Empirical Linguistics

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 (though not always) using computers and electronic language samples ("corpora"). Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques and gives a step-by-step explanation for applying a lately rediscovered quantitative technique pioneered by Alan Turing during World War II.