Cognitive Linguistics argues that language is governed by general cognitive principles, rather than by a special-purpose language module. This introductory textbook surveys the field of cognitive ...linguistics as a distinct area of study, presenting its theoretical foundations and the arguments supporting it. Clearly organised and accessibly written, it provides a useful introduction to the relationship between language and cognitive processing in the human brain. It covers the main topics likely to be encountered in a course or seminar, and provides a synthesis of study and research in this fast-growing field of linguistics. The authors begin by explaining the conceptual structures and cognitive processes governing linguistic representation and behaviour, and go on to explore cognitive approaches to lexical semantics, as well as syntactic representation and analysis, focusing on the closely related frameworks of cognitive grammar and construction grammar. This much-needed introduction will be welcomed by students in linguistics and cognitive science.
We describe two mathematical representations for what have come to be called “semantic maps”, that is, representations of typological universals of linguistic co-expression with the aim of inferring ...similarity relations between concepts from those universals. The two mathematical representations are a graph structure and Euclidean space, the latter as inferred through multidimensional scaling. Graph structure representations come in two types. In both types, meanings are represented as vertices (nodes) and relations between meanings as edges (links). One representation is a pairwise co-expression graph, which represents all pairwise co-expression relations as edges in the graph; an example is CLICS. The other is a minimally connected co-expression graph – the “classic semantic map”. This represents only the edges necessary to maintain connectivity, that is, the principle that all the meanings expressed by a single form make up a connected subgraph of the whole graph. The Euclidean space represents meanings as points, and relations as Euclidean distance between points, in a specified number of spatial dimensions. We focus on the proper interpretation of both types of representations, algorithms for constructing the representations, measuring the goodness of fit of the representations to the data, and balancing goodness of fit with informativeness of the representation.
Evolutionary Linguistics Croft, William
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2008, Letnik:
37, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Both qualitative concepts and quantitative methods from evolutionary biology have been applied to linguistics. Many linguists have noted the similarity between biological evolution and language ...change, but usually have employed only selective analogies or metaphors. The development of generalized theories of evolutionary change (Dawkins and Hull) has spawned models of language change on the basis of such generalized theories. These models have led to the positing of new mechanisms of language change and new types of selection that may not have biological parallels. Quantitative methods have been applied to questions of language phylogeny in the past decade. Research has focused on widely accepted families with cognates already established by the comparative method (Indo-European, Bantu, Austronesian). Increasingly sophisticated phylogeny reconstruction models have been applied to these families to resolve questions of subgrouping, contact, and migration. Little progress has been made so far in analyzing sound correspondences in the cognates themselves.
How individuals change language Blythe, Richard A; Croft, William
PloS one,
06/2021, Letnik:
16, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation ...precipitates a population-wide change in the language, and many theoretical proposals exist. We introduce a very general mathematical model that encompasses a wide variety of individual-level linguistic behaviours and provides statistical predictions for the population-level changes that result from them. This model allows us to compare the likelihood of empirically-attested changes in definite and indefinite articles in multiple languages under different assumptions on the way in which individuals learn and use language. We find that accounts of language change that appeal primarily to errors in childhood language acquisition are very weakly supported by the historical data, whereas those that allow speakers to change incrementally across the lifespan are more plausible, particularly when combined with social network effects.
In Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology, William Croft presents a unified theory of linguistic form and meaning that encompasses crosslinguistic diversity, verbalization and language ...change.
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to ...properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using crosslinguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single “polysemous” word to express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows that these structural properties are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. The methods developed here can be applied to any semantic domain to reveal the extent to which its conceptual structure is, similarly, a universal attribute of human cognition and language use.
Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain‐general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the ...cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves the following key features: The system consists of multiple agents (the speakers in the speech community) interacting with one another. The system is adaptive; that is, speakers’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior. A speaker's behavior is the consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual constraints to social motivations. The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive mechanisms. The CAS approach reveals commonalities in many areas of language research, including first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language evolution, and computational modeling.
Due to the pervasiveness of image capturing devices in every-day life, images of individuals are routinely captured. Although this has enabled many benefits, it also infringes on personal privacy. A ...promising direction in research on obfuscation of facial images has been the work in the
k
-same
family of methods which employ the concept of
k
-anonymity
from database privacy. However, there are a number of deficiencies of
k
-anonymity that carry over to the
k
-same methods, detracting from their usefulness in practice. In this paper, we first outline several of these deficiencies and discuss their implications in the context of facial obfuscation. We then develop a framework through which we obtain a formal
differentially private
guarantee for the obfuscation of facial images in generative machine learning models. Our approach provides a provable privacy guarantee that is not susceptible to the outlined deficiencies of
k
-same obfuscation and produces photo-realistic obfuscated output. In addition, we demonstrate through experimental comparisons that our approach can achieve comparable utility to
k
-same obfuscation in terms of preservation of useful features in the images. Furthermore, we propose a method to achieve differential privacy for any image (i.e., without restriction to facial images) through the direct modification of pixel intensities. Although the addition of noise to pixel intensities does not provide the high visual quality obtained via generative machine learning models, it offers greater versatility by eliminating the need for a trained model. We demonstrate that our proposed use of the
exponential mechanism
in this context is able to provide superior visual quality to pixel-space obfuscation using the
Laplace mechanism
.
When querying databases containing sensitive information, the privacy of individuals stored in the database has to be guaranteed. Such guarantees are provided by differentially private mechanisms ...which add controlled noise to the query responses. However, most such mechanisms do not take into consideration the valid range of the query being posed. Thus, noisy responses that fall outside of this range may potentially be produced. To rectify this and therefore improve the utility of the mechanism, the commonly-used Laplace distribution can be truncated to the valid range of the query and then normalized. However, such a data-dependent operation of normalization leaks additional information about the true query response, thereby violating the differential privacy guarantee. Here, we propose a new method which preserves the differential privacy guarantee through a careful determination of an appropriate scaling parameter for the Laplace distribution. We adapt the privacy guarantee in the context of the Laplace distribution to account for data-dependent normalization factors and study this guarantee for different classes of range constraint configurations. We provide derivations of the optimal scaling parameter (i.e., the minimal value that preserves differential privacy) for each class or provide an approximation thereof. As a result of this work, one can use the Laplace distribution to answer queries in a range-adherent and differentially private manner. To demonstrate the benefits of our proposed method of normalization, we present an experimental comparison against other range-adherent mechanisms. We show that our proposed approach is able to provide improved utility over the alternative mechanisms.
Alternative Actions for Antibiotics Ratcliff, William Croft; Denison, Robert Ford
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
04/2011, Letnik:
332, Številka:
6029
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Compounds recognized as having antibiotic functions may have other possible roles in microbial interactions.
Microbes generate signals, which coordinate mutually beneficial activities (
1
). They ...also produce antibiotics that kill prey, suppress competitors, or deter predators (
2
). Recent observations have led to the view that antibiotics often act as mutually beneficial signals (
3
–
6
). Exposure to sublethal concentrations of antibiotics can indeed alter microbial metabolism and even change behavior in beneficial ways, triggering reactions such as fleeing or hiding within the protective environment of a microbial aggregate (biofilm). But the weapon-signal dichotomy of functions for these compounds is a false one—there may be other possible information-related actions of naturally produced antibiotics: cues and manipulation.
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