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Linguistics is a subject which came to the fore only in the 1960s.
It is founded on a fallacy. Linguistics claims to be 'the
scientific study of language', but language behaviour is too
open-ended and creative to be treated by the methods of science. In
consequence, linguistic theories systematically distort the nature
of language, and present a misleading picture of our human nature.
Geoffrey Sampson shows how various traditions of linguistics, and
their accounts of different aspects of language, are all infected
by the delusion of scientism. And he offers positive examples of
how language can be studied insightfully, once the scientistic
delusion is given up.
When it was first published in 1997, Geoffrey Sampson's Educating
Eve was described as the definitive response to Steven Pinker's The
Language Instinct and Noam Chomsky's nativism. In this revised and
expanded new edition, Sampson revisits his original arguments in
the light of fresh evidence that has emerged since the original
publication.
Since Chomsky revolutionized the study of language in the 1960s, it
has increasingly come to be accepted that language and other
knowledge structures are hard-wired in our genes. According to this
view, human beings are born with a rich structure of cognition
already in place. But people do not realize how thin the evidence
for that idea is.
The 'Language Instinct' Debate examines the various arguments for
instinctive knowledge, and finds that each one rests on false
premisses or embodies logical fallacies. The structures of language
are shown to be purely cultural creations.
With a new chapter entitled 'How People Really Speak' which uses
corpus data to analyse how language is used in spontaneous English
conversation, responses to critics, extensive revisions throughout,
and a new preface by Paul Postal of New York University, this new
edition will be an essential purchase for students, academics, and
general readers interested in the debate about the 'language
instinct'.
This book records a unique attempt over a ten-year period to use
stochastic optimization in the natural language processing domain.
Setting the work against the background of the logical rule-based
approach, the author provides a context for understanding the
differences in assumptions about the nature of language and
cognition.
Computer processing of natural language is a burgeoning field, but
until now there has been no agreement of a standardized
classification of the diverse structural elements that occur in
real-life language material. This book attempts to define a
'Linnaean taxonomy' for the English language: an annotation scheme,
the SUSANNE scheme, which yields a labelled constituency structure
for any string of English, comprehensively identifying all of its
surface and logical structural properties. The structure is
specified with sufficient rigour that analysts working
independently must produce identical annotations for a given
example. The scheme is based on large samples of real-life use of
British and American written and spoken English. The book also
describes the SUSANNE electronic corpus of English which is
annotated in accordance with the scheme. It is freely available as
a research resource to anyone working at a computer connected to
Internet, and since 1992 has come into widespread use in academic
and commercial research environments on four continents.
Linguists have standardly assumed that grammar is about identifying
all and only the 'good' sentences of a language, which implies that
there must be other, 'bad' sentences - but in practice most
linguists know that it is hard to pin those down. The standard
assumption is no more than an assumption. A century ago,
grammarians did not think about their subject that way, and our
book shows that the older idea was right: linguists can and should
dispense with the concept 'starred sentence'. We draw on corpus
data in order to support a different model of grammar, in which
individuals refine positive grammatical habits to greater or lesser
extents in diverse and unpredictable directions, but nothing is
ever ruled out. Languages are not merely alternative methods of
verbalizing universal logical forms. We use empirical evidence to
shed light on the routes by which school-age children gradually
expand their battery of grammatical resources, which turn out to be
sometimes counter-intuitive. Our rejection of the 'starred
sentence' concept has attracted considerable discussion, and we
summarize the reactions and respond to our critics. The contrasting
models of grammar described in this book entail contrasting
pictures of human nature; our closing chapter shows that
grammatical theory is not value-neutral but has an ethical
dimension.
The cultures of the world have chosen different ways to make spoken
language visible and permanent. The original edition of Writing
Systems represented the first time that modern linguistic
principles were brought to bear on a study of this. Now this new
edition brings the story up to date; it incorporates topics which
have emerged since the first edition (such as electronic techniques
for encoding the world's scripts), together with new findings about
established topics, including the ultimate historical origin of our
alphabet. Featuring a series of detailed case studies of scripts of
diverse types, and giving due attention to the psychology of
reading and learning to read, the book is written so as to be
accessible to those with no prior knowledge of any writing systems
other than our own.
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.
Linguistics is a subject which came to the fore only in the 1960s.
It is founded on a fallacy. Linguistics claims to be 'the
scientific study of language', but language behaviour is too
open-ended and creative to be treated by the methods of science. In
consequence, linguistic theories systematically distort the nature
of language, and present a misleading picture of our human nature.
Geoffrey Sampson shows how various traditions of linguistics, and
their accounts of different aspects of language, are all infected
by the delusion of scientism. And he offers positive examples of
how language can be studied insightfully, once the scientistic
delusion is given up.
The cultures of the world have chosen different ways to make spoken
language visible and permanent. The original edition of Writing
Systems represented the first time that modern linguistic
principles were brought to bear on a study of this. Now this new
edition brings the story up to date; it incorporates topics which
have emerged since the first edition (such as electronic techniques
for encoding the world's scripts), together with new findings about
established topics, including the ultimate historical origin of our
alphabet. Featuring a series of detailed case studies of scripts of
diverse types, and giving due attention to the psychology of
reading and learning to read, the book is written so as to be
accessible to those with no prior knowledge of any writing systems
other than our own.
Corpus Linguistics seeks to provide a comprehensive sampling of
real-life usage in a given language, and to use these empirical
data to test language hypotheses. Modern corpus linguistics began
fifty years ago, but the subject has seen explosive growth since
the early 1990s. These days corpora are being used to advance
virtually every aspect of language study, from computer processing
techniques such as machine translation, to literary stylistics,
social aspects of language use, and improved language-teaching
methods. Because corpus linguistics has grown fast from small
beginnings, newcomers to the field often find it hard to get their
bearings. Important papers can be difficult to track down. This
volume reprints forty-two articles on corpus linguistics by an
international selection of authors, which comprehensively
illustrate the directions in which the subject is developing. It
includes articles that are already recognized as classics, and
others which deserve to become so, supplemented with editorial
introductions relating the individual contributions to the field as
a whole. This collection of readings will be useful to students of
corpus linguistics at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, as
well as academics researching this fascinating area of linguistics.
When it was first published in 1997, Geoffrey Sampson's Educating
Eve was described as the definitive response to Steven Pinker's The
Language Instinct and Noam "Chomsky's Nativism. In this revised and
expanded new edition, Sampson revisits this original arguments in
the light of fresh evidence that has emerged since the original
publication. Since Chomsky revolutionized the study of language in
the 1960s, it has increasingly come to be accepted that language
and other knowledge structures are hard-wired in our genes.
According to this view, human beings are born with a rich structure
of cognition already in place. But people do not realize how thin
the evidence for that idea is. The "Language Instinct" Debate
examines the various arguments for instinctive knowledge, and finds
that each one rests on false premises or embodies logical
fallacies. The structures of language are shown to be purely
cultural creations. With a new chapter entitled "How People Really
Speak" which uses corpus data to analyse how language is used in
spontaneous English conversation, responses to critics, extensive
revisions throughout, and a new foreword by Paul Postal of New York
University, this new edition will be an essential purchase for
students, academics, and general readers interested in the debate
about the "language instinct."
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