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Empirical Linguistics

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2 Reviews
Continuum, Sep 12, 2002 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 240 pages
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.
  

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Review: Empirical Linguistics

User Review  - Nat - Goodreads

The demands this book makes for a switch from "intuitive" data to objective, observational data in confirming or disconfirming linguistic theories is absolutely to the point. There are descriptions of ... Read full review

Review: Empirical Linguistics

User Review  - Bill - Goodreads

Part nuts-and-bolts computational linguistics articles and part cri de coeur from a researcher who is exasperated at the hand-wavy route much theoretical linguistics has taken. I am sympathetic to the ... Read full review

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Contents

1 Introduction
1
2 From central embedding to empirical linguistics
13
3 Many Englishes or one English?
24
4 Depth in English grammar
37
5 Demographic correlates of complexity in British speech
57
6 The role of taxonomy
74
7 GoodTuring frequency estimation without tears
94
8 Objective evidence is all we need
122
9 What was Transformational Grammar?
141
10 Evidence against the grammaticalungrammatical distinction
165
11 Meaning and the limits of science
180
References
209
URL list
219
Index
221
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Language Acquisition as Rational Contingency Learning
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About the author (2002)

Geoffrey Sampson is Professoráof Natural Language Computing at the School of Informatics, University of Sussex.

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