Mathematics Colloquium
Matilde Marcolli
California Institute of Technology
Title: Mathematical structures in generative linguistics
Date: Friday, September 5th
Place and Time: Love 101, 3:05-3:55 pm
Abstract. Human language, especially syntax, is a highly structured computational mechanism and, as such, it is suitable for mathematical modeling. The field of generative linguistics has incorporated the use of algebraic structures modeling natural language since the mid 1950s, but Chomsky's most recent formulation of Merge as the key structure building operation in syntax reveals that the combinatorics of syntactic structures and their semantic parsing obey similar mathematical laws to those that govern the extraction of meaningful physical values from the combinatorics of Feynman diagrams in quantum field theory. The talk is based on joint work with Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick.