Structure of Language

Samar Husain
(samar@[Link])

January 4th , 2024

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Intro

Why do we care about the structure of language?

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Intro

Imagine that you’d like to understand visual perception or music

perception
How would you go about doing that?

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Levels

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Relevance for the levels

The English regular plural suffix has three pronunciations: ‘s’ as in

cats, ‘z’ as in dogs, and ‘9z’ (‘uhz’) as in horses
The choice of which to use is determined by the final sound of the
word that the suffix is attached to – in particular the sound’s
distinctive features
Think about this!

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Relevance for the levels

The [-voiced] sound ‘s’ is used with words that end with a [-voiced]
sound (‘t’, ‘p’, ‘k’, ‘f’, etc.);
the [+voiced] sound ‘z’ is used with words that end with a [+voiced]
sound (‘d’, ‘b’, ‘g’, ‘m’, etc. plus vowels);
and ‘9z’ is used with words that end with the sounds ‘s’, ‘z’, ‘š’ (‘sh’),
‘ž’ (‘zh’), ‘č’ (‘ch’), or ‘j’

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Relevance for the levels

These (distinctive) features play a role in child language

acquisition, in historical change, and in speech errors/perception,
as well as in the description of many dozens of languages.

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From levels to meaning

The structure of our sentence cannot just be the collection of these

structures.
It is necessary also to encode the relationships among them – how the
parts of each structure are connected to parts of the others.

S. Husain (HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Structure of Language January 4th , 2024 8 / 44

From levels to meaning

We need to ask how we understand/generate a sentence like The

little star’s beside a big star ?
The structures that we have looked at is meant to be “psychologically
real” – it is to be treated as a model of something in the mind of a
speaker of English who says or hears this sentence
If we speak of the mind/brain determining visual contours or parsing
a linguistic expression, we are speaking in functional terms;
this functional organization is embodied in a collection of neurons
engaging in electrical and chemical interaction

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Levels of analysis

Marr distinguishes three different levels for analyzing cognitive

systems
I computational level
I algorithmic level
I implementational level

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Levels of analysis

Computational level
A computational analysis identifies the information with which the
cognitive system has to begin (the input to that system) and the
information with which it needs to end up (the output from that
system).

to translate a general description of the cognitive system into a

specific account of the particular information-processing problem
that the system is configured to solve
to identify the constraints that hold upon any solution to that
information-processing task

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Levels of analysis

Algorithmic level
The algorithmic level tells us how the cognitive system actually
solves the specific information-processing task identified at the
computational level

It tells us how the input information is transformed into the output

information
An algorithmic level explanation takes the form of specifying detailed
sets of information-processing instructions

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Levels of analysis

Implementational level
To find mechanisms at the neural level that can properly be
described as computing the algorithm in question.

to find a physical realization for the algorithm

to identify physical structures that will realize the representational
states over which the algorithm is defined

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

Patients with right parietal lesions are able to recognize and verbally
identify familiar objects provided that they can see them from familiar
or “conventional” perspectives.
but would also vehemently deny that the shapes they perceived could
possibly correspond to the objects that they in fact were

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

Patients with left parietal lesions showed a diametrically opposed

pattern of behavior. Although left parietal lesions are often
accompanied by language problems, patients with such lesions tend to
be capable of identifying the shape of objects
They have little difficulty, for example, in matching conventional and
unconventional representations of the same object.

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

Marr drew two conclusions about how the visual system functions
from Warrington’s neuropsychological observations.
He concluded, first, that information about the shape of an object
must be processed separately from information about what the
object is for and what it is called
and, second, that the visual system can deliver a specification of
the shape of an object even when that object is not in any sense
recognized
Elizabeth Warrington had put her finger on what was somehow the
quintessential fact about human vision – that it tells us about shape
and space and spatial arrangement

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

So, at the computational level, the basic task of the visual system is
to derive a representation of the three-dimensional shape and spatial
arrangement of an object in a form that will allow that object to be
recognized
Since ease of recognition is correlated with the ability to extrapolate
from the particular vantage point from which an object is viewed,
Marr concluded that this representation of object shape should be on
an object-centered rather than an egocentric frame of reference
(where an egocentric frame of reference is one centered on the
viewer).

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

When we move to the algorithmic level of analysis we require a far

more detailed account of how the general information-processing task
identified at the computational level might be carried out.
What we are looking for now is an algorithm that can take the system
from inputs of the appropriate type to outputs of the appropriate type.

How exactly is the input and output information encoded?

What are the system’s representational primitives (the basic “units”
over which computations are defined)?
What sort of operations is the system performing on those
representational primitives to carry out the information-processing
task?

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

A crucial part of the function of vision is to recover information about

surfaces in the field of view – in particular, information about their
orientation; how far they are from the perceiver; and how they reflect
light
In Marr’s theory this information is derived from a series of
increasingly complex and sophisticated representations, which he
terms the primal sketch, the 2.5D sketch, and the 3D sketch.

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

The primal sketch makes explicit some basic types of information

implicitly present in the retinal image
Basic types of information implicitly present in the retinal image
(areas of relative brightness or darkness)
Basic geometry (an embedded triangle in the left figure and an
embedded square in the right)

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

The next information-processing task is to extract from the primal

sketch information about the depth and orientation of visible surfaces
from the viewer’s perspective
The figure shows orientation information, but no depth information

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

The visual system allows us to keep track of objects even though their
visual appearance changes from the viewer’s perspective
This requires a stable representation of object shape that is
independent of the viewer’s particular viewpoint.
This viewer-independent representation is provided by the 3D sketch

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

At the algorithmic level the job is to specify these different

representations and how the visual system gets from one to the next,
starting with the basic information arriving at the retina
Since the retina is composed of cells that are sensitive to light, this
basic information is information about the intensity of the light
reaching each of those cells
In thinking about how the visual system might work we need
(according to Marr) to think about which properties of the retinal
information might provide clues for recovering the information we
want about surfaces.

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An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

S. Husain (HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Structure of Language January 4th , 2024 24 / 44

An example of this level of analysis using the visual system

Marr’s analysis of the visual

system, therefore, gives us a clear
illustration not only of how a
single cognitive phenomenon can
be studied at different levels of
explanation,
but also of how the different levels
of explanation can come together
to provide a unified analysis
It is not surprising that Marr’s
analysis of the visual system is
frequently taken to be a paradigm
of how cognitive science ought to
proceed.

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Levels of analysis

Discoveries about brain properties are now believed to have a more

direct bearing on functional properties than was previously thought
As Marr (1982) eloquently stresses, though, the connection is a
two-way street: if it can be demonstrated that humans must in effect
compute such-and-such a function in order to perform as they do on
some task, then it is necessary to figure out how the brain’s neural
circuitry could compute that function
So, the computational/algorithmic level representations must then be
reflected somehow in neural instantiation,

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

So, the computational/algorithmic level representations must then be

reflected somehow in neural instantiation, for example
I that words belong to syntactic categories;
I that words are in linear order;
I that words group hierarchically into larger constituents that also belong
to syntactic categories.

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

Further, languages are

Structure Sensitivity
I Compare the yes-no question formation for The man you were looking
at has left vs You were looking at the man
Dependency – Words in an utterance are connected
I The man ( you – at ) – has : The subject and the verb agree; if the
subject was The men ( you – at ): The verb would have to change to
have
I look – at : The choice of the preposition is dependent on the choice of
the verb; some verbs do not select prepositions (like hate), but if a
verb selects a prepositional phrase, the choice of preposition is limited:
John looked at/*to Mary

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

From the standpoint of communication systems in the natural world,

one of the most striking facts about human language is that its users
can create and understand an unlimited number of utterances on an
unlimited number of topics.
This productivity is possible thanks to an important design feature of
language: utterances are built by combining elements of a large but
finite vocabulary into larger meaningful expressions

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

In this respect human utterances contrast sharply with the long and
complex songs of certain species of whales and birds, which, as far as
can be told at present, basically convey only the message “Here I am,
everyone!”

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

Figure 1: Transition diagrams of a Bengalese finch song

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

Figure 2: Transition diagrams of a Humpback whale song

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

Rules that define the grammar and the lexicon

Grammar – formation rules, derivational rules, and constraints
Lexicon – lexical formation rules and lexical relations

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

Formation rules
NP → Det AP N

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Relevance of the computational/algorithmic level
representations

How rules of grammar are to be incorporated into a model of

performance, and hence into a theory of neural instantiation?

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Challenges

The massiveness of the binding problem

Much of the neuroscience of language has been concerned with how
words stored in long-term memory are activated in the course of
sentence perception and production
But activation of words alone is not sufficient to account for the
understanding of sentences.
If The big star’s beside a little star is understood simply as activation
of words then it might well be understood as Beside a the big little
star star’s

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Challenges

The massiveness of the binding problem

The word meanings are structured into the meaning of the sentence
by means of semantic relations among them.
These semantic relations are to some degree signalled by the syntactic
structure of the sentence, which in turn is correlated with the linear
order of the phonological words.
During this time, all the connections within and among the structures
are available
What one must have memorized, though, is the words the, star, big,
little, beside, and a, and the clitic ’s, plus the principles for putting
them together.

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Challenges

The massiveness of the binding problem

The need for combining independent bits into a single coherent
percept has been recognized in the theory of vision under the name of
the binding problem
we have found that the shape and the color of an object are encoded
in different regions of the brain, and they can be differentially
impaired by brain damage. How is it, then, that we sense a particular
shape and color as attributes of the same object?
If the shape region detects a square and a circle, and the color region
detects red and blue, how does the brain encode that one is seeing,
say, a red square and a blue circle rather than the other way around?

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Challenges

The problem of 2
In much work on language processing the only mechanism available
for constructing linguistic expressions is spreading activation among
nodes connected in a semantic network or neural net.
If the first occurrence simply activates the lexical entry in long-term
memory, what can the second occurrence do?
In particular, the first occurrence is bound to little and the second to
big, so simultaneous binding to both would lead to the contradictory
concept of a little big star.

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Other cognitive domains

Relations
One aims to explain linguistic principles using more general cognitive
grounds
for example, if there prove to be hierarchical structures in perception,
cognition, and action, we then need not ascribe these characteristics
to a specifically linguistic “toolkit”
David Marr (1982) to have been developing such a functional
description for the visual system;
Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) develop a functional description for
musical cognition.

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Other cognitive domains

Relations
Connectionist neural network modeling (Rumelhart and McClelland
1986) has suggested some very general principles of mental
computation and learning that demonstrably extend over many
capacities
These general principles may be conceived of as formal universals of
the mind. They undoubtedly constrain and shape formal universals
specific to language.
Similarly, it is quite possible that there are some constraints that
apply to any communicative system operating in a community of
organisms, and therefore apply to language.

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Other cognitive domains

Relations
This leads us to the discussion about language evolution
To what extent language is unique (both evolutionarily and
ontogenically)?
Was communication the evolutionary force that lead to the creation
of modern language?
This will be taken up in the next set of lectures

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Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of Language. Oxford Uni Press.
Bermúdez, J. L. (2010). Cognitive Science. Cambridge Uni Press.

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 Fin.

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