Analogical Modeling of Language

Royal Skousen
1989
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Dordrecht
ISBN 0-7923-0517-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
1. Structuralist Versus Analogical Descriptions 3
2. An Overview of the Book 6
Chapter 1: PROBLEMS WITH RULE DESCRIPTIONS OF LANGUAGE
1. Three Basic Types of Language Behavior 11
2. Empirical Problems 15
3. Conceptual Problems 19
Chapter 2: AN ANALOGICAL APPROACH
1. An Overview of the Analogical Model 22
2. Constructing the Analogical Set for a Given Context 23
3. The Exponential Effect in a Saturated Deterministic Field 37
4. Predicting the Three Basic Behaviors Analogically 40
Chapter 3: THREE EXAMPLES FROM ENGLISH
1. Specifying the Data Set 51
2. Categorical Behavior: The Indefinite Article 54
3. Exceptional/Regular Behavior: Spelling Initial /h/ 60
4. Idiosyncratic Behavior: Voicing Onset Time 71
Chapter 4: PREDICTING NON-DETERMINISTIC LANGUAGE VARIATION
1. Learning Probabilities 77
2. McClelland and Rumelhart's Connectionist Approach 81
3. Imperfect Memory and Multivariate Predictions 86
4. Rule Approaches to Language Variation 95
5. Sociolinguistic Variation in Arabic 97
Chapter 5: ANALOGICAL PREDICTIONS OF THE PAST TENSE IN FINNISH
1. An Overview of the Verb Types 101
2. The Past Tense in Standard Finnish 104
3. Variation in the Past Tense 107
4. Properties of an Analogically Predicted Past Tense Form 110
5. Predicting the Past Tense for Infrequent Verbs 114
6. Predicting the Past Tense for Verbs in the Data Set 119
7. Historical Drift of the Past Tense 124
8. A Note on the Historical Development 135
Chapter 6: CONCLUSION
1. Massively Parallel Processing of Analogical Sets 137
2. A Final Analogy 139
REFERENCES 141
Appendix 1: SYMBOLS FOR THE PHONEMES OF ENGLISH 147
Appendix 2: DATA SETS
1. The Indefinite Article in English 150
2. Spelling of Initial /h/ in English 156
3. Categorical Determination of /b,p/ in English 181
4. Terms of Address in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic 182
5. Past Tense in Finnish 185
Appendix 3: PASCAL PROGRAM 191
INDEX 209