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DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20210925T115000Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20210925T111000Z
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UID:e18bb1a0-51ae-4d4e-9c63-384c61b68ee5@talks.stuts.de
DESCRIPTION:Linguistics certainly benefits from many different fields of 
 knowledge\, be it science or humanities or… whatever else there is\, but
 \, as for any science\, none of them is as crucial as the metascience of
  mathematics. However\, additional specifications are needed.\n\nMany li
 nguists use statistic machinery to find correlations and otherwise make 
 predictions about language and/or its use\, but\, as Agricola Moroz once
  said (p. c.)\, “Statistics is to check hypotheses not to create them”\,
  which seems to be easily forgotten by many of those linguists who benef
 it from using statistics\, N-grams\, Markov models and such things.\n\nD
 iscrete mathematics\, on the other hand\, actually provides us with a wo
 rkable metaframework able to generate large parts of frameworks from its
 elf\, the most obvious examples being\, first of all\, theory of formal 
 languages (created\, by no accident\, by none other than linguist Noam C
 homsky\, (Chomsky\, 1956)) and then lambda calculus and model theory\, b
 oth of the latter lying in the heart of formal semantics (see\, for exam
 ple\, (Heim\, et al.\, 1998)).\n\nGiven such a metaframework\, we can cr
 eate frameworks which by their very design make certain predictions abou
 t the data\, be it binary branching and endocentricity of Minimalist Mer
 ge (Chomsky\, 2000) or regularity (again\, in the sense of the theory of
  formal language) of phonology.\n\nThat being said\, even those who indi
 rectly benefit from discrete mathematics (and that embodies most of form
 al linguists) often fail to directly describe their deeds in terms of it
 s relevant subfield. For some frameworks it is not directly needed becau
 se they provide a translation of its terms to the terms of discrete math
 ematics\; for others it is much more problematic because a relevant tran
 slation is either not full (or even non-existing) or misleading. That le
 ads us to the main point of this abstract: every new framework (even if 
 it is a modification of an existing one if the modification is drastic e
 nough) has to provide its formal equivalent in discrete mathematics (pro
 bably in either first-order logic or monadic second-order logic\, as mos
 t other areas\, such as graph theory\, are\, in turn\, expressible throu
 gh one of those) to be used interchangeably by other linguists.\n\nFollo
 wing that\, I am going to write my thesis on generative phonology and mo
 rphology (on Ancient Greek material) providing a formal description for 
 most of the notions used (such as phonological segment\, boundary segmen
 t\, or all postsyntactic operations) relying on first-order logic and\, 
 where relevant\, graph theory.
URL:https://talks.stuts.de/en/18staps/public/events/610
SUMMARY:Discrete mathematics as the tool for linguists
ORGANIZER:18staps
LOCATION:18staps - Don Giovanni
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