The Notion of Functions in Maths and in Language

In everyday plain English, the word “function” is understood to be roughly synonymous with words like “goal” or “purpose”. For example, the function of a fruit knife is to cut fruit.

In linguistics, “function” is usually understood to have this kind of meaning. For example, the primary function of the English determiner the, when used alongside a noun within a noun phrase like the cow, is to express deictic meaning (“that particular cow”), whilst the determiner a/an, as in a cow, has the function of expressing non-deictic (singular) quantification (“just one of the cows”).

Hanks' Theory of Norms and Exploitations Part 2: Meaning Potential

Preamble: This post continues my exploration of Patrick Hanks’ Theory of Norms and Exploitations which I had undertaken in my previous post, this time focusing on the notion of meaning potential. Much of the following is based on Chapter 3 “Do Word Meanings Exist?” and parts of Chapter 4 “Prototypes and Norms”, Chapter 5 “Contextual Dependency and Lexical Sets”, and Hanks (The Syntagmatics of Metaphor and Idiom, 2004).

Hanks' Theory of Norms and Exploitations Part 1: Some Personal Notes

Preamble: The following consists of a summary/personal interpretation of my reading of Chapter 1 “Words and Meanings: The Need for a New Approach” from Patrick Hanks’ monograph Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (2013: The MIT Press).

AI vs Linguistics: Thoughts on LLMs as theories of language

In Hjelmslev’s well-known but little read Prolegomena, arguments were put forth for the advancement of linguistics as an independent, formal science distinct from the older tradition known as philology. The goal was a theory of language, one that described not languages but the systems underlying languages.

Why Language Science Needs Ecological Validity

Recently I read a blog post by the syntactician Omer Preminger about why ecological validity is undesirable and “would undermine research into the structure of human language.” Indeed, Preminger argues that when scientists are confronted with complex natural phenomena that arise out of messy interactions between multiple factors, the typical approach has been to simplify matters by isolating or eliminating factors through highly artificial setups.