LINGUIST List 10.1483

Fri Oct 8 1999

Books: Mathematical & Computational Ling, Formal Ling

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

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LINCOM EUROPA, H. Mark Hubey, Mathematical & Computational Linguistics

LINCOM EUROPA, Formal Ling - Ping Jiang-King, Tone-Vowel Interaction in OT

Message 1: H. Mark Hubey, Mathematical & Computational Linguistics

Date: Mon, 04 Oct 1999 21:23:43 +0200
From: LINCOM EUROPA <LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de>
Subject: H. Mark Hubey, Mathematical & Computational Linguistics

MATHEMATICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS H. Mark Hubey, Montclair State University

As Lass (1980) has remarked, "system" is something talked about constantly in linguistics but never beyond paying just lip-service to the concept. This book shows how linguistics constitutes a "system". Linguists (except those who study Formal Language Theory) are confronted with a dilemma. What they study is partially based on physics and is in many respects mathematical; yet the mathematics books are divorced from linguistics and linguistics books are divorced from mathematics and physics. There are no books that teach mathematics for linguists or linguistics with mathematics. This book goes a long way toward accomplishing the integration of mathematics, physics and linguistics into a whole, in other words "a system", just like those that are studied by others in the quantitative disciplines such as physics, engineering, computer science or economics.

The methods of mathematics which are used in the books to elucidate system concepts and others that are needed in linguistics includes boolean algebra, differential equations, and fuzzy logic. Furthermore it also explains in an intuitive manner,those concepts are not only from mathematics but also from the underlying physics and engineering up to and including acoustic theory of speech, speech recognition, and even nonlinearity/catastrophe theory and quantality of phonemic systems.

All the mathematics needed to form the mathematical foundations of linguistics is illustrated with examples from linguistics and thus may be thought of as "theories", those that should replace the standard literary linguistics tradition in the same way that literary economics is no longer the de facto standard. Physical/acoustic theory of speech is blended naturally into the phonological and phonetic standard, and the standard works are used as springboards to the development of vector space concepts that are necessary for comprehension of new works in speech synthesis and speech recognition. It is rather easy then to show how seemingly nonrelated topics such as sonority scales, child language development, and various linguistics processes such as assimilation, metathesis, fortition/lenition can be seen to be a part of the greater whole. Historical processes are also treated in terms of sound change and also in terms of the most basic ideas which are needed for a thorough understanding of the problems such as multiple scale phenomena, distance and similarity, probability theory, and stochastic processes. A book of this length cannot possibly discuss all of the mathematics necessary in detail, however, there is sufficient material to motivate the topics, and furthermore to point in the direction of further study.

Table of Contents:

0: INTRODUCTORY PRELIMINARIES 0.1. Continuous Nature of Speech 0.2. Functions and Mappings 0.3. Stochastic and Fuzzy Functions 0.4. Linear Operators, Relations, and Black Boxes 0.5. Discretization -- Numerical and Closed formSolutions 0.6. Representation, Meaning, and Definition 0.7. Significance, Precision, Accuracy, and Error 0.8. Beads on a String 0.9. Discretization of Speech 0.10. Simple Discretization 0.11. Mappings, Functions, Perception, and Excessive Mentalism 0.12. Binary, Ternary, or Infinity 0.13. Universal Distinctive Features

Appendix 0.A Sets, Classes, Relations, and Functions; Phonemes, Allophones, Semantics, Orthography; Appendix 0.B Dialogue

I: OPPOSITIONS, RELATIONS, GROUPS, AND LATTICES I.1. Features, Binary Oppositions and Binary Relations I.2. Simple Structures: Semigroups, Monoids, Groups, Isomorphisms, and Distances I.3. More Complex Structures: Partial Ordering, Posets, N-cubes, Lattices, Hasse Diagram I.4. `Lattice' of Vowels: Cardinal Vowel Diagrams, Ladefoged's Modification, Discrete Distance Metric, Trubetzkoy vowels

Appendix I.A Number Systems and Codes:The Binary System, K-maps, Gray codes; Appendix I.B Boolean Algebras

II: PRIVATE AND UNIVERSAL VOWEL SPACES II.1. Cycles, Distance, Linear Ordering, and Hilbert Curves II.2. Bloch and Trager Private Spaces II.3. Chomsky & Halle Private Spaces II.4. Complement of a Graph II.5. Pure Vowels in 3-D II.6. Discrete Universal Spaces II.7. Karnaugh Maps and Finnish Vowels II.8. American English Vowels II.9. Other Spaces -- Stanford Phonology Archive II.10. Binarity and Simplicity

III: COMPOUND VOWELS, DIPTHONGS, AND VECTORS III.1. Vector Spaces and Phonemes III.2. Time Domain Compositions -- Dipthongs and Glides III.3. Dipthong = Vowel + Vowel III.4. Dipthong = Vowel + Semivowel III.5. Vectors and Dependency Phonology III.6. Trubetzkoy and Stevens III.7. Nonorthogonality of Features and Fant

IV: SPECTRAL DOMAIN DESCRIPTIONS IV.1. Time-domain Signals IV.2. Frequency Domain Descriptions IV.3. Power Spectrum, Noise, and Autocorrelation IV.4. Source and Filter IV.5. Formant Functions and Approximations IV.6 Dipthongs and Glides IV.7. Compound Vowels IV.8. Orthographic Projection of the Vocalic Phonemes of a Generic Language IV.9. Formant Functions Again IV.10. Formant Plots and Their Description IV.11. Summary of Results IV.12. Further Refinements of the Method IV.13. The Formant Plots IV.14. Nonlinearity, Quantality, and Catastrophe Theory IV.15. Nonlinear Differential Equations and Quantality in Phonetics

Appendix IV.A: Fourier Analysis; Appendix IV.B: Convolution, Correlation, Spectral Density; Appendix IV.C Ordinary Linear Differential Equations; Appendix IV.D Orthogonal Functions; Appendix IV.E: Other Normalizations; Appendix IV.F Exponential Formant Approximations.

V: 3-D VECTOR PHASE SPACE FOR SPEECH V.1. Properties of Consonants V.2. Towards a Space V.3. Consonant Vector Space V.4. Dimensional Analysis and Buckingham Pi Theorem V.5. Natural Groupings V.6. Path Integrals and Minimization V.7. Acoustic and Auditory Correlates in the Phase Space V.8. Phones, Phonemes and Allophones V.9. Sonority, Lenition, Fortition V.10. Child Language Development and Aphasia V.11. Vowels in Phase Space V.12. Distance and Birth of New Phonemes V.13. Experimental Evidence from Dipthongs V.14. Implications for Phonological Space V.15. The Ordinal Vowel Cube V.16. Sonority Scales V.17. Vector Representation V.18. Dynamic Stochastic Processes and Speech Realization V.19. Forced Binary Discrimination Tests and Probability Theory V.20. The Ambiguity Function: Another Interpretation V.21. Entropy, Uncertainty, and Information Theory V.22. Fuzzy Sets and Catastrophe Theory V.23. Fuzzy Functions for Multiple Discriminations along a Single Stimulus V.24. Binary Discriminations for Multiple Stimuli and Stochastic Proceses

VI: UPPER-LEVEL DISTANCE METRICS VI.1. Consonant Clusters VI.2. Turkish Vowel Harmony VI.3. Grammar for Transitions VI.4. Turkish Syllabification VI.5. Word Level Measures VI.6. Topology of Vowel Spaces of Languages Examples from Arabic, English, Chinese, French,German, Italian, Latin, Sanskrit, Irish and Tamil VI.7. Word Formation Rules and Borrowing VI.8. Residues of Languages and Distance Functions--Sprachbunde and Sprachfamilien. VI.9. Propagation, Waves and Diffusion of Innovation VI.10. Semitic Word Formation Examples

VII: MULTIDIMENSIONAL INHERITANCE VII.0. Introduction VII.1. Temporal and Spatial Scaling VII.2. Time Complexity vs Space Complexity -- Compute vs Memory Bound Processes VII.3. Order of Magnitude and Complexity VII.4. Intensive and Extensive Parameters VII.5. Measurement Scales: Absolute and Relative Measures VII.6. Stability, Relaxation Time and Correlation Time VII.7. Process vs State VII.8. Open Systems vs Closed Systems VII.9. Time Scales and Linguistics VII.10 Word Orders and Artificial Non-natural Languages VII.11. Prehistoric Times and Language VII.12. Change: Is it infinite ? VII.13. Family Trees VII.14. Distance Functions VII.15. Matching Lexemes and Semantemes VII.16. Dynamic Stochastic Processes and Language VII.17. Summary

Appendix VII.A Cognates or Not; Appendix VII.B: Differential Equations Initial Value Problems, Stability and Equilibrium, Static vs Dynamic Equilibrium (Steady State) Appendix VII.C Stochastic Processes; Randomness, Mass and Density Functions, Averaging, Stochastic Differential Equations, Stationarity

VIII: PHONOLOGY, MORPHOLOGY, AND SYNTAX VIII.0. Modularity VIII.1. Upper Level Syntactic Structure of the World's Languages VIII.2. Permutations, Reflections, and Rotations VIII.3. Same Set Permutations VIII.4. Tree Traversals and Permutation Groups VIII.5. Phonology and Morphology VIII.6. Postfixing Morphology and Morphophonology VIII.7. Premorphing Languages and Phonology VIII.8. Transformational Grammar and the H-operators VIII.9. Infixing and Erase and Replace VIII.10.Combined Inmorphing and Endmorphing VII.11. Indonesian and German VIII.12.Simplicity Metric

Appendix VIII.A: String Quasi-Algebra

IX: SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF NEAR NATURAL LANGUAGES IX.1. Prologue IX.2. Graphs IX.3. Binary Trees and Their Growth Patterns IX.4. Trees and Tree Traversals IX.5. Operands, Operators and Operations IX.6. Formal Language Theory IX.7. Another Kind of Space for Sentences

ISBN 3 89586 639 3. LINCOM Handbooks in Linguistics 09. Ca. 450pp. Pb: EUR 70.56 / USD 80 / DM 138

ISBN 3 89586 924 4. LINCOM Handbooks in Linguistics 09 (Hardcover). Ca. 450pp. Hb: EUR 101.23 / USD 110 / DM 198 / � 66.

Ordering information for individuals: Please give us your creditcard no. / expiry date or send us a cheque. Prices in this information include shipment worldwide by airmail. A standing order for this series is available with special discounts offered to individual subscribers.

LINCOM EUROPA, Paul-Preuss-Str. 25, D-80995 Muenchen, Germany; FAX +4989 3148909; http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de.

Message 2: Formal Ling - Ping Jiang-King, Tone-Vowel Interaction in OT

Date: Mon, 04 Oct 1999 21:27:05 +0200
From: LINCOM EUROPA <LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de>
Subject: Formal Ling - Ping Jiang-King, Tone-Vowel Interaction in OT

TONE-VOWEL INTERACTION IN OPTIMALITY THEORY Ping Jiang-King, University of British Columbia

This study aims at constructing a fully articulated theory of tone-vowel interaction within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). It examines the nature of this phenomenon in Northern Min languages, as well as various Southeast Asian languages. The questions addressed are (i) what is the nature of tone-vowel interaction? (ii) how do they relate to each other? Two important findings emerge from the investigation. First, tonal types and syllable types are closely related to each other. That is, different groups of tones occur only in a certain kind of syllables. These cooccurrence restrictions are identified as a correlation between tonal contour and syllable weight.

Second, tone does not directly affect vowel distributions and alternations. Rather, it is the relative syllable positions in which a vowel occurs and the number of segments present in a syllable that trigger vowel distributions and alternations. These findings lead to the conclusion that tone and vowel do not interact directly and that there is no feature-to-feature correlation between them. Their interaction lies in the prosodic anchor mediating between them. To account for the correlation between tonal contour and syllable weight and the close relationship between syllable structures and vowel features, a prosodic anchor hypothesis is proposed which attributes the tone-vowel interaction to the mora and its function as an anchor for both tone and vowel.

ISBN 3 89586 647 4. INCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 16. 220pp. EUR 57.26 / USD 70 / DM 112

Ordering information for individuals: Please give us your creditcard no. / expiry date or send us a cheque. Prices in this information include shipment worldwide by airmail. A standing order for this series is available with special discounts offered to individual subscribers.

LINCOM EUROPA, Paul-Preuss-Str. 25, D-80995 Muenchen, Germany; FAX +4989 3148909; http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de.

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