Section
LinguisticsPath
Language as structure: sounds, word pieces, syntax, meaning, conversation, and the empirical question of what language models learn from text.
This is not a language-learning site. It is a map of linguistics as a field, with special care around the places where linguistic theory and modern NLP touch without collapsing into each other.
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The launch spine
9 published topics
Phonology · 12 min
Phoneme vs Allophone
The phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish meaning in a language; an allophone is a context-determined surface realization of a phoneme. Distinguishing them is the foundational analytical mo...
Morphology · 11 min
Morpheme and Allomorph
The morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language; an allomorph is a context-determined surface realization of a morpheme. The plural -s in English realizes as three allomorphs depending on the precedi...
Syntax · 11 min
Constituency Tests
Standard diagnostics for whether a sequence of words forms a syntactic unit (constituent): substitution, movement, coordination, ellipsis, and pro-form replacement. The empirical foundation of phrase-structure...
Computational Linguistics · 14 min
The Distributional Hypothesis
Words that occur in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings; the empirical claim that grounds vector semantics, word2vec, and the dense-embedding parts of modern language models.
Computational Linguistics · 14 min
Probing Classifiers for Linguistic Structure
Train a small classifier to predict a linguistic label (POS tag, dependency relation, syntactic depth) from a frozen language model's hidden states. If the probe succeeds, the model has encoded the linguistic p...
Phonology
Sound systems, contrast, allophony, and the analytical machinery behind speech.
Morphology
Meaning-bearing word pieces, surface variants, and how morphology differs from tokenization.
Syntax
Constituents, phrase structure, and the tests that make syntactic claims empirical.
Constituency Tests
core · 11 minStandard diagnostics for whether a sequence of words forms a syntactic unit (constituent): substitution, movement, coordination, ellipsis, and pro-form replacement. The empirical foundation of phrase-structure analysis and the entry point t...
X-Bar Theory
advanced · 14 minA schema for phrase structure: every phrase has a head, complement, specifier, and adjunct positions arranged in a uniform XP / X-bar / X tree. The structural framework that organizes constituency-test data into a coherent theory of syntact...
Formal Semantics
Truth-conditional meaning, typed lambda calculus, and compositional interpretation.
Pragmatics
Meaning in use: implicature, cooperation, context, and what literal content leaves unsaid.
Computational Linguistics
Distributional semantics, embeddings, and careful tests of linguistic structure in language models.
Probing Classifiers for Linguistic Structure
advanced · 14 minTrain a small classifier to predict a linguistic label (POS tag, dependency relation, syntactic depth) from a frozen language model's hidden states. If the probe succeeds, the model has encoded the linguistic property. The standard methodol...
The Distributional Hypothesis
core · 14 minWords that occur in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings; the empirical claim that grounds vector semantics, word2vec, and the dense-embedding parts of modern language models.
Vector Semantics and word2vec, Revisited
advanced · 14 minWords as vectors in a high-dimensional space, where geometric closeness reflects semantic similarity. The algorithmic instantiation of the distributional hypothesis: Mikolov's 2013 word2vec (skip-gram and CBOW) and the Levy-Goldberg 2014 re...