Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

A minor feature likely based on human constraints -- hardly any implications of a universal grammar. Even Japanese breaks this easily, which instantly kills universal in a Chomsky sense (it has to be absolute to be something our brains have innately). 37 languages aren't much when there are so many out there, particularly minor ones of isolated populations with entirely different features.

Not super exciting just yet.

View on HN

Yes, I also think dependency length minimization is just a cognitive constraint. (Lead author here.) The idea of calling this a universal in the Chomsky sense is all from the press. The cool thing about it is that (previous work has shown) you can use this constraint in principle to derive a lot of the more substantive "universals" (really, overwhelming tendencies) of language, such as that natural language expressions are usually well-nested, and that in languages where the verb follows the object, the noun also follows the adjective, and the preposition follows the noun, etc.

As for isolated languages, I just finished performing some dependency length preference experiments on indigenous people in Bolivia, but haven't analyzed the data yet, so we'll see :)

What have you learned about how to talk to the press?

Bad coverage like this reflects back negatively on the research and the institution, sadly.

Uni PR offices are famously bad at twisting and over-selling research results.

I think I've learned there's not much you can do.

My advisor and I talked to two reporters: one from MIT News (https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/how-language-gives-your-brai...) and one from Science Magazine (http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2015/08/all-langu...). They both communicated with us about all kinds of details in the articles, and let us comment on the drafts. We clearly stated what we did and didn't want to claim, and they did a good job conveying what we wanted while adding extra connections we hadn't thought of for popular appeal.

On the other hand, we had no contact with anyone about the Ars Technica article. I've also seen some other articles cropping up that are copying the original articles, and making claims I wouldn't stand by. I don't think there's anything we can do about that.

Have you considered demanding a correction?

They are putting words in your mouth. Somebody should keep journalist accountable.

A few days ago I tried to follow the source of an article in an online newspaper. The source was another online newspaper , in a different language, and the source for this one another one. Along the way things were added and removed, just like in a crazy telephone game.

It makes you think about the news we read and take for granted.

"Scientists notice small trend that may or may not be of importance to language" just isn't a very catchy headline.

A good thing that we did for our last paper [1]: we have set up a FAQ [2] with the most common questions (we updated the FAQ when we received new questions). Thanks to the FAQ, the journalists do not "invent" too much and they have quotes that they can use.

Overall, I think the FAQ helped a lot and it avoided some common mis-interpretations.

[1] Paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7553/full/nature1... | arxiv version & video: http://chronos.isir.upmc.fr/~mouret/website/nature_press.xht...

[2] FAQ: http://chronos.isir.upmc.fr/~mouret/website/nature_press.xht...

>Bad coverage like this reflects back negatively on the research and the institution, sadly

On the contrary! It's usually assisted by the researchers and the institution, and it helps them get grants and free press "advertising".

Also: do not let the Uni PR office write the press release. Write it yourself and insist they use yours.

These abstract patterns are interesting (and I'd love to read more about them), butt more so if you can drive some kind of tree that neatly describes all languages. But doing so is essentially solving Chomsky's main theory which so far hasn't been done to my understanding?

Very interesting.

Do you think this constraint would hold in artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban, Tengwar) as well?

Speakers of artificial languages are probably influenced by the syntax of their native languages, so yes, I suspect we'd see dependency length minimization when people speak those languages too.

Glad this is top comment atm, and thanks for saying it. Pop/folk linguistics is too easy and super annoying.

This is a bad article and it misrepresents the notion of a 'universal' in any sense (Chomsky, Greenberg, you name it) but the most purely functional. Things like sentence/word length being bounded by memory or cognitive capacity or whatever aren't a 'universal' in any meaningful or useful sense, and no linguist would argue otherwise. Probably.

I don't think you understand what the universal grammar is, if you're discounting DLM as merely being "likely based on human constraints," because that's the whole hypothesis of the universal grammar. It posits that there are physical limitations in the brain that force certain structures on language, as opposed to language being completely free form.

The hypothesis that the brain imposes constrains on possible languages is trivially true and the alternative that languages can be free-form is a straw man. That's the problem with universal grammar, depending on who you ask, it is either absurd or trivial. Perhaps there are more sensible formulations of the idea but I have yet to see them.

Finding something universal (and non-trivial) to human languages would still be exciting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com