Analogies of form between chunks in japanese are massive and far from being misleading

Overview & Synopsis

This paper relates to the assessment of the argument of the poverty of the stimulus in that we measure the number of true proportional analogies between chunks in a language with case markers, Japanese. On a bicorpus of 20,000 sentences, we show that at least 96% of the analogies of form between chunks are also analogies of meaning, thus reporting the presence of at least two million true analogies between chunks in this corpus. As the number of analogies between chunks grows nearly quadratically compared to sentences, we conclude that proportional analogy is an efficient and undeniable structuring device between chunks.