Syntax - Trees: Crash Course Linguistics #4
Emergentism is actually a concept that extends way beyond linguistics. Very generally speaking, it’s the idea that simple interactions can give rise to complex systems. And those complex systems are much more than just a sum of their parts. Which I know sounds really abstract, but this kind of thing, emergent phenomena, are actually really common a... See more
Samia Bouzid • Elizabeth Bates and the Search for the Roots of Human Language
that define how what amount to “parse trees” can be put together: ChatGPT doesn’t have any explicit “knowledge” of such rules. But somehow in its training it implicitly “discovers” them—and then seems to be good at following them. So how does this work? At a “big picture” level it’s not clear. But to get some insight it’s perhaps instructive to loo
... See moreStephen Wolfram • What Is ChatGPT Doing ... And Why Does It Work?
The first is the syntax of language. Language is not just a random jumble of words. Instead, there are (fairly) definite grammatical rules for how words of different kinds can be put together: in English, for example, nouns can be preceded by adjectives and followed by verbs, but typically two nouns can’t be right next to each other. Such grammatic
... See moreStephen Wolfram • What Is ChatGPT Doing ... And Why Does It Work?
—Categories are neither fixed nor uniform. They are defined by prototypes and family resemblances to prototypes and are adjustable in context, given various purposes.
George Lakoff • Metaphors We Live By
The answer is that language is a system. Sounds, words and grammar do not exist in isolation: each of these three levels of language constitutes a system in itself. And, extraordinarily, these systems change as systems. If one change threatens disruption, another change compensates, so that the new system, though different from the old, is still an... See more
And then there is the problem of ambiguity. Human languages are shot through and through with ambiguities.