From Grammar to Science

From Grammar to Science
Author: Victor H. Yngve
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 363
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027221618

Although efforts have been under way for the past two centuries to treat language scientifically, linguists and others who work with language, speech, or communication have not found an adequate scientific foundation in current linguistic theory. Many of the difficulties are caused by longstanding confusions between the logical domain of science and grammar and the physical domain of sound waves and the people who speak and understand. In this book, therefore, the last impediments of tradition, the ancient semiotic-grammatical foundations of linguistics, are set aside. We move into the physical domain, where theories and hypotheses can be tested against observations of the physical reality. Here new foundations are laid that are fully consonant with modern science as practiced in physics, chemistry, and biology. On these foundations is built a structure of testable specific dynamic causal laws of communicative behavior that provides support for treating previously recalcitrant context-dependent semantic, pragmatic, interactive, rhetorical, and literary phenomena. The central role of context in the foundations of the theory provides the insights of scientific lawfulness while still honoring the particularity of situations celebrated in the humanities.

Writing and Presenting in English

Writing and Presenting in English
Author: Petey Young
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2006-06-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0080469329

The Rosetta Stone of Science is a useful and practical guide to presenting scientific research in the English language. It is written specifically for scientists who would like to improve the effectiveness with which they use the English language and improve their communicative skills in order to become published and develop more confidence in presenting their work at international conferences. Part 1 of the book covers the style preferred by today's leading journals, discusses how to prepare models for writing research papers, and provides advice for writing abstracts, proposals, and editing. Examples of cover letters are also given. Part 2 discusses the various arts and techniques used by successful presenters at scientific conferences. The content of the book is presented in a light, simple and informative manner making The Rosetta Stone of Science an entertaining and instructive read. This book will prove invaluable to all scientists, research fellows, post-docs, and graduate students whose first language is not English.

A grammar of Palula

A grammar of Palula
Author: Henrik Liljegren
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2016-02-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3946234313

This grammar provides a grammatical description of Palula, an Indo-Aryan language of the Shina group. The language is spoken by about 10,000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language, and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data, collected over the course of about ten years, commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded, mainly narrative, texts, but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community, and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering, annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology, morphology and syntax, illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances, but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven, but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account, particularly in the area of morphology, and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.

Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words

Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words
Author: David Lindsay
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2020-05-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1486311482

Telling people about research is just as important as doing it. But many competent researchers are wary of scientific writing, despite its importance for sharpening scientific thinking, advancing their career, obtaining funding for their work and growing the prestige of their institution. This second edition of David Lindsay’s popular book Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words presents a way of thinking about writing that builds on the way good scientists think about research. The simple principles in this book will help you to clarify the objectives of your work and present your results with impact. Fully updated throughout, with practical examples of good and bad writing, an expanded chapter on writing for non-scientists and a new chapter on writing grant applications, this book makes communicating research easier and encourages researchers to write confidently. It is an ideal reference for researchers preparing journal articles, posters, conference presentations, reviews and popular articles; for students preparing theses; and for researchers whose first language is not English.

Semantics as Science

Semantics as Science
Author: Richard K. Larson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262539950

An introductory linguistics textbook that takes a novel approach: studying linguistic semantics as an exercise in scientific theory construction. This introductory linguistics text takes a novel approach, one that offers educational value to both linguistics majors and nonmajors. Aiming to help students not only grasp the fundamentals of the subject but also engage with broad intellectual issues and develop general intellectual skills, Semantics as Science studies linguistic semantics as an exercise in scientific theory construction. Semantics offers an excellent medium through which to acquaint students with the notion of a formal, axiomatic system—that is, a system that derives results from a precisely articulated set of assumptions according to a precisely articulated set of rules. The book develops semantic theory through the device of axiomatic T-theories, first proposed by Alfred Tarski more than eighty years ago, introducing technical elaboration only when required. It adopts Japanese as its core object of study, allowing students to explore and investigate the real empirical issues arising in the context of non-English structures, a non-English lexicon and non-English meanings. The book is structured as a laboratory science text that poses specific empirical questions, with 25 short units, each of which can be covered in one class session. The layout is engagingly visual, designed to help students understand and retain the material, with lively illustrations, examples, and quotations from famous scholars.

Writing Science

Writing Science
Author: M.A.K. Halliday
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135723052

This book is about the use of language in the science classroom. It discusses the evolution of scientific discourse for learning in secondary schools, and examines the form and function of language across a variety of levels including lexiogrammar, discourse semantics, register, genre and ideology. Special attention is paid to how this knowledge is imparted. It will be of particular interest to educators involved with linguistics and/or science curriculum and teachers of English for special and academic purposes.; It is aimed at teachers of undergraduates in science and literacy, linguists teaching in English for special and academic purposes and students in higher education with an interest in science and literacy.

Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics
Author: Stefanowitsch, Anatol
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2020
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102244

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.

The Empirical Base of Linguistics

The Empirical Base of Linguistics
Author: Carson T. Schutze
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1996-05-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780226741543

He then assesses the status of judgments as reliable indicators of a speaker's grammar.