Edward Gibson: evaluation

Transcript context

…And then you’re kind saying the word order and the syntax of language, the dependency length are all helpful to do- Well, dependency length is really about memory. I think that’s about what’s easier or harder to produce in some way. And these other ideas are about robustness to communication. So, the problem of potential loss of signal due to noise. There may be aspects of word order which is somewhat optimized for that. And we have this one guess in that direction… And these are kind of just so stories, I have to be pretty frank. They’re not like, I can’t show, this is true. All we can do is look at the current languages of the world. We can’t see how languages change or anything because we’ve got these snapshots of a few hundred or a few thousand languages. We can’t do the right kinds of modifications to test things experimentally. And so just take this with a grain of salt from here, this stuff. The dependency stuff, I’m much more solid on and here’s what the lengths are and here’s what’s hard, here’s what’s easy, and this is a reasonable structure. I think I’m pretty reasonable. Why does the word order look the way it does is, we’re now into shaky territory, but it’s kind of cool. We’re talking about, just to be clear, we’re talking about maybe just actually the sounds of communication. You and I are sitting in a bar, it’s very loud, and you model with a noisy channel, the loudness, the noise, and we have the signal that’s coming across and you’re saying word to order might have something to do with optimizing that when there’s presence of noise.…

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