User:Biolinguist

I’m a Ph.D. student at the Concordia Center for Cognitive Science & Linguistics, interested in the computational architecture and biological implementation of phonology. Here I am supervised by Prof. Charles Reiss (Chair), Prof. Alan Bale and Prof. Mark Hale. My research is primarily built around the idea that cognition IS computation, and summarily rejects the convoluted dogma of embodied cognition. I defend the nativist, computational-representational approach to the study of the mind as a property of the computational brain, which I argue (in the spirit of Fodor and Pylyshyn) has been nothing short of an umitigated success.

Before joining the Cognitive Science center, I was a post-graduate researcher at the MARCS Institute of Brain, Behavior and Development in Sydney, Australia, and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. At MARCS I worked with Anne Cutler on exploring the hemispheric integration of information during dichotic listening tasks, and did some work on articulatory mechanisms using electromagnetic articulometry. It was useful experience in that it taught me the futility of trying to answer questions about phonological competence using sensory-motor and performance data.

My present research argues that phonological computations are arbitrary symbol-manipulating set-theoretic operations that are opaque to the partial veridicality that holds between phonological primes and their neuro-phonetic correlates. The input to and output of phonology are both described using the same algebraic variables-based alphabet, with a pair of sets of transducers converting between neurological states and representational formats. The focus is on (1) emphasizing interface-driven computations, (2) a principle of minimal search and efficient computation, and (3) deriving cross-linguistic variation from the structure of the inventory rather than from violable constraints. Ultimately, I try to argue, that the Strong Minimalist Thesis can, indeed, hold for phonology, provided we make use of Chomsky’s insightful advice – simple representations, powerful computations.

Currently I am working on two parallel projects. The first, a formal-computational project, seeks to elaborate upon the syntax and semantics of phonological operations, with a focus on explaining long-distance computations in phonology instead of explaining them away. I advocate for a strong procedural SEARCH & COPY based model to account for long-distance vowel harmony, and argue that the same can be extended to all consonant-vowel interactions. Subjacency is defined as a special case of long-distance relationships, and I argue that locality principles are not encoded in the grammar but are derivable from the syntax of phonology thus eliminating the need for iterative rule application. On the semantics side of things I try to explore the issues of bidirectionality, directional vs. global application of rules, and argue that being explicit regarding formalization helps take steps towards determining the lower bound of computational power needed for phonology.

A second electrophysiological project, inspired directly by Lenneberg’s seminal book The Biological Foundations of Language, is aimed at collecting modality-independent evidence for biological adaptations for the language faculty. Currently we are exploring the respiratory and physiological adaptations for language (discussed by Lenneberg in Chapter 3) using both visual and tactile sign-languages. Other related projects involve studying the electrophysiological responses to violations of backward long-distance dependencies (e.g. cataphoric binding, backward control etc.) during parsing.

In my free time, I talk about political economy, Anarcho-Syndicalism and Jewish socialism, and the genocide being committed by the apartheid state of Israel against the valiant people of Palestine. I am a staunch advocate for EULA-abolition and the right to pirate unethically licensed proprietary software. As a devotee of The Hacker Manifesto (1996) I resolutely maintain that all knowledge is and must be FREE. When paywall-driven oppression and discrimination (think Elsevier) becomes the law, pirates become the last defenders of basic human dignity. If you have taken the trouble to read this far, I encourage you to spend five more minutes reading and pondering this seminal piece from 1986 -- The Conscience of a Hacker.

I have been using GNU/Linux since 2001 in various forms. My current setup is Pop O.S., although I have used various flavors of Arch, and Slackware too, over the years.

In all matters, social, political and/or scientific, I am rather unapologetic in being an ironclad Chomskyan.