Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper outlines a brief history of the evolving relationship between linguistics and computer science, ranging from the famous 1956 MIT symposium on information theory to contemporary debates over the relevance of language models for the study of the human language faculty. As a case in point, we consider the phenomenon of negative concord in children’s acquisition of negation in both English and (to a lesser extent) Korean.  Drawing on insights from both cognitive and computational approaches, we exemplify how an interactive line of inquiry may contribute to advances in the field of linguistics.