Research Interests

As I said on the other page, I'm interested in animals (including humans), aliens, artificial intelligence, and ancient people. More specifically, I'm interested in developing accurate formalisms for how these groups might communicate, and aligning them with realistic hypotheses about evolution and emergence. Here are some questions that I think about a lot:

• What does it mean for an individual to know a specific language?
  • What cognitive data structures must exist to represent human language, and how do they change? How can we represent them formally?
  • What does the mental grammar of a specific human e-language look like -- just the parts that are learned?
  • What is the nature of linguistic variation (phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic)? What does this tell us about how we represent language cognitively?
  • To what degree are these cognitive structures and means of change shared by bird/whalesong?
• What does it mean for a species to have language?
  • Which aspects of the human language faculty are shared by birds, whales, and other animals?
  • Which aspects of human language are shared by traditional human music, and by gesture?
  • Why and how did human language evolve? Why and how did bird/whalesong evolve?
    • How do we formally characterize exactly what evolved when?
  • Given the surface utterances and behaviors of a species, how can we tell what aspects of language it does or doesn't have?
  • Is the human language faculty ‘perfect’? Are there other ways of communicating unbounded propositional information that are more likely to have evolved in other scenarios?
  • For each aspect of language shared by humans and another species, to what degree is the cognitive basis for this aspect shared or homologous?
• What does the language of a species (including humans) tell us, if anything, about their conceptual structure? Are there multiple ways of representing conceptual structure?
• How can we create accurate formalisms for language which are easily representable by the neural networks in our brains?

Following is a non-exhaustive list of specific research topics prompted by the above questions, which I hope to explore in the future:

• How does a head-final language evolve into a head-initial one, and vice versa? How can we represent parameters like head-finality formally in plausibly-evolved/acquired cognitive structures?
• If syntax is “just Merge,” how can we encode syntactic universals (e.g. phrase ordering, adjective ordering) into a semantic formalism? How can we use syntactic and semantic universals and conceptual structure as learned from neuro/psych experiments as evidence for a semantic formalism?
• Does noun case come from externalization or from conceptual structure? How does it evolve between languages, and why does it exist at all?
• Are some varieties of birdsong and whalesong formally equivalent to human phonology?
• Do birds and whales remember songs in ‘chunks’?
• How can we formally represent the communication systems of eusocial insects?
• How can we formally represent the ‘neuralese’ of an LLM, and how might we predict the structure of an LLM's ‘neuralese’ based on its training data and reinforcement algorithms?
• Could human phonology/externalization have evolved before syntax? Why would it have done so?
• We know that the songs of birds and whales vary and evolve ‘culturally’, as learned communication systems. Is this cultural variation/evolution limited to the phonological representations of a limited set of fixed meanings, or does semantic shift exist as well? Can a given noncompositional phonological unit be re-interpreted to mean something else?