
Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/89/the-dark-side/-talking-is-throwing-fictional-worlds-at-one-another-rp
======
eindiran
I feel like the Piraha stuff comes up every so often, and I feel obligated
each time to link to the famous Nevins and Pesetsky rebuttal:
[https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-...](https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-2009-PIRAHA%20EXCEPTIONALIT.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)

Beyond the disagreement about what recursion is (as used to define the faculty
of language narrow (FLN), from the Chomsky, Hauser, Fitch paper mentioned in
the interview), there are significant problems with Everett's argument in
general which are covered quite well in the rebuttal.

~~~
derriz
Here's Evert's response to the rebuttal:
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215992069_Cultural_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215992069_Cultural_constraints_on_grammar_in_Piraha_A_reply_to_Nevins_Pesetsky_and_Rodrigues_2007)

~~~
bloak
It doesn't inspire confidence that the German examples in that response are
all wrong.

But I can recommend Everett's book "Don't sleep, there are snakes", which is
only partly about language.

~~~
derriz
I'm curious (having some basic German) what's wrong with the German examples?
Isn't most of the German taken from the article he is responding to?

edit - actually I think I see it - he's not inflecting the articles correctly
after "von"?

~~~
Zickzack
The claim is that "the English possessive is potentially recursive, while the
Saxon genitive [its counterpart in German] is not". I think they are confusing
some issues. And by the way, I thought Saxon genitive was a term from English
grammar.

Anyhow, in German, you can use the Saxon genitive in preposition, if the word
in Genitive can be used like a personal name: "ich sehe Karls Auto". And it is
true that you cannot recurse on that: "ich sehe Karls Bruders Auto" is not
German, except maybe in German poems two hundred years ago, when the language
was raped. Even "ich sehe meines Vaters Auto" will sound outside of the norm.

However, you can recurse in postposition: "ich sehe das Auto meines Vaters",
"ich sehe das Auto des Bruders meines Vaters". You do not have to say "ich
sehe das Auto vom Bruder von meinem Vater".

Several edits, sorry.

~~~
teraku
Would argue that "ich sehe meines Vaters Auto" is valid, but only for lyrics
and/or old German.

------
fiblye
The note about the Piraha language not having embedding is incredibly
interesting. Example taken from Wikipedia:

>Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say,
"John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences.

Compounding this on the apparent lack of numbers/counting, expressing higher
order concepts seems like it'd be borderline impossible in the language as-is.
I wonder if many other languages started out "simple" like this, and developed
grammatical complexity alongside their society?

Of course, the issue here could just be a lack of understanding and
insufficient ability to ask questions to native speakers by people researching
it. It only has 250 speakers and picking it up as a second language with zero
resources leaves plenty of room for error. More recent research suggests it
_might_ be possible, but no non-native speakers are really sure.

~~~
WaxProlix
Everett is an extremely controversial figure within linguistics, to put it
very mildly.

Recursive embedding is one of the foundational marks of human language (though
not the only), and finding a natural language without it would cast long
shadows across the existing literature while making that language's
"discoverer" very famous.

His data have been challenged by a number of other linguists, despite
Everett's attempts to keep others from access to first hand sources.

Note too that the existence of alternate constructions such as "John has a
brother. This brother has a house." do not preclude the language's ability to
accommodate embedding.

Anyway, I'm no orthodox Chomskyist (in part because I'm not well enough
educated to be:) but I think all of Everett's claims should be taken with as
many grains of salt as we can find in our immediate vicinity.

~~~
derriz
Traces of recursion have been found in animal "language" also -
[https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_h...](https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_human_humans_recursion/)
describes recursive elements to certain bird song.

More recently here's a recent experiment -
[https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-
linguist...](https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguistic-
feature-not-unique-to-humans/) \- which seems to show that some primates have
similar "recursive" reasoning skills as young (under 4) children.

~~~
foldr
The studies on song birds have for the most part been very poorly conceived
and based on a simple misunderstanding. (The fact that a grammar _can be_
defined using recursive rules doesn't entail that its string language can't be
_recognized_ by non-recursive procedures.) For example, the common A^nB^n
string language (which can be defined using a recursive CFG) can obviously
also be recognized by counting.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
But the a^nb^n language is context free so there is no regular grammar that
can represent it. If a couting mechanism can be used to represent a^nb^n the
result will still have to be a context-free grammar, otherwise a^nb^n would
not be context-free.

~~~
foldr
No, that's exactly the mistake. You can check that the counts are equal
without parsing the string at all. So the ability to recognize the string
language is not evidence that the string is being parsed according to a
particular CFG (or any other grammar). In other words, it is not evidence that
the birds are pairing up each A with the corresponding B.

Most of the literature on birds stems from a confusion of the distinction
between regular string languages and context free string languages with the
distinction between grammars with and without recursive rules. The two
distinctions are largely orthogonal. It is certainly possible, for example, to
define certain regular string languages using recursive grammars, and to
define certain context free string languages without using recursive grammars.

When you say that "the result must be a context free grammar" I think what you
mean to say is that the string language defined must be a context free (and
non-regular) string language. But that does not in any way entail that the
only way to recognize the string language is by means of a particular context
free grammar.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Ah, I see - my mistake. You're saying that one can count n "a"s followed by n
"b"s without the need for a context-free grammar (or any grammar!). I agree.

What I meant by "the result will still have to be a context free grammar" was
a context-free grammar that incorporates a counting mechanism, as part of its
definition. Something like this, perhaps (in Definite Clause Grammars notation
so you can actually run it as a Prolog program):

    
    
      'S' --> 'A'(N), 'B'(N).
      
      'A'([1]) --> 'A'.
      'A'([1|As]) --> 'A', 'A'(As).
      
      'B'([1]) --> 'B'.
      'B'([1|Bs]) --> 'B', 'B'(Bs).
      
      'A' --> [a].
      'B' --> [b].
    

Though that one is recursive (or at least the counting mechanism is) and I'm
not sure how you'd do the same thing without recursion to be honest (or
without going up a couple of levels to Turing-completeness so you can call
arbitrary functions). So, never mind- I just misunderstood what you meant.

~~~
foldr
I see, fair enough. I think I may have misread your original comment.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
No, I misread yours :)

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kieckerjan
Interesting interview, but weird that the interviewer pulls the title "Talking
Is Throwing Fictional Worlds at One Another" from his own words, not the
interviewee's. I guess he was rather smitten with his own turn of phrase.

~~~
fuzzfactor
_The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense._

― Tom Clancy

------
dgellow
The title is a bit clickbaity, but some parts of the article were interesting
(there is a lot of noise though, if what you’re looking for are technical
details).

In case some of you are interested by the “merge” structure they mention, you
can look for “Minimalist Program”, by Chomsky and others. That’s where it
comes from:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program)

~~~
082349872349872
relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/2043/](https://xkcd.com/2043/)

I've worked with some clever animals, and agree they didn't show any signs of
recursive embedding (they "lex" but don't "parse"), but must note that modern
anglophone humans are relatively embedding-impoverished compared with prior
centuries, a reduction which we can observe in comparing the number of stack
levels necessary to parse the subordinations and coordinations[1] in the
dendritic periods of the 1st president of the US with the number necessary to
parse the sequential utterances of the most recent.

[1]
[https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtx...](https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html)

> "In these honorable qualifications, I behold the surest pledges, that as on
> one side, no local prejudices, or attachments; no separate views, nor party
> animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to
> watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests: so, on
> another, that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the
> pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a
> free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the
> affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world."

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
I'm not a linguist but that to me is more a list (a sequence of qualifiers)
than a recursion (a nesting). However, a quick browse shows I'm wrong so for
those who also aren't sure

[https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/what-
is...](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/what-is-recursion)

[https://www.thoughtco.com/recursion-
grammar-1691901](https://www.thoughtco.com/recursion-grammar-1691901)

~~~
ppod
I'm not sure that those links completely show that you're wrong. The example
you're replying to appears deeper than it is because each nested element is
quite broad, so the absolute depth is not as much as it might seem (I think).

~~~
082349872349872
Agreed, there are listings, but even they are not always just a flat unary
tree. For instance, there's the structure within the listing of:

    
    
        (no ((local prejudices) or (attachments))
         no (separate views)
         nor (party animosities))
    

which is itself embedded within

    
    
        ... will misdirect ...
        as on one side ... so, on another, ...
        etc.

------
azangru
> Despite that seeming constraint, Adger argues in his new book, Language
> Unlimited, that the sentences we make are infinite in faculty, form, and
> expression.

This is such a journalist thing to write. The idea that the number of
sentences that can be produced using a given language is potentially infinite
is such an old one that it hardly has anything to do with Adger, and Adger
hardly needed to "argue" it.

------
klunger
"I think about it like even numbers. There’s an unlimited number of even
numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren’t in
there. Language is like that. There’s an unlimited number of possible things
we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence
structure. So you’re absolutely right. Language is unlimited, but it’s
unlimited in a limited way."

This is such a tantalizing idea, but there doesn't seem to be anyway to extend
it beyond "we don't know what it would be like to think with a different
language paradigm, but it would probably be different." I want to know _how_
human thoughts are shaped and constrained by human language.

~~~
dorchadas
The issue, in my opinion, is separating the fact from the language shaping the
thought to the thought shaping the language. It quickly leads into strong
linguistic relativity, which has been proven wrong. And even the weak form, in
my opinion, isn't very strong proof that it's necessarily a specific language,
as opposed to cultural influences, affecting it.

------
KhoomeiK
Shameless plug for my essay [1] that discusses some similar ideas to this
article. I focus more in-depth on what the consequences of compositional
grammar are for ML-based NLP and why we should be looking to theories of
psycholinguistics and philosophy of language for inspiration as a research
community.

[1] [https://rohan.bearblog.dev/humans-spoke-
vectors/](https://rohan.bearblog.dev/humans-spoke-vectors/)

------
ppod
> We don’t do this by putting the two words in a sequence, like an artificial
> intelligence or a bonobo would do. Instead we build a new hierarchical unit.
> This unit puts together the verb drink with the noun wine to create the
> phrase drink wine, with wine being the grammatical object of drink.

AI can do compositionality.

------
aerovistae
I wish this had less of a clickbait title. I have no idea what the article is
about other than linguistics.

------
j-pb
Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/114/](https://xkcd.com/114/)

~~~
howlgarnish
I'm generally a fan, but that's quite possibly the least funny XKCD ever.

~~~
j-pb
My computational linguist friend disagrees and asked me to design this for his
iPad:
[https://m.imgur.com/gallery/oPzM8U7](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/oPzM8U7)

