How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
This addresses the debate in linguistics about the relevance of language models for human language study, offering an optimistic perspective for researchers in the field.
The paper argues that language models can contribute to fundamental questions in linguistics, such as structure, processing, and learning, by serving as model systems for gradient, usage-based approaches, without replacing linguistic theory.
Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing. On the other side, there have been claims that the success of LMs obviates the need for studying linguistic theory and structure. We argue that both extremes are wrong. LMs can contribute to fundamental questions about linguistic structure, language processing, and learning. They force us to rethink arguments and ways of thinking that have been foundational in linguistics. While they do not replace linguistic structure and theory, they serve as model systems and working proofs of concept for gradient, usage-based approaches to language. We offer an optimistic take on the relationship between language models and linguistics.