Questions

You may not feel in a position to answer these questions. However, I doubt if anyone is actually able to answer them definitively, so you should attempt them anyway.

1.

Is bird song a language? How about whale songs? Why? Can you think of ways of supporting your claims using corpus analysis?

2.

How would you go about determining authorship of a collection of disputed text?

3.

What is the difference between a language and an artificial code? Why exactly does Weaver's idea of treating Russian as a funny encoding of English seem so strange?

4.

A regular seeming signal arrives from a distant star. How would you try to determine whether this signal is a sample from a language spoken by some unknown intelligent life form?

5.

People don't seem to assign probabilities to sequences of words, so why should machines?

6.

A possible objection to the statistical approach is:

``Statistical models can't be right because they assign a score even to obvious drivel. This makes them worse than non-probabilistic grammars, which reject such trash.''

Is this objection reasonable?

7.

What use could linguistics make of a million hours of annotated video of everyday conversation?