Linguistic Productivity: the Case of Determiners in English

摘要

Having heard “a pimwit”, English-speakers assume that “the pimwit” is also possible. This type of productivity is attributed to syntactic categories such as NOUN and DETERMINER , but the key question is how do humans become endowed with these categories in the first place. We propose a novel approach that combines corpus analysis with computational modeling to analyze the productivity of DETER - MINER + NOUN constructions in child-produced utterances. Our experiments on two corpora of child-adult interactions using two different methods of quantifying linguistic productivity show that children do not display productivity at early stages. Using a model trained on child-directed utterances, we simulate children’s developmental trajectory with great precision, suggesting that the emergence of productivity in human language can be explained without the need to postulate a priori access to syntactic categories.