Empirical Linguistics

Empirical Linguistics PDF Author: Geoffrey Sampson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847144314
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Linguistics has become an empirical science again after several decades when it was preoccupied with speakers' hazy "intuitions" about language structure. With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analyses, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples ("corpora"). Concrete evidence is brought to bear to resolve long-standing questions such as "Is there one English language or many Englishes?" and "Do different social groups use characteristically elaborated or restricted language codes?" Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques for themselves, giving a step-by-step "recipe-book" method for applying a quantitative technique that was invented by Alan Turing in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and has been rediscovered and widely applied in linguistics fifty years later.

Empirical Linguistics

Empirical Linguistics PDF Author: Geoffrey Sampson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847144314
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book

Book Description
Linguistics has become an empirical science again after several decades when it was preoccupied with speakers' hazy "intuitions" about language structure. With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analyses, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples ("corpora"). Concrete evidence is brought to bear to resolve long-standing questions such as "Is there one English language or many Englishes?" and "Do different social groups use characteristically elaborated or restricted language codes?" Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques for themselves, giving a step-by-step "recipe-book" method for applying a quantitative technique that was invented by Alan Turing in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and has been rediscovered and widely applied in linguistics fifty years later.

Empirical Linguistics

Empirical Linguistics PDF Author: Geoffrey Sampson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847144314
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book

Book Description
Linguistics has become an empirical science again after several decades when it was preoccupied with speakers' hazy "intuitions" about language structure. With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analyses, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples ("corpora"). Concrete evidence is brought to bear to resolve long-standing questions such as "Is there one English language or many Englishes?" and "Do different social groups use characteristically elaborated or restricted language codes?" Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques for themselves, giving a step-by-step "recipe-book" method for applying a quantitative technique that was invented by Alan Turing in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and has been rediscovered and widely applied in linguistics fifty years later.

The empirical base of linguistics

The empirical base of linguistics PDF Author: Carson T. Schütze
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 394623402X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Throughout much of the history of linguistics, grammaticality judgments - intuitions about the well-formedness of sentences - have constituted most of the empirical base against which theoretical hypothesis have been tested. Although such judgments often rest on subtle intuitions, there is no systematic methodology for eliciting them, and their apparent instability and unreliability have led many to conclude that they should be abandoned as a source of data. Carson T. Schütze presents here a detailed critical overview of the vast literature on the nature and utility of grammaticality judgments and other linguistic intuitions, and the ways they have been used in linguistic research. He shows how variation in the judgment process can arise from factors such as biological, cognitive, and social differences among subjects, the particular elicitation method used, and extraneous features of the materials being judged. He then assesses the status of judgments as reliable indicators of a speaker's grammar. Integrating substantive and methodological findings, Schütze proposes a model in which grammaticality judgments result from interaction of linguistic competence with general cognitive processes. He argues that this model provides the underpinning for empirical arguments to show that once extragrammatical variance is factored out, universal grammar succumbs to a simpler, more elegant analysis than judgment data initially lead us to expect. Finally, Schütze offers numerous practical suggestions on how to collect better and more useful data. The result is a work of vital importance that will be required reading for linguists, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers of language alike.

The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics: Process

The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics: Process PDF Author: Sam Featherston
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110213389
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory

Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory PDF Author: Britta Stolterfoht
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614510881
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The mental representation of language cannot be directly observed but must be inferred and modelled from its effects at second hand. Linguists have traditionally responded to this in two ways, either going for a fairly data-light approach and valuing theoretical creativity, or pursuing just those goals for which data is available and trusting to data-driven descriptive work. More recently, advances in technology and experimental techniques have made data gathering easier and more accessible, so that a theoretically informed but empirically based approach is rapidly growing in popularity. This synthesis permits linguists to combine the intellectual hypothesis generation of the theoreticians with the ability to deliver hard answers of the empiricist. This volume is a collection of papers in this direction, using mostly experiment methods to yield insights into syntactic and semantic structures, language processing, and acquisition. Papers report corpus data, neurological investigations, child language studies, and fieldwork from minority languages.

Introducing Linguistic Research

Introducing Linguistic Research PDF Author: Svenja Voelkel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316946533
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Over the past decade, conducting empirical research in linguistics has become increasingly popular. The first of its kind, this book provides an engaging and practical introduction to this exciting versatile field, providing a comprehensive overview of research aspects in general, and covering a broad range of subdiscipline-specific methodological approaches. Subfields covered include language documentation and descriptive linguistics, language typology, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The book reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of each single approach and on how they interact with one-another across the study of language in its many diverse facets. It also includes exercises, example student projects and recommendations for further reading, along with additional online teaching materials. Providing hands-on experience, and written in an engaging and accessible style, this unique and comprehensive guide will give students the inspiration they need to develop their own research projects in empirical linguistics.

The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics: Product

The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics: Product PDF Author: Sam Featherston
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110213478
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Linguistic Theory and Empirical Evidence

Linguistic Theory and Empirical Evidence PDF Author: Bob de Jonge
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902721574X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This volume further elaborates the empirical tradition of Columbia School (CS) Linguistics by offering diverse empirical analyses for a wide variety of languages. These studies open a much needed debate advocating the necessity of the independent validation of linguistic hypotheses. This research exemplifies how such a validation should be conducted by determining which forms underlie the analyses and extracting those observations that are considered to be objective. The volume consists of two parts: a section on synchronic and diachronic grammatical problems and a section on Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB), the Columbia School version of phonology, applied to evolutionary, developmental and clinical issues and the phonotactics of the selected lexicon of a literary text. It provides a wealth of useful empirical data and in-depth and sophisticated qualitative and quantitative analyses of a broad range of languages from diverse families: French, Spanish, Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Polish, Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew.

Empirical Evidences and Theoretical Assumptions in Functional Linguistics

Empirical Evidences and Theoretical Assumptions in Functional Linguistics PDF Author: Elissa Asp
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429631863
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This collection explores the relationships between theory and evidences in functional linguistics, bringing together perspectives from both established and emerging scholars. The volume begins by establishing theoretical common ground for functional approaches to language, critically discussing empirical inquiry in functional linguistics and the challenges and opportunities of using new technologies in linguistic investigations. Building on this foundation, the second part of the volume explores the challenges involved in using different data sources as evidence for theorizing language and linguistic processes, drawing on work on lexical cohesion in language variation, neuroimaging and neuropathological data, and keystroke logging and eye-tracking. The final section of the volume examines the ways in which evidences from a wide range of data sources can offer new perspectives toward challenging established theoretical claims, employing empirical evidences from corpus linguistic analysis, keystroke logging, and multimodal communication. This pioneering collection synthesizes perspectives and addresses fundamental questions in the investigation of the relationships between theory and evidences in functional linguistics and will be of particular interest to researchers working in the field, as well as linguists working in experimental and interdisciplinary approaches which seek to bridge this gap.

Language Contact

Language Contact PDF Author: Ernst H. Jahr
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110851849
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.