Pith Number

pith:4TPHQWJ5

pith:2026:4TPHQWJ5NXY4FCXIC644Z4QWW7

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Not-So-Strange Love: Language Models and Generative Linguistic Theories are More Compatible than They Appear

R. Thomas McCoy

Language models can instantiate formal generative linguistic theories in addition to usage-based ones.

arxiv:2605.10061 v1 · 2026-05-11 · cs.CL · cs.AI

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\pithnumber{4TPHQWJ5NXY4FCXIC644Z4QWW7}

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in the generative tradition.

C2weakest assumption

That the observed success and behavior of LMs can be interpreted as instantiating formal generative theories without additional evidence or specific mechanisms provided.

C3one line summary

Language models can support formal generative linguistic theories, expanding testable theories and potentially reconciling them with usage-based accounts.

References

12 extracted · 12 resolved · 0 Pith anchors

[1] Boleda, G. (2025). LLMs as a synthesis between symbolic and distributed approaches to language. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 9365–9379, Suzhou, China 2025

[2] Bybee, J. L. and Hopper, P. J. (2001).Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. John Benjamins Publishing Company 2001

[3] Chomsky, N. (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. InThe View from Building 20, pages 1–52. MIT Press 1993

[4] Futrell, R. and Mahowald, K. (2025). How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models.Behavioral and Brain Sciences, pages 1–98 2025

[5] Kim, N., Schuster, S., and Toshniwal, S. (2024). Code pretraining improves entity tracking abilities of language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.21068 2024

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T15:59:25.051778Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

e4de78593d6df1c28ae817b9ccf216b7e95372f61125a64bd1966a95977310ec

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.10061 · arxiv_version: 2605.10061v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.10061 · pith_short_12: 4TPHQWJ5NXY4 · pith_short_16: 4TPHQWJ5NXY4FCXI · pith_short_8: 4TPHQWJ5

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/4TPHQWJ5NXY4FCXIC644Z4QWW7 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: e4de78593d6df1c28ae817b9ccf216b7e95372f61125a64bd1966a95977310ec

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "80721926dbdb497aa17a53ac02d0da34b6257f8d5d55263f15c4af9b67a28ed0",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-11T06:38:40Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "061c49fb7b52b80356013514ae9d135b5276ca8b86660aeee627b13ee39708f0"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.10061",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}