Empirical LinguisticsLinguistics 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. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 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 |
| 209 | |
URL list | 219 |
| 221 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Affix Hopping analysis analytic/synthetic distinction annotation scheme average behaviour bigram British National Corpus Brown Corpus chapter Chomsky Chomsky's CHRISTINE complex computational linguists constituents constructions cross-validation defined depth discussed distinction empirical linguistics English estimates evidence example fact fiction Figure finite genres Geoffrey Leech Good-Turing grammatical structure human language individual instance intuitions Katz Labov Lancaster-Leeds Treebank left-branching LSLT main clause multiple central embeddings natural language natural-language natural-language computing nominal clause nonterminal nonterminal nodes noun phrase types objective observed occur parse-trees parsing particular phrase-structure grammar possible predict probability question real-life relative clause relevant represent rules sample frequency Sampson scientific semantic sentence length sequences speakers speech statistical strings SUSANNE Corpus Syntactic Structures Table tagmas techniques theory tion Transformational Grammar tree structure treebank ungrammatical unseen species usage utterances values Variant verb group vocabulary William Labov word meanings word-sequences Yngve