On Information Structure, Meaning and Form

On Information Structure, Meaning and Form
Author: Kerstin Schwabe
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027233646

This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Encyclopaedia Britannica
Author: Hugh Chisholm
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1090
Release: 1910
Genre: Encyclopedias and dictionaries
ISBN:

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

Research in Applied Linguistics

Research in Applied Linguistics
Author: Fred L. Perry, Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2011-05-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1136881727

Newly updated and revised, this popular text provides a solid introduction to the foundations of research methods, with the goal of enabling students and professionals in the field of applied linguistics to become not just casual consumers of research who passively read bits and pieces of a research article, but discerning consumers able to effectively use published research for practical purposes in educational settings. All issues important for understanding and using published research for these purposes are covered. Key principles are illustrated with research studies published in refereed journals across a wide spectrum of applied linguistics. Exercises throughout the text encourage readers to engage interactively with what they are reading at the point when the information is fresh in their minds. Changes in the second edition: new examples in chapter two reflecting formatting changes made by ERIC major reordering in chapter four to better represent the sample types reorganization of chapters six and seven to enhance cohesion of the themes being discussed updated references and recommended reading lists in all chapters.

LINGUISTIC VALUES BASED INTELLIGENT INFORMATION PROCESSING

LINGUISTIC VALUES BASED INTELLIGENT INFORMATION PROCESSING
Author: Pei Zheng
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9491216287

Humans employ mostly natural languages in describing and representing problems, c- puting and reasoning, arriving at ?nal conclusions described similarly as words in a natural language or as the form of mental perceptions. To make machines imitate humans’ mental activities, the key point in terms of machine intelligence is to process uncertain information by means of natural languages with vague and imprecise concepts. Zadeh (1996a) proposed a concept of Computing with Words (CWW) to model and c- pute with linguistic descriptions that are propositions drawn from a natural language. CWW, followed the concept of linguistic variables (Zadeh, 1975a,b) and fuzzy sets (Zadeh, 1965), has been developed intensively and opened several new vast research ?elds as well as applied in various areas, particularly in the area of arti?cial intelligence. Zadeh (1997, 2005) emphasized that the core conceptions in CWW are linguistic variables and fuzzy logic (or approximate reasoning). In a linguistic variable, each linguistic value is explained by a fuzzy set (also called semantics of the linguistic value), its membership function is de?ned on the universe of discourse of the linguistic variable. By fuzzy sets, linguistic information or statements are quanti?ed by membership functions, and infor- tion propagation is performed by approximate reasoning. The use of linguistic variables implies processes of CWW such as their fusion, aggregation, and comparison. Different computational approaches in the literature addressed those processes (Wang, 2001; Zadeh and Kacprzyk, 1999a, b). Membership functions are generally at the core of many fuzzy-set theories based CWW.

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.

Language and Power

Language and Power
Author: Paul Simpson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2009-10-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1135282196

Routledge English Language Introductions cover core areas of language study and are one-stop resources for students. Assuming no prior knowledge, books in the series offer an accessible overview of the subject, with activities, study questions, sample analyses, commentaries and key readings – all in the same volume. The innovative and flexible ‘two-dimensional’ structure is built around four sections – introduction, development, exploration and extension – which offer self-contained stages for study. Each topic can also be read across these sections, enabling the reader to build gradually on the knowledge gained. Language and Power: offers a comprehensive survey of the ways in which language intersects and connects with the social, cultural and political aspects of power, provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of the field, and covers all the major approaches, theoretical concepts and methods of analysis in this important and developing area of academic study; covers all the ‘traditional’ topics, such as race, gender and institutional power, but also incorporates newer material from forensic discourse analysis, the discourse of new capitalism and the study of humour as power; includes readings from works by seminal figures in the field, such as Roger Fowler, Deborah Cameron and Teun van Dijk; uses real texts and examples throughout, including advertisements from cosmetics companies; newspaper articles and headlines; websites and internet media; and spoken dialogues such as a transcription from the Obama and McCain presidential debate; is accompanied by a supporting website that aims to challenge students at a more advanced level and features a complete four-unit chapter which includes activities, a reading and suggestions for further work. Language and Power will be essential reading for students studying English language and linguistics. Paul Simpson is Professor of English Language in the School of English at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, where he teaches and researches in stylistics, critical linguistics and related fields of study. Andrea Mayr is Lecturer in Modern English Language and Linguistics at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, where she teaches and researches in media discourse and in multimodal critical discourse analysis.

Linguistic Databases

Linguistic Databases
Author: John A. Nerbonne
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications
Total Pages: 255
Release: 1998-01-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781575860930

Linguistic Databases explores the increasing use of databases in linguistics. The enormous potential in linguistic data - billions of utterances and messages daily - has been difficult to exploit. Many linguists have had to concentrate on introspective data with its inevitable blinders toward frequency, variation, and naturalness. Applications of linguistics have been handicapped. This volume explores the potential advantages of database applications to linguistics. Included in this volume are reports on database activities in phonetics, phonology, lexicography and syntax, comparative grammar, second-language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, and language pathology. The book presents the specialized problems of multi-media (especially audio) and multi-lingual texts, including those in exotic writing systems. Implemented solutions are also discussed. The opportunities to use existing, minimally structured text repositories are presented.

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.

Explanation in typology

Explanation in typology
Author: Karsten Schmidtke-Bode
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 278
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961101477

This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations. On this view, recurrent pathways of reanalysis and grammaticalization can lead to uniform synchronic results, obviating the need to postulate global forces like ambiguity avoidance, processing efficiency or iconicity, especially if there is no evidence for such motivations in the genesis of the respective constructions. On the other hand, the recent typological literature is equally ripe with talk of "complex adaptive systems", "attractor states" and "cross-linguistic convergence". One may wonder, therefore, how much room is left for traditional functional-adaptive forces and how exactly they influence the diachronic trajectories that shape universal distributions. The papers in the present volume are intended to provide an accessible introduction to this debate. Covering theoretical, methodological and empirical facets of the issue at hand, they represent current ways of thinking about the role of diachronic sources in explaining grammatical universals, articulated by seasoned and budding linguists alike.