In this volume, Matthew L. Jockers introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis--a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societal linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture. Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the "close-reading" of individual works, Jockers describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.

A novel view of the syntax-semantics interface that analyzes the behavior of indefinite objects. In Indefinite Objects, Luis Lopez presents a novel approach to the syntax-semantics interface using indefinite noun phrases as a database. Traditional approaches map structural configurations to semantic interpretations directly; Lopez links configuration to a mode of semantic composition, with the latter yielding the interpretation. The polyvalent behavior of indefinites has long been explored by linguists who have been interested in their syntax, semantics, and case morphology, and Lopez's contribution can be seen as a synthesis of findings from several traditions. He argues, first, that scrambled indefinite objects are composed by means of Function Application preceded by Choice Function while objects in situ are composed by means of Restrict. This difference yields the different interpretive possibilities of indefinite objects. Lopez's more nuanced approach to the syntax-semantics interface turns out to be rich in empirical consequences. Second, he proposes that short scrambling also yields Differential Marking, provided that context conditions are fulfilled, while in situ objects remain unmarked. Thus, Lopez contributes to the extensive literature on Differential Object Marking by showing that syntactic configuration is a crucial factor. Lopez substantiates this approach with data from Spanish, Hindi-Urdu, Persian (Farsi), Kiswahili, Romanian, and German.

This title acts as a one-volume resource, providing an introduction to every aspect of corpus linguistics as it is being used at the moment. Corpus linguistics uses large electronic databases of language to examine hypotheses about language use. These can be tested scientifically with computerised analytical tools, without the researcher's preconceptions influencing their conclusions. For this reason, corpus linguistics is a popular and expanding area of study. "Contemporary Corpus Linguistics" presents a comprehensive survey of the ways in which corpus linguistics is being used by researchers. Written by internationally renowned linguists, this volume of seventeen introductory chapters aims to provide a snapshot of the field of corpus linguistics. The contributors present accessible, yet detailed, analyses of recent methods and theory in Corpus Linguistics, ways of analysing corpora, and recent applications in translation, stylistics, discourse analysis and language teaching. The book represents the best of current practice in Corpus Linguistics, and as a one volume reference will be invaluable to students and researchers looking for an overview of the field.

Using a corpus of data drawn from naturally-occurring second language conversations, this book explores the role of idiomaticity in English as a native language, and its comparative role in English as a lingua franca. Through examining how idiomaticity enables first language learners to achieve a greater degree of fluency, the book explores why idiomatic language poses such a challenge for users of English as a lingua franca. The book puts forward a new definition of competence and fluency within the context of English as a lingua franca, concluding with an analysis of practical implications for the lingua franca classroom.
This in-depth study of English language learning using corpus data will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics and corpus linguistics and to teachers of English as an international lingua franca.

A gentle introduction to programming for students and researchers interested in conducting computer-based analysis in linguistics, this book is an ideal starting point for linguists approaching programming for the first time. Assuming no background knowledge of programming, the author introduces basic notions and techniques needed for linguistics programming and helps readers to develop their understanding of electronic texts. The book includes many examples based on diverse topics in linguistics in order to demonstrate the applicability of the concepts at the heart of programming. Practical examples are designed to help the reader to: *Identify basic issues in handling language data, including Unicode processing *Conduct simple analyses in morphology/morphosyntax, and phonotactics *Understanding techniques for matching linguistic patterns *Learn to convert data into formats and data structures suitable for linguistic analysis *Create frequency lists from corpus materials to gather basic descriptive statistics on texts *Understand, obtain and 'clean up' web-based data *Design graphical user interfaces for writing more efficient and easy-to-use analysis tools. Two different types of exercise help readers to either learn to interpret and understand illustrative sample code, or to develop algorithmic thinking and solution strategies through turning a series of instructions into sample programs. Readers will be equipped with the necessary tools for designing their own extended projects. Key Features: *Ideal introduction for students of linguistics attempting to process corpus materials or literary texts for dissertations, theses or advanced research work *Linguistic examples throughout the text clearly demonstrate the application of programming theory and techniques *Coverage ranging from basic to more complex topics and methodologies enables the reader to progress at their own pace *Two chapters on the advantages of modularity and associated issues provide a basis for more advanced projects *A final main chapter introduces graphical user interfaces, providing a basis for user-friendly programs and multi-lingual analysis.

This book is the first comprehensive presentation of Functional Discourse Grammar, a new and important theory of language structure. The authors set out its nature and origins and show how it relates to contemporary linguistic theory. They demonstrate and test its explanatory power and descriptive utility against linguistic facts from over 150 languages across a wide range of linguistic families.
After a full introduction the book is divided into chapters concerned with the four levels of grammatical representation - pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonological - each of which has its own hierarchical structure. Functional Discourse Grammar offers a thorough account of how the use and meaning of language influence linguistic form by conditioning two levels of formulation which feed into two levels of encoding, all with their own specific characteristics. The book offers an ideal introduction to the theory and its applications in typology and description for scholars in linguistics and related fields from graduate students upwards.

This book collects and introduces some of the best and most useful work in practical lexicography. It has been designed as a resource for students and scholars of lexicography and lexicology and to be an essential reference for professional lexicographers. It focusses on central issues in the field and covers topics hotly debated in lexicography circles. After a full contextual introduction Thierry Fontenelle divides the book into twelve parts - theoretical perspectives, corpus design, lexicographical evidence, word senses and polysemy, collocations and idioms, definitions, examples, grammar and usage, bilingual lexicography, tools and methods, semantic networks, and how dictionaries are used. The book is fully referenced and indexed.
The reader may be used independently for reference or as reading material for a course of study. It will also be an essential companion for The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography by Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell, to be published by OUP in 2008.

This groundbreaking book offers a new and compelling perspective on the structure of human language. The fundamental issue it addresses is the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and lexicon. It argues that the balance struck by mainstream generative grammar is wrong. It puts forward a new basis for syntactic theory, drawing on a wide range of frameworks, and charts new directions for research. In the past four decades, theories of syntactic structure have become more abstract, and syntactic derivations have become ever more complex. Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff trace this development through the history of contemporary syntactic theory, showing how much it has been driven by theory-internal rather than empirical considerations. They develop an alternative that is responsive to linguistic, cognitive, computational, and biological concerns. At the core of this alternative is the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory syntactic theory is one that imputes the minimum structure necessary to mediate between phonology and meaning. A consequence of this hypothesis is a far richer mapping between syntax and semantics than is generally assumed. Through concrete analyses of numerous grammatical phenomena, some well studied and some new, the authors demonstrate the empirical and conceptual superiority of the Simpler Syntax approach. Simpler Syntax is addressed to linguists of all persuasions. It will also be of central interest to those concerned with language in psychology, human biology, evolution, computational science, and artificial intellige

A landmark in linguistics and cognitive science. Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965 -- yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.

This volume of newly commissioned essays examines current theoretical and computational work on polysemy, the term used in semantic analysis to describe words with more than one meaning. Such words present few difficulties in everyday language, but pose central problems for linguists and lexicographers, especially for those involved in lexical semantics and in computational modelling. The contributors to this book - leading researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics - consider the implications of these problems for linguistic theory and how they may be addressed by computational means. The theoretical essays in the book examine polysemy as an aspect of a broader theory of word meaning. Three theoretical approaches are presented: the Classical (or Aristotelian), the Prototypical, and the Relational. Their authors describe the nature of polysemy, the criteria for detecting it, and its manifestations across languages. They examine the issues arising from the regularity of polysemy and the theoretical principles proposed to account for the interaction of lexical meaning with the semantics and syntax of the context in which it occurs. Finally they consider the formal representations of meaning in the lexicon, and their implications for dictionary construction. The computational essays are concerned with the challenge of polysemy to automatic sense disambiguation - how the intended meaning for a word occurrence can be identified. The approaches presented include the exploitation of lexical information in machine-readable dictionaries, machine learning based on patterns of word co-occurrence, and hybrid approaches that combine the two. As a whole the volume shows how on the one hand theoretical work provides the motivation and may suggest the basis for computational algorithms, while on the other computational results may validate, or reveal problems in, the principles set forth by theories.

Early formal specifications of natural language syntax were quite closely connected to the notion of abstract machines for computing them. More recently, this approach has been superseded by one in which languages are specified in terms of systems of constraints on the structure of their sentences. This has made complexity results difficult to obtain. This book introduces a way of obtaining such results. It presents a natural and quite general means of expressing constraints on the structure of trees and shows that the languages that can be specified by systems of such constraints are exactly those computable by a particular standard class of abstract machines. Thus the difficulty of processing a construction can be reduced to the difficulty of expressing the constraints that specify it.

Includes chapters that provide a survey of approaches to developing multimedia software and relevant multilingual issues; design considerations for a visual language and how it might be developed for maximum ease of use.

This volume brings together papers from linguists, logicians, and computer scientists from 13 countries (Armenia, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK, and USA). This collection aims to serve as a catalyst for new interdisciplinary developments in language, logic and computation and to introduce new ideas from the expanded European academic community. Spanning a wide range of disciplines, the papers included in this volume cover such topics as formal semantics of natural language, dynamic semantics, channel theory, formal syntax of natural language, formal language theory, corpus-based methods in computational linguistics, computational semantics, syntactic and semantic aspects of l-calculus, non-classical logics, and a fundamental problem in predicate logic.

This volume is concerned with how ambiguity and ambiguity resolution are learned, that is, with the acquisition of the different representations of ambiguous linguistic forms and the knowledge necessary for selecting among them in context. Schutze concentrates on how the acquisition of ambiguity is possible in principle and demonstrates that particular types of algorithms and learning architectures (such as unsupervised clustering and neural networks) can succeed at the task. Three types of lexical ambiguity are treated: ambiguity in syntactic categorisation, semantic categorisation, and verbal subcategorisation. The volume presents three different models of ambiguity acquisition: Tag Space, Word Space, and Subcat Learner, and addresses the importance of ambiguity in linguistic representation and its relevance for linguistic innateness.

This book investigates the learnability of various classes of classical categorial grammars within the Gold paradigm of identification in the limit from positive data. Learning from structure and learning from flat strings are considered. The class of k-valued grammars, for k = 1,2,3,..., is shown to be learnable both from structures and from strings, while the class of least-valued grammars and the class of least-cardinality grammars are shown to be learnable from structures. In proving these learnable results, crucial use is made of a theorem on the concept known as finite elasticity. The learning algorithms used in this work build on Buszkowski and Penn's algorithm for finding categorial grammars from input consisting of functor-argument structures.

Early formal specifications of natural language syntax were quite closely connected to the notion of abstract machines for computing them. More recently, this approach has been superseded by one in which languages are specified in terms of systems of constraints on the structure of their sentences. This has made complexity results difficult to obtain. This book introduces a way of obtaining such results. It presents a natural and quite general means of expressing constraints on the structure of trees and shows that the languages that can be specified by systems of such constraints are exactly those computable by a particular standard class of abstract machines. Thus the difficulty of processing a construction can be reduced to the difficulty of expressing the constraints that specify it.

Not Wholly Free is a comprehensive study of manumission in the Greek world, based on a thorough appraisal of the extant evidence and on a careful examination of manumission terminology. R. Zelnick-Abramovitz investigates the phenomenon of manumission in all its aspects and features, by analyzing modes of manumission, its terminology, the group composition of manumittors and freed slaves, motivation, procedures and conditions of manumission, legal actions and laws concerning manumitted slaves, and the latter's legal status and position in society. A very important work for all those interested in social history of ancient Greece, slavery, and manumission, as well as ancient historians and classical philologists.

Corpus linguistics is the study of language data on a large scale the computer-aided analysis of very extensive collections of transcribed utterances or written texts. This textbook outlines the basic methods of corpus linguistics, explains how the discipline of corpus linguistics developed and surveys the major approaches to the use of corpus data. It uses a broad range of examples to show how corpus data has led to methodological and theoretical innovation in linguistics in general. Clear and detailed explanations lay out the key issues of method and theory in contemporary corpus linguistics. A structured and coherent narrative links the historical development of the field to current topics in 'mainstream' linguistics. Practical tasks and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter encourage students to test their understanding of what they have read and an extensive glossary provides easy access to definitions of technical terms used in the text.

This contributed volume gives access to semiotic researches adopting a quantitative stance. European semiotics is traditionally based on immanent methodologies: meaning is seen as an autonomous dimension of human existence, whose laws can be investigated via purely qualitative analytical and reflexive analysis. Today, researches crossing disciplinary boundaries reveal the limitations of such an homogeneous practice. In particular, two families of quantitative research strategies can be identified. On the one hand, researchers wish to naturalize meaning, by making semiotic results interact with those coming from Neurophysiological and psychological sciences. On the other hand, statistical and computational tools are adopted to work on linguistic and multimedia corpora. The book acts to put the two approaches into dialogue.

This edited volume provides a platform for experts from various fields to introduce and discuss their different perspectives on the topic of teamwork and collaborative problem solving. It brings together researchers in organizational teaming, educational collaboration, tutoring, simulation, and gaming as well as those involved in statistical and psychometric process modelling. This book seeks to channel this expertise towards advances in the measurement and assessment of cognitive and non-cognitive skills of individuals and teams.

Although there are a large number of grammar books that explain the form and meaning of the English modal auxiliaries, there are few resources that provide examples as to what modals could be used, and in which cases, when referring to successive clauses. Modal auxiliaries are among the most difficult structures to teach to students of English as a second or foreign language. Some combinations of modals are more commonly used than others, and pairs of modals are used to express a specific meaning. It is not well known, however, exactly which combinations of modals are more popular. Therefore, a method to extract modal auxiliaries in two consecutive clauses from the British National Corpus 2007 XML edition was developed and is discussed in this book.Pair modal frequencies were not well known since simple string match methods could not be used with embedded sentences, complex sentences and compound sentences. This problem was solved by defining rules of sentence structures to identify important clauses carrying the main ideas of sentences, extracting only the important clauses and calculating t-scores. A system was implemented by using computational linguistic techniques for extracting, parsing, and simplifying sentences for learners to study the use of modal auxiliaries. Which collocational expressions are more common? What is the appropriateness of the results? Learners and educators can make use of these results to gain a better understanding of modal auxiliaries, and to facilitate the process of teaching and learning English.

Auf der KONVENS-98, der vierten Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natuerlicher Sprache, trafen sich Forscher aus verschiedenen Bereichen der Sprachverarbeitung. Der Schwerpunkt lag auf Beitraegen zur Integration der strukturellen und phonologisch/phonetischen Aspekte der computerunterstuetzten Sprachforschung. Der Sammelband vereinigt 34 Beitraege unter folgenden Grossbereichen: Parsing, Grammatik, Tagging; Phonetik, Prosodie, Spracherkennung, Sprachsynthese; Dialog, Semantik, Kognition; Anwendungen; Ausbildung. Er bietet damit einen aktuellen Querschnitt durch laufende Forschungsarbeiten auf den Gebieten der computerorientierten Linguistik und Phonetik. KONVENS-98, the 4th Conference on Natural Language Processing, was a meeting of researchers from various fields of language and speech processing. Focus was on contributions that aim at integrating structural and phonological/phonetic aspects of computerized linguistic research. The proceedings comprise 34 contributions from the following areas: parsing, grammar, tagging; phonetics, prosody, speech recognition, speech synthesis; dialogue, semantics, cognition; applications; education. They provide a survey of current research in the areas of computerized linguistics and phonetics.