LINGUIST List 17.1991
Fri Jul 07 2006
Qs: 'Nor' in the World's Languages; Sample Rates
Editor for this issue: Jessica Boynton
<jessicalinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Maarten
van Wijk,
'Nor' in the World's Languages
2. Ian
Logan,
Sample Rates
Message 1: 'Nor' in the World's Languages
Date: 04-Jul-2006
From: Maarten van Wijk <m.p.van.wijkumail.leidenuniv.nl>
Subject: 'Nor' in the World's Languages
For my dissertation on the emergence of logical connectives in natural language I'm trying to debunk an argument by Gazdar and Pullum (1976) on what they call non-confessionality, which is supposed to be principle that rules out nand, but also nor as a natural language truth-functional connective.
The basic argument runs as follows:
There is psycholinguistic evidence that negations are hard to compute for human minds, and computation time increases exponentially for each extra negative element added (Hoosain 1973; Clark 1974, both cited by Gazdar and Pullum 1976).
Therefore there can be no connective C that causes the truth value of a proposition conjoined by C to be true when both of the arguments of C are false. This is supposed to explain why NAND, IFF and IF are not natural language connectives. After all, A if B is true if neither A nor B is true.
However, NOR would be non-confessional as well, and still it is found in many natural languages.
Gazdar and Pullum acknowledge the existence of neither...nor in modern English, but they accommodate this by proposing that neither...nor is derived syntactically from either...or by incorporation of NEG. Such syntactic claims have been made. (I don't have the citations handy).
This seems like a bit of an argument out of convenience to me. I can see that English nor certainly gives the impression of being composed out of not and or. I'm wondering whether this is true in other languages of the world as well, though....
Does anyone know of any language in which the word for NOR doesn't look at all like the particle for negation? And what is your general take on the 'incorporation of negation' argument? How seriously should I take this generativistic argument? I myself work in an evolutionary linguistics framework.
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics Morphology
Message 2: Sample Rates
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Date: 04-Jul-2006
From: Ian Logan <ilogan34hotmail.co.uk>
Subject: Sample Rates
Dear colleagues,
All acoustic information needed to distinguish two phonemes can be found below 4kilohertz.
So, in automatic speech recognition (ASR) why do acoustic models trained on speech data sampled at 22kilohertz work better than acoustic models trained on speech data sampled at 11kilohertz? What information above 4kilohertz helps ASR?
Thank you all.
Ian Logan
Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
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