Special Issue on Linguistic Typology
Author: Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 154
ISBN-13:
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Typology and Universals
Author: William Croft
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9780521004992
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA thorough rewriting to reflect advances in typology and universals in the past decade.
Information Theory and Language
Author: Łukasz Dębowski
Publisher: MDPI
Published: 2020-12-15
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 3039360264
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“Information Theory and Language” is a collection of 12 articles that appeared recently in Entropy as part of a Special Issue of the same title. These contributions represent state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research at the interface of information theory and language studies. They concern in particular: • Applications of information theoretic concepts such as Shannon and Rényi entropies, mutual information, and rate–distortion curves to the research of natural languages; • Mathematical work in information theory inspired by natural language phenomena, such as deriving moments of subword complexity or proving continuity of mutual information; • Empirical and theoretical investigation of quantitative laws of natural language such as Zipf’s law, Herdan’s law, and Menzerath–Altmann’s law; • Empirical and theoretical investigations of statistical language models, including recently developed neural language models, their entropies, and other parameters; • Standardizing language resources for statistical investigation of natural language; • Other topics concerning semantics, syntax, and critical phenomena. Whereas the traditional divide between probabilistic and formal approaches to human language, cultivated in the disjoint scholarships of natural sciences and humanities, has been blurred in recent years, this book can contribute to pointing out potential areas of future research cross-fertilization.
Telecinematic Discourse
Author: Roberta Piazza
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2011-07-20
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 9027285152
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis cutting-edge collection of articles provides the first organised reflection on the language of films and television series across British, American and Italian cultures. The volume suggests new directions for research and applications, and offers a variety of methodologies and perspectives on the complexities of "telecinematic" discourse – a hitherto virtually unexplored area of investigation in linguistics. The papers share a common vision of the big and small screen: the belief that the discourses of film and television offer a re-presentation of our world. As such, telecinematic texts reorganise and recreate language (together with time and space) in their own way and with respect to specific socio-cultural conventions and media logic. The volume provides a multifaceted, yet coherent insight into the diegetic – as it revolves around narrative – as opposed to mimetic – as referring to other non-narrative and non-fictional genres – discourses of fictional media. The collection will be of interest to researchers, tutors and students in pragmatics, stylistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, communication studies and related fields.
Explanation in typology
Author: Karsten Schmidtke-Bode
Publisher: Language Science Press
Published:
Total Pages: 278
ISBN-13: 3961101477
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations. On this view, recurrent pathways of reanalysis and grammaticalization can lead to uniform synchronic results, obviating the need to postulate global forces like ambiguity avoidance, processing efficiency or iconicity, especially if there is no evidence for such motivations in the genesis of the respective constructions. On the other hand, the recent typological literature is equally ripe with talk of "complex adaptive systems", "attractor states" and "cross-linguistic convergence". One may wonder, therefore, how much room is left for traditional functional-adaptive forces and how exactly they influence the diachronic trajectories that shape universal distributions. The papers in the present volume are intended to provide an accessible introduction to this debate. Covering theoretical, methodological and empirical facets of the issue at hand, they represent current ways of thinking about the role of diachronic sources in explaining grammatical universals, articulated by seasoned and budding linguists alike.
Language Typology 1985
Author: Winfred P. Lehmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 1986-01-01
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9027279446
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume presents revised versions of papers originally presented at the Colloquium in Linguistic Typology, held in Moscow in 1985. The organizers and participants of the colloquium considered it of great importance to come to terms on primary principles, in order to be able to build on previous research and to determine the place of typology in linguistics. The papers in this volume reflect that goal.
Usage-based and Typological Approaches to Linguistic Units
Author: Tsuyoshi Ono
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2021-04-15
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13: 9027259836
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of ‘unit’ in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and interactional linguistics. This volume contributes to and extends this discussion by examining the nature of units in actual usage in a range of genetically and typologically unrelated languages, English, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Mandarin, engaging with fundamental theoretical issues. The chapters show that categories originally created for the description of Indo-European languages have limited usefulness if our goal is to understand the nature of human language in general. The authors thus question the status of traditionally accepted linguistic units, especially their static understanding as a priori entities, and suggest instead that an emergent and interactional view of both structure and function offers a better fit with the data from the languages examined. Originally published as special issue 43:2 (2019) of Studies in Language.
Linguistic Typology
Author: Paolo Ramat
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2011-05-02
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 3110859122
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.
Language Typology
Author: Alice Caffarel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 716
ISBN-13: 9027247668
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is intended as a systemic functional contribution to language typology both for those who would like to understand and describe particular languages against the background of generalizations about a wide range of languages and also for those who would like to develop typological accounts that are based on and embody descriptions of the systems of particular languages (rather than isolated constructions). The book is a unique contribution in at least two respects. On the one hand, it is the first book based on systemic functional theory that is specifically concerned with language typology. On the other hand, the book combines the particular with the general in the description of languages: it presents comparable sketches of particular languages while at the same time identifying generalizations based on the languages described here as well as on other languages. The volume explores eight languages, covering seven language families: French, German, Pitjantjatjara, Tagalog, Telugu, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese.
Sociolinguistic and Typological Perspectives on Language Variation
Author: Silvia Ballarè
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2023-10-02
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 3110781239
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLinguistic variation, loosely defined as the wholesale processes whereby patterns of language structures exhibit divergent distributions within and across languages, has traditionally been the object of research of at least two branches of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic typology. In spite of their similar research agendas, the two approaches have only rarely converged in the description and interpretation of variation. While a number of studies attempting to address at least aspects of this relationship have appeared in recent years, a principled discussion on how the two disciplines may interact has not yet been carried out in a programmatic way. This volume aims to fill this gap and offers a cross-disciplinary venue for discussing the bridging between sociolinguistic and typological research from various angles, with the ultimate goal of laying out the methodological and conceptual foundations of an integrated research agenda for the study of linguistic variation.
