[vkazanov]

Yes! As somebody who speaks 2 languages, and sort of reads/understands 2 more, I cannot agree more. Human spoken languages do not follow any grammars. Grammars are just simplified representations of reality that is probabilistic in nature.

This is something that Chomsky got very wrong, and the statistical/ML crowd got very right.

But still, grammars are a very useful model.

[pessimizer]

Languages definitely follow grammars. They don't follow the grammars that were written by observing them, but you can discover unwritten grammatical structures that are nevertheless followed by everyone who speaks a language, and who if asked wouldn't even be able to articulate the rules that they are following. It's the following that defines the grammar, not the articulation of the rules.

Statistics are just another way to record a grammar, all the way down to the detail of how one talks about bicycles, or the Dirty War in Argentina.

If a grammar is defined as a book that enumerates the rules of a language, then of course language doesn't require following a grammar. If a grammar is defined as a set of rules for communicating reasonably well with another person who knows those same rules, then language follows grammars.

[vkazanov]

> Languages definitely follow grammars

But it's the other way around! Grammars follow languages. Or, more precisely, grammars are (very lossy) language models.

They describe typical expectations of an average language speaker. Grammars try to provide a generalized system describing an average case.

I prefer to think of languages as a set of typical idioms used by most language users. A given grammar is an attempt to catch similarities between idioms within the set and turn 'em into a formal description.

A grammar might help with studying a language, and speed up the process of internalizing idioms, but the final learning stage is a set of things students use in certain situations aka idioms. And that's it.

> Statistics are just another way to record a grammar

I almost agree.

But it should be "record a language". These are two approaches to the problem of modeling human languages.

Grammars are an OK model. Statistical models are less useful to us humans but given the right amount of compute they do show much better (see LLMs).

[canjobear]

This is a terminological difference. Linguists use "grammar" as a technical term for a speaker's implicit knowledge of how their language works. That knowledge could be statistical or rule-based in nature, although most linguistic theories say that it's rule-based. You're using grammars to mean human-produced descriptions of that knowledge.

[vkazanov]

That's correct.

Grammars the way I understand them are are a family of human language models. Typically discrete in nature. The approach was born out of Chomsky's research culminating in the Universal Grammar idea.

[foobarqux]

This is just wrong. Languages follow certain inviolable rules, most notably, hierarchical structure dependence. There are experiments (Moro, the subject "Chris") that show that humans don't process synthetic languages that violate these rules the same as synthetic languages that do (specifically it takes them longer to process and they use non-language parts of the brain to do so).

[famouswaffles]

This does not mean that language in humans isn't probabilistic in nature. You seem to think that because there is structure then it must be rule based but that doesn't follow at all.

When a group of birds fly, each bird discovers/knows that flying just a little behind another will reduce the amount of flaps it needs to fly. When you have nearly every bird doing this, the flock form an interesting shape.

'Birds fly in a V shape' is essentially what grammar is here - a useful fiction of the underlying reality. There is structure. There is meaning but there is no rule the birds are following to get there. No invisible V shape in the sky constraining bird flight.

[foobarqux]

First, there is no evidence of any probabilistic processing at the level of syntax in humans (it's irrelevant what computers can do).

Second, I didn't say that, in language, structure implies deterministic rules, I said that there is a deterministic rule that involves the structure of a sentence. Specifically, sentences are interpreted according to their parse tree, not the linear order of words.

As for the birds analogy, the "rules" the birds follow actually does explain the V-shape that the flock forms. You make an observation "V-shaped flock" ask the question "why a V-shape and not some other shape" and try to find a explanation (the relative bird positions make it easier to fly [because of XYZ]). In the case of language you observe that there is structure dependence, you ask why it's that way and not another (like linear order) and try to come up with an explanation. You are trying to suggest that the observation that language has structure dependence is like seeing an image of an object in a cloud formation: an imagined mental projection that doesn't have any meaningful underlying explanation. You could make the same argument for pretty much anything (e.g. the double-slit experiment is just projecting some mental patterns onto random behavior) and I don't think it's a serious argument in this case either.

[famouswaffles]

>First, there is no evidence of any probabilistic processing at the level of syntax in humans (it's irrelevant what computers can do).

There is plenty evidence for to suggest this

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27135040/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25644408/

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110346916...

And research on syntactic surprisal—where more predictable syntactic structures are processed faster—shows a strong correlation between the probability of a syntactic continuation and reading times.

>In the case of language you observe that there is structure dependence, you ask why it's that way and not another (like linear order) and try to come up with an explanation. You are trying to suggest that the observation that language has structure dependence is like seeing an image of an object in a cloud formation: an imagined mental projection that doesn't have any meaningful underlying explanation.

No I'm suggesting that all you're doing here is cooking up some very nice fiction like Newton did when he proposed his model of gravity. Grammar does not even fit into rule based hierarchies all that well. That's why there are a million strange exceptions to almost every 'rule'. Exceptions that have no sensible explanations beyond, 'well this is just how it's used' because of course that's what happens when you try to break down an inherently probabilistic process into rigid rules.

[vkazanov]

What exactly is wrong? The fact that grammars are very limited models of human languages? My key thesis is that human languages operate in a way that non-probabilistic models (i.e. grammars) can only describe it in a very lossy way.

Sure, LLMs are also lossy but also much more scalable.

I've spent quite a lot of time with 90s/2000s papers on the topic, and I don't remember any model useful in generating human language better than "stohastic parrots" do.

[foobarqux]

As I said there are universal rules that human language processing follows (like hierarchical structure dependence); you can't have arbitrary syntax/grammars. It's true that science hasn't solved the main puzzles about how to characterize these rules.

The fact that statistical models are better predictors than the-"true"-characterization-that-we-haven't-figured-out-yet is completely irrelevant, just as it would be irrelevant if your deep-learning net was a better predictor of the weather: it wouldn't imply that the weather doesn't follow rules in physics, regardless of whether we knew what those rules were.

[judahmeek]

> As I said there are universal rules that human language processing follows (like hierarchical structure dependence); you can't have arbitrary syntax/grammars.

GP didn't say anything about grammars being arbitrary. In fact, his claim that grammars are models of languages would mean the complete opposite.

[judahmeek]

Moro is apparently a reference to Andrea Moro, but I can't find any writing of his titled 'The Subject "Chris"'.

[foobarqux]

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/signs-of-a-savant/i...

[foobarqux]

It's a separate study done by someone else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgd8BnZ2-iw&t=6735s