The goal of this article is to reveal the computational structure of modern principle-and-parameter (Chomskian) linguistic theories: what computational problems do these informal theories pose, and what is the underlying structure of those computations? To do this, I analyze the computational complexity of human language comprehension: what linguistic representation is assigned to a given sound? This problem is factored into smaller, interrelated (but independently statable) problems. For example, in order to understand a given sound, the listener must assign a phonetic form to the sound; determine the morphemes that compose the words in the sound; and calculate the linguistic antecedent of every pronoun in the utterance. I prove that these and other subproblems are all NP-hard, and that language comprehension is itself PSPACE-hard.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MIT/oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/7341 |
| Date | 01 December 1988 |
| Creators | Ristad, Eric Sven |
| Source Sets | M.I.T. Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 49 p., 5602405 bytes, 2090110 bytes, application/postscript, application/pdf |
| Relation | AIM-964 |
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