The price of linguistic productivity : how children learn to break the rules of language / Charles Yang.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages.

"All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and demand, the price of linguistic productivity arises from the quantitative considerations of rules and exceptions. The learner postulates a productive rule only if it results in a more efficient organization of language, with the number of exceptions falling below a critical threshold. Supported by a wide range of cases with corpus evidence, Yang's Tolerance Principle gives a unified account of many long-standing puzzles in linguistics and psychology, including why children effortlessly acquire rules of language that perplex otherwise capable adults. His focus on computational efficiency provides novel insight on how language interacts with the other components of cognition and how the ability for language might have emerged during the course of human evolution"--Publisher's website.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed October 19, 2016).

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Border Wars -- 1.1 How Grammars Leak -- 1.2 Where Core Meets Periphery -- 1.3 Some Outstanding Problems -- 2 The Inevitability of Rules -- 2.1 Statistical Profiles of Grammar -- 2.2 Interlude: Irregular Rules and Irregular Verbs -- 2.3 Productivity in Child Language -- 3 The Tipping Point -- 3.1 Learning by Generalization -- 3.2 The Cost of Exceptions -- 3.3 Elsewhere in Language Processing -- 3.4 The Tolerance Principle -- 3.5 Remarks -- 4 Signal and Noise -- 4.1 When Felt Becomes Feeled -- 4.2 A Recursive Approach to Stress -- 4.3 The Mysteries of Nominalization -- 4.4 The Horrors of German: Exceptions that Force the Rules -- 5 When Language Fails -- 5.1 Finding Gaps -- 5.2 The Rise and Fall of Productivity -- 5.3 Diagnosing Sickness -- 6 The Logic of Evidence -- 6.1 Inference and Weight of Evidence -- 6.2 Why Are There No Asleep Cats? -- 6.3 Resolving Baker's Paradox -- 7 On Language Design -- 7.1 Computational Efficiency in Language Acquisition -- 7.2 Core and Periphery Revisited -- 7.3 The Ecology of Language Learning -- Bibliography -- Index.

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