The Philosophy and Science of Language

Download The Philosophy and Science of Language PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030554384
Total Pages : 444 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Philosophy and Science of Language by : Ryan M. Nefdt

Download or read book The Philosophy and Science of Language written by Ryan M. Nefdt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a diverse range of scholars to address important philosophical and interdisciplinary questions in the study of language. Linguistics throughout history has been a conduit to the study of the mind, brain, societal structure, literature and history itself. The epistemic and methodological transfer between the sciences and humanities in regards to linguistics has often been documented, but the underlying philosophical issues have not always been adequately addressed. With 15 original and interdisciplinary chapters, this volume therefore tackles vital questions relating to the philosophy, history, and theoretical interplay between the study of language and fields as varied as logic, physics, biology, classical philology and neuroscience. With a four part structure, questions of the mathematical foundations of linguistics, links to the natural sciences, cognitive implications and historical connections, take centre stage throughout the volume. The final chapters present research related to the linguistic connections between history, philosophy and the humanities more broadly. Advancing new avenues of research, this volume is exemplary in its treatment of diachronic and cross-disciplinary interaction, and will be of interest to all scholars interested in the study of language.

Information structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation

Download Information structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961101299
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (611 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Information structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation by : Juan José Bueno Holle

Download or read book Information structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation written by Juan José Bueno Holle and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an in-depth description of information structure in Isthmus Zapotec, an Otomanguean language spoken by around 50,000 people in southeastern Oaxaca, Mexico, and represents the first book-length treatment of information structure in a Mesoamerican language. Three main observations motivate the study: Strong documentation and a relatively large and active speaker community create a unique opportunity to document information structure in Isthmus Zapotec and to study the language as it is used by speakers in everyday life;As a tonal and verb-initial language, the examination of Isthmus Zapotec represents a chance to explore the possible combinations of tone, intonation, morphology and verb-initial syntax that may occur in the coding of information structure; andThe close analysis of spontaneous speech in an endangered language contributes to our theoretical understanding of information structure and informs our knowledge of language documentation practices and revitalization efforts. Overall, the analysis presented here demonstrates the value and need for information structure studies to document and analyze naturally-occurring data.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Download Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961102554
Total Pages : 1632 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (611 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar by : Stefan Müller

Download or read book Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar written by Stefan Müller and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 1632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).

Language, Science, and Structure

Download Language, Science, and Structure PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780197653104
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (531 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Language, Science, and Structure by : Ryan M. Nefdt

Download or read book Language, Science, and Structure written by Ryan M. Nefdt and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

A lexicalist account of argument structure

Download A lexicalist account of argument structure PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961101213
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (611 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A lexicalist account of argument structure by :

Download or read book A lexicalist account of argument structure written by and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are two prominent schools in linguistics: Minimalism (Chomsky) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Tomasello). Minimalism comes with the claim that our linguistic capabilities consist of an abstract, binary combinatorial operation (Merge) and a lexicon. Most versions of Construction Grammar assume that language consists of flat phrasal schemata that contribute their own meaning and may license additional arguments. This book examines a variant of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is lexical in principle but was augmented by tools that allow for the description of phrasal constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. These new tools include templates that can be used to model inheritance hierarchies and a resource driven semantics. The resource driven semantics makes it possible to reach the effects that lexical rules had, for example remapping of arguments, by semantic means. The semantic constraints can be evaluated in the syntactic component, which is basically similar to the delayed execution of lexical rules. So this is a new formalization that might be suitable to provide solutions to longstanding problems that are not available for other formalizations. While the authors suggest a lexical treatment of many phenomena and only assume phrasal constructions for selected phenomena like benefactive and resultative constructions in English, it can be shown that even these two constructions should not be treated phrasally in English and that the analysis would not extend to other languages as for instance German. I show that the new formal tools do not really improve the situation and many of the basic conceptual problems remain. Since this specific proposal fails for two constructions, it follows that proposals (in the same framework) that assume phrasal analyses for all constructions are not appropriate either. The conclusion is that lexical models are needed and this entails that the schemata that combine syntactic objects are rather abstract (as in Categorial Grammar, Minimalism, HPSG and standard LFG). On the other hand there are constructions that should be treated by very specific, phrasal schemata as in Construction Grammar and LFG and HPSG. So the conclusion is that both schools are right (and wrong) and that a combination of ideas from both camps is needed.

The size of things I

Download The size of things I PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961103208
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (611 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The size of things I by : Zheng Shen

Download or read book The size of things I written by Zheng Shen and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation.

Language, Science, and Structure

Download Language, Science, and Structure PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019765309X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (976 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Language, Science, and Structure by : Ryan M. Nefdt

Download or read book Language, Science, and Structure written by Ryan M. Nefdt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a language? What do scientific grammars tell us about the structure of individual languages and human language in general? What kind of science is linguistics? These and other questions are the subject of Ryan M. Nefdt's Language, Science, and Structure. Linguistics presents a unique and challenging subject matter for the philosophy of science. As a special science, its formalisation and naturalisation inspired what many consider to be a scientific revolution in the study of mind and language. Yet radical internal theory change, multiple competing frameworks, and issues of modelling and realism have largely gone unaddressed in the field. Nefdt develops a structural realist perspective on the philosophy of linguistics which aims to confront the aforementioned topics in new ways while expanding the outlook toward new scientific connections and novel philosophical insights. On this view, languages are real patterns which emerge from complex biological systems. Nefdt's exploration of this novel view will be especially valuable to those working in formal and computational linguistics, cognitive science, and the philosophies of science, mathematics, and language.

Sound structure and sound change

Download Sound structure and sound change PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN 13 : 3985540756
Total Pages : 121 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (855 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Sound structure and sound change by : Rebecca L. Morley

Download or read book Sound structure and sound change written by Rebecca L. Morley and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-07-17 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research in linguistics, as in most other scientific domains, is usually approached in a modular way – narrowing the domain of inquiry in order to allow for increased depth of study. This is necessary and productive for a topic as wide-ranging and complex as human language. However, precisely because language is a complex system, tied to perception, learning, memory, and social organization, the assumption of modularity can also be an obstacle to understanding language at a deeper level. This book examines the consequences of enforcing non-modularity along two dimensions: the temporal, and the cognitive. Along the temporal dimension, synchronic and diachronic domains are linked by the requirement that sound changes must lead to viable, stable language states. Along the cognitive dimension, sound change and variation are linked to speech perception and production by requiring non-trivial transformations between acoustic and articulatory representations. The methodological focus of this work is on computational modeling. By formalising and implementing theoretical accounts, modeling can expose theoretical gaps and covert assumptions. To do so, it is necessary to formally assess the functional equivalence of specific implementational choices, as well as their mapping to theoretical structures. This book applies this analytic approach to a series of implemented models of sound change. As theoretical inconsistencies are discovered, possible solutions are proposed, incrementally constructing a set of sufficient properties for a working model. Because internal theoretical consistency is enforced, this model corresponds to an explanatorily adequate theory. And because explicit links between modules are required, this is a theory, not only of sound change, but of many aspects of phonological competence. The book highlights two aspects of modeling work that receive relatively little attention: the formal mapping from model to theory, and the scalability of demonstration models. Focusing on these aspects of modeling makes it clear that any theory of sound change in the specific is impossible without a more general theory of language: of the relationship between perception and production, the relationship between phonetics and phonology, the learning of linguistic units, and the nature of underlying representations. Theories of sound change that do not explicitly address these aspects of language are making tacit, untested assumptions about their properties. Addressing so many aspects of language may seem to complicate the linguist's task. However, as this book shows, it actually helps impose boundary conditions of ecological validity that reduce the theoretical search space.

Perspectives on Information Structure in Austronesian Languages

Download Perspectives on Information Structure in Austronesian Languages PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781013291920
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (919 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Perspectives on Information Structure in Austronesian Languages by : Atsuko Utsumi

Download or read book Perspectives on Information Structure in Austronesian Languages written by Atsuko Utsumi and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information structure is a relatively new field to linguistics and has only recently been studied for smaller and less described languages. This book is the first of its kind that brings together contributions on information structure in Austronesian languages. Current approaches from formal semantics, discourse studies, and intonational phonology are brought together with language specific and cross-linguistic expertise of Austronesian languages. The 13 chapters in this volume cover all subgroups of the large Austronesian family, including Formosan, Central Malayo-Polynesian, South Halmahera-West New Guinea, and Oceanic. The major focus, though, lies on Western Malayo-Polynesian languages. Some chapters investigate two of the largest languages in the region (Tagalog and different varieties of Malay), others study information-structural phenomena in small, underdescribed languages. The three overarching topics that are covered in this book are NP marking and reference tracking devices, syntactic structures and information-structural categories, and the interaction of information structure and prosody. Various data types build the basis for the different studies compiled in this book. Some chapters investigate written texts, such as modern novels (cf. Djenar's chapter on modern, standard Indonesian), or compare different text genres, such as, for example, oral narratives and translations of biblical narratives (cf. De Busser's chapter on Bunun). Most contributions, however, study natural spoken speech and make use of spoken corpora which have been compiled by the authors themselves. The volume comprises a number of different methods and theoretical frameworks. Two chapters make use of the Question Under Discussion approach, developed in formal semantics (cf. the chapters by Latrouite & Riester; Shiohara & Riester). Riesberg et al. apply the recently developed method of Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to investigate native speakers' perception of prosodic prominences and boundaries in Papuan Malay. Other papers discuss theoretical consequences of their findings. Thus, for example, Himmelmann takes apart the most widespread framework for intonational phonology (ToBI) and argues that the analysis of Indonesian languages requires much simpler assumptions than the ones underlying the standard model. Arka & Sedeng ask the question how fine-grained information structure space should be conceptualized and modelled, e.g. in LFG. Schnell argues that elements that could be analysed as "topic" and "focus" categories, should better be described in terms of 'packaging' and do not necessarily reflect any pragmatic roles in the first place. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Grammatical theory

Download Grammatical theory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961102023
Total Pages : 877 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (611 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Grammatical theory by : Stefan Müller

Download or read book Grammatical theory written by Stefan Müller and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 877 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25 and http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/195.

Structure Discovery in Natural Language

Download Structure Discovery in Natural Language PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 3642259235
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (422 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Structure Discovery in Natural Language by : Chris Biemann

Download or read book Structure Discovery in Natural Language written by Chris Biemann and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-12-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current language technology is dominated by approaches that either enumerate a large set of rules, or are focused on a large amount of manually labelled data. The creation of both is time-consuming and expensive, which is commonly thought to be the reason why automated natural language understanding has still not made its way into “real-life” applications yet. This book sets an ambitious goal: to shift the development of language processing systems to a much more automated setting than previous works. A new approach is defined: what if computers analysed large samples of language data on their own, identifying structural regularities that perform the necessary abstractions and generalisations in order to better understand language in the process? After defining the framework of Structure Discovery and shedding light on the nature and the graphic structure of natural language data, several procedures are described that do exactly this: let the computer discover structures without supervision in order to boost the performance of language technology applications. Here, multilingual documents are sorted by language, word classes are identified, and semantic ambiguities are discovered and resolved without using a dictionary or other explicit human input. The book concludes with an outlook on the possibilities implied by this paradigm and sets the methods in perspective to human computer interaction. The target audience are academics on all levels (undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers and professors) working in the fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics, as well as natural language engineers who are seeking to improve their systems.

Modeling Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective

Download Modeling Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 9783944675978
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (759 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Modeling Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective by : Sanghoun Song

Download or read book Modeling Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective written by Sanghoun Song and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with a specific focus on creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The present study first provides cross-linguistic findings in regards to information structure meanings and markings. Building upon such findings, the current model represents information structure within the HPSG/MRS framework using Individual Constraints. The primary goal of the present study is to create a multilingual grammar model of information structure for the LinGO Grammar Matrix system. The present study explores the construction of a grammar library for creating customized grammar incorporating information structure and illustrates how the information structure-based model improves performance of transfer-based machine translation.

Utterance structure in initial L2 acquisition

Download Utterance structure in initial L2 acquisition PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961102619
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (611 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Utterance structure in initial L2 acquisition by : Jacopo Saturno

Download or read book Utterance structure in initial L2 acquisition written by Jacopo Saturno and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is devoted to morphosyntactic processing in the earliest stages of L2 Polish. The target structure taken into consideration is the morphosyntactic opposition between the nominative and accusative case, respectively corresponding to the subject and object function. This is the first book-length work devoted to the VILLA project, a large multi-national initiative within which 90 adult learners took part in a first-exposure, 14-hour Polish course under controlled input conditions. As participants had never been exposed to Polish or other Slavic languages, the experiment portrays the very first contact with a completely new target language; moreover, since the learners were evenly distributed among five L1 groups, L1 interference can also be investigated in depth. In addition to an in-depth analysis of the effect of input properties on morpho-syntactic processing, the book discusses sensitive methodological points such as the role of semantics in semi-spontaneous production as well as the impact of elicitation techniques.

Syntactic Structures

Download Syntactic Structures PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3112316002
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (123 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Syntactic Structures by : Noam Chomsky

Download or read book Syntactic Structures written by Noam Chomsky and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

The Structure of Language

Download The Structure of Language PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139488694
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Structure of Language by : Emma L. Pavey

Download or read book The Structure of Language written by Emma L. Pavey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the time we communicate using language without considering the complex activity we are undertaking, forming words and sentences in a split second. This book introduces the analysis of language structure, combining both description and theory within a single, practical text. It begins by examining words and parts of words, and then looks at how words work together to form sentences that communicate meaning. Sentence patterns across languages are also studied, looking at the similarities and the differences we find in how languages communicate meaning. The book also discusses how context can affect how we structure our sentences: the context of a particular language and its structures, the context of old and new information for us and our addressee(s), and the context of our culture.

The Structure of Typed Programming Languages

Download The Structure of Typed Programming Languages PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262193498
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (934 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Structure of Typed Programming Languages by : David A. Schmidt

Download or read book The Structure of Typed Programming Languages written by David A. Schmidt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The text is unique in its tutorial presentation of higher-order lambda calculus and intuitionistic type theory.

Structural Realism

Download Structural Realism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9400725787
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (7 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Structural Realism by : Elaine Landry

Download or read book Structural Realism written by Elaine Landry and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structural realism has rapidly gained in popularity in recent years, but it has splintered into many distinct denominations, often underpinned by diverse motivations. There is, no monolithic position known as ‘structural realism,’ but there is a general convergence on the idea that a central role is to be played by relational aspects over object-based aspects of ontology. What becomes of causality in a world without fundamental objects? In this book, the foremost authorities on structural realism attempt to answer this and related questions: ‘what is structure?’ and ‘what is an object?’ Also featured are the most recent advances in structural realism, including the intersection of mathematical structuralism and structural realism, and the latest treatments of laws and modality in the context of structural realism. The book will be of interest to philosophers of science, philosophers of physics, metaphysicians, and those interested in foundational aspects of science.