Toward a rich phonology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0059/000059Abstract
A radically new conception of linguistic representations is proposed. The claim is that language is stored in memory in the form of large distributions of specific utterances in a rich high-dimensional space, sometimes called exemplar memory. This is the form the brain uses for understanding and creating utterances in real time. In contrast, the abstract, speaker-independent description of language (as modelled by alphabetical orthographies and by linguistic descriptions using phonemes, etc.) exhibits many structures and patterns that comprise a social institution, maintained by speakers over time, and approximating a discrete system made from components. However, these phenomena, shaped by social as well as articulatory/auditory factors, play no clear role in real-time language processing.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Robert Port (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
