Though we can imagine the rules of language as a formal grammar, an important caveat – reiterated in many discussions of formal linguistics – is that this should not be taken as any indication that people mentally execute rewrite rules while speaking. A grammar serves merely as a formal description of the language that we …
Monthly archives: December 2019
Formal language models
In the second blogpost of this series, we’ll follow Pinker in his discussion of formal language models. This post will give a brief introduction to formal (a.k.a. mathematical) linguistics, which enables discussions about language learnability. Languages as formal objects If we want a formal model of language acquisition, we of course require a formal definition …