Empirical linguistics / Geoffrey Sampson.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Sampson, Geoffrey.

Series:

• Open linguistics series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Linguistics--Methodology.

Physical Description:

viii, 226 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Continuum, 2001.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

• 1. Introduction
• 2. From central embedding to empirical linguistics
• 3. Many Englishes or one English?
• 4. Depth in English grammar
• 5. Demographic correlates of complexity in British speech
• 6. The role of taxonomy
• 7. Good-Turing frequency estimation without tears
• 8. Objective evidence is all we need
• 9. What was Transformational Grammar?
• 10. Evidence against the grammatical/ungrammatical distinction
• 11. Meaning and the limits of science.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [209]-217) and index.

ISBN:

0826448836

OCLC:

44076174