Download Free Excursions Into Syntactic Databases Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Excursions Into Syntactic Databases and write the review.

This book is about syntactic databases (a.k.a. treebanks), collections of text material in which the syntactic relations have been made visible. It starts off with a general intro-duction to the subject and then continues with three in-depth investigations of more specialized aspects. In the introduction, syntactic databases are first placed in the larger context of linguistic databases, text collections with a broader linguistic annotation than just a syntactic one. Then some examples of syntactic databases are given, illustrating the range of annotation actually encountered. The introduction is completed with an investigation of database management systems for syntactic databases. The first in-depth investigation concerns the treatment of ambiguous structures in syntactic analysis trees, focussing on a very efficient representation for such structures and the means to create this representation. Next, classroom use of syntactic databases is examined. A computer program for this purpose, CLUES, is discussed, along with a suggested series of syntax exercises. The final subject is the importance of including function and attribute information in the annotation of texts. The central line of investigation here is a probabilistic parsing experiment in which the use of function and attribute information is the main variable.
This book promotes the development of linguistic databases by describing a number of successful database projects, focusing especially on cross-linguistic and typological research. It has become increasingly clear that ready access to knowledge about cross-linguistic variation is of great value to many types of linguistic research. Such a systematic body of data is essential in order to gain a proper understanding of what is truly universal in language and what is determined by specific cultural settings. Moreover, it is increasingly needed as a tool to systematically evaluate contrasting theoretical claims. The book includes a chapter on general problems of using databases to handle language data and chapters on a number of individual projects. Note: This title was originally announced as including a CD-Rom with databases. The CD-Rom, however, was replaced by a list of URLs within the book. More information as well as links to the databases can also be found here.
Manipulation of text by means of the computer is well-established. Everybody has a word processor on his or her desk, and electronic mail, desk top publishing, text interchange languages, hypertext and multimedia are technologies many will be aware of. However, the full potential of the computer for the management and use of textual information has not been tapped yet. Far from it. For this a more principled approach is necessary, which will create a framework on which existing technologies, and technologies-yet-to-come can build and in which they can be integrated. This book can be seen as one step on this road. It employs the experience gained in working with a rich electronic linguistic corpus, the ECA database. A basic text database model is put forward and several text database retrieval languages are defined and analysed. A clear direction for further research is given. Therefore, the book is of relevance to researchers and developers in the field of corpus linguistics and in the more general field of electronic text.
This book should be seen mainly as a contribution to the long-standing tradition of English descriptive linguistics. It gives a complete account of the nature and frequency of possible noun phrase (NP) structures in contemporary British English, including the ones that deviate from the prototypical description we find in handbooks of English. The book focuses on those NPs which are characterized by the fact that one or more of the constituents is not in its prototypical position, but has moved. The detailed description of variant NPs is obtained through the careful combination of corpus data and experimental data. The book addresses the question how corpus data can be combined with intuitive data and offers a practical approach to the task: the multi-method approach. In this approach, corpus data are combined with intuitive data obtained from native speakers in an elicitation experiment.
From being the occupation of a marginal (and frequently marginalised) group of researchers, the linguistic analysis of machine-readable language corpora has moved to the mainstream of research on the English language. In this process an impressive body of results has accumulated which, over and above the intrinsic descriptive interest it holds for students of the English language, forces a major and systematic re-thinking of foundational issues in linguistic theory. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory was accordingly chosen as the motto for the twentieth annual gathering of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern/ Medieval English, which was hosted by the University of Freiburg (Germany) in 1999. The present volume, which presents selected papers from this conference, thus builds on previous successful work in the computer-aided description of English and at the same time represents an attempt at stock-taking and methodological reflection in a linguistic subdiscipline that has clearly come of age. Contributions cover all levels of linguistic description - from phonology/ prosody, through grammar and semantics to discourse-analytical issues such as genre or gender-specific linguistic usage. They are united by a desire to further the dialogue between the corpus-linguistic community and researchers working in other traditions. Thereby, the atmosphere ranges from undisguised skepticism (as expressed by Noam Chomsky in an interview which is part of the opening contribution by Bas Aarts) to empirically substantiated optimism (as, for example, in Bernadette Vine's significantly titled contribution Getting things done).
ISBN 9042003731 (paperback) NLG 50.00 realist novel, later in the century.
With word processing and the Internet, computing is much more part and parcel of the everyday life of the humanities scholar, but computers can do much more than assist with writing or Internet searching. This book introduces a range of tools and techniques for manipulating and analysing electronic texts in the humanities. It shows how electronic texts can be used for the literary analysis, linguistic analysis, authorship attribution, and the preparation and publication of electronic scholarly editions. It assesses the ways in which research in corpus and computational linguistics can feed into better electronic tools for humanities research. The tools and techniques discussed in this book will feed into better Internet tools and pave the way for the electronic scholar of the twenty-first century.
Bibliographie Linguistique/ Linguistic Bibliography is the annual bibliography of linguistics published by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists under the auspices of the International Council of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies of UNESCO. With a tradition of more than fifty years (the first two volumes, covering the years 1939-1947, were published in 1949-1950), Bibliographie Linguistique is by far the most comprehensive bibliography in the field. It covers all branches of linguistics, both theoretical and descriptive, from all geographical areas, including less known and extinct languages, with particular attention to the many endangered languages of the world. Up-to-date information is guaranteed by the collaboration of some forty contributing specialists from all over the world. With over 20,000 titles arranged according to a detailed state-of-the-art classification, Bibliographie Linguistique remains the standard reference book for every scholar of language and 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 (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.
Using data from a new corpus of contemporary American medical texts, Vihl analyzes model expressions such as may, must, and possibly as they are used in medical English. She thinks that knowing how modal expressions are distributed and their pragmatic functions in the texts can help when teaching professional writing to non-native speakers, and clarify how language is institutionally situated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR