Empirical linguistics / Geoffrey Sampson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sampson, Geoffrey.

Series:

Open linguistics series.

Open linguistics series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Linguistics--Methodology.

Linguistics.

Language and languages.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (237 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Continuum, 2001.

Language Note:

English

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 (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 E

Contents:

Contents; Sources and acknowledgements; 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; References; URL list; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786611298425

9781281298423

1281298425

9781847144317

1847144314

OCLC:

229359554