ERIC Number: EJ1269991
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 20
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7237
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Abstractions Made of Exemplars or 'You're All Right, and I've Changed My Mind': Response to Commentators
First Language, v40 n5-6 p640-659 Oct-Dec 2020
In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b) in the service of language use, re-represent these exemplars at multiple levels of abstraction, as simulated by computational neural-network models such as BERT, ELMo and GPT-3. Whilst I maintain that traditional linguistic abstractions (e.g. a DETERMINER category; SUBJECT VERB OBJECT word order) are no more than human-readable approximations of the type of abstractions formed by both human and artificial multiple-layer networks, I express hope that the abstractions-made-of-exemplars position can point the way towards a truce in the language acquisition wars: We were all right all along, just focusing on different levels of abstraction.
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Syntax, Computational Linguistics, Language Research, Language Usage, Networks, Language Processing, Definitions, Morphology (Languages), Phonetics, Phonology, Abstract Reasoning, Figurative Language
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative; Opinion Papers
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Language: English
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