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Abstract

This chapter reports on research showing that it may be a universal structural property of human languages that they fall into a class of languages defined by mildly context-sensitive grammars. It also investigates the issue of whether there are properties of language that are needed to guarantee that it is learnable. It suggests that languages are learnable if they have a finite Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension (where the VC dimension provides a combinatorial measure of complexity for a set of languages). Informally, a finite VC dimension requires that there be restrictions on the set of languages to be learned such that they do not differ from one another in arbitrary ways. These restrictions can be construed as universals that are required for language to be learnable (given formal language learnability theory). The chapter concludes by pointing out that formalizations of the semantic contribution (e.g., compositionality) to language learning might yield further insight into language universals.

Keywords: language complexity; formal language learning theory; learnable syntactic patterns; linguistic universals; compositionality; Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension

@incollection{stabler09LUchapter,
  author={Edward P. Stabler},
  title={Computational Models of Language Universals: Expressiveness, Learnability, and Consequences},
  year={2009},
  pages={200-224},
  chapter={10},
  editor={M.H. Christiansen and C. Collins and S. Edelman},
  publisher={Oxford University Press},
  booktitle={Language Universals},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/stabler09LUchapter.html},
  keywords={language complexity; formal language learning theory; learnable syntactic patterns; linguistic universals; compositionality; Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension}
}