Linguistic Structure and Change

Linguistic Structure and Change

Author: Thomas Berg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780198236726

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Thomas Berg challenges context-free theories of linguistics; he is concerned with the way the term 'explanation' is typically used in the discipline. He argues that real explanations cannot emerge from a view which asserts the autonomy of language, but only from an approach which seeks to establish a connection between language and the contexts in which it is embedded. The author examines the psychological context in detail. He uses an interactiveactivation model of language processing to derive predictions about synchronic linguistic patterns, the course of linguistic change, and the structure of poetic rhymes. The majority of these predictions are borne out, leading the author to conclude that the structure of language is shaped by the properties of the mechanism which puts it to use, and that psycholinguistics thus qualifies as one likely approach from which to derive an explanation of linguistic structure.


Linguistic Structure in Language Processing

Linguistic Structure in Language Processing

Author: G.N. Carlson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-10-18

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9789400927308

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The papers in this volume are intended to exemplify the state of experimental psycho linguistics in the middle to later 1980s. Our over riding impression is that the field has come a long way since the earlier work of the 1950s and 1960s, and that the field has emerged with a renewed strength from a difficult period in the 1970s. Not only are the theoretical issues more sharply defined and integrated with existing issues from other domains ("modularity" being one such example), but the experimental techniques employed are much more sophisticated, thanks to the work of numerous psychologists not necessarily interested in psycholinguistics, and thanks to improving technologies unavailable a few years ago (for instance, eye-trackers). We selected papers that provide a coherent, overall picture of existing techniques and issues. The volume is organized much as one might organize an introductory linguistics course - beginning with sound and working "up" to mean ing. Indeed, the first paper, Rebecca Treiman's, begins with considera tion of syllable structure, a phonological consideration, and the last, Alan Garnham's, exemplifies some work on the interpretation of pro nouns, a semantic matter. In between are found works concentrating on morphemes, lexical structures, and syntax. The cross-section represented in this volume is by necessity incom plete, since we focus only on experimental work directed at under standing how adults comprehend and produce language. We do not include any works on language acquisition, first or second.


Approaches to the Study of Sound Structure and Speech

Approaches to the Study of Sound Structure and Speech

Author: Magdalena Wrembel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-21

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1000712087

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This innovative work highlights interdisciplinary research on phonetics and phonology across multiple languages, building on the extensive body of work of Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk on the study of sound structure and speech. // The book features concise contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars who have worked with Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk across a range of disciplinary fields toward broadening the scope of how sound structure and speech are studied and how phonological and phonetic research is conducted. Contributions bridge the gap between such fields as phonological theory, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, and morphology, but also includes perspectives from such areas as historical linguistics, which demonstrate the relevance of other linguistic areas of inquiry to empirical investigations in sound structure and speech. The volume also showcases the rich variety of methodologies employed in existing research, including corpus-based, diachronic, experimental, acoustic and online approaches and showcases them at work, drawing from data from languages beyond the Anglocentric focus in existing research. // The collection reflects on Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk’s pioneering contributions to widening the study of sound structure and speech and reinforces the value of interdisciplinary perspectives in taking the field further, making this key reading for students and scholars in phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech and language processing.


Morphological Aspects of Language Processing

Morphological Aspects of Language Processing

Author: Laurie Beth Feldman

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1134778333

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It is now well established that phonological -- and orthographic -- codes play a crucial role in the recognition of isolated words and in understanding the sequences of words that comprise a sentence. However, words and sentences are organized with respect to morphological as well as phonological components. It is thus unfortunate that the morpheme has received relatively little attention in the experimental literature, either from psychologists or linguists. Due to recent methodological developments, however, now is an opportune time to address morphological issues. In the experimental literature, there is a tendency to examine various psycholinguistic processes in English and then to assume that the account given applies with equal significance to English and to other languages. Written languages differ, however, in the extent to which they capture phonological as contrasted with morphological units. Moreover, with respect to the morpheme, languages differ in the principle by which morphemes are connected to form new words. This volume focuses on morphological processes in word recognition and reading with an eye toward comparing morphological processes with orthographic and phonological processes. Cross-language comparisons are examined as a tool with which to probe universal linguistic processes, and a variety of research methodologies are described. Because it makes the experimental literature in languages other than English more accessible, this book is expected to be of interest to many readers. It also directs attention to the subject of language processing in general -- an issue which is of central interest to cognitive psychologists and linguists as well as educators and clinicians.


Morphological Structure in Language Processing

Morphological Structure in Language Processing

Author: R. Harald Baayen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-07-20

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 3110910187

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This volume brings together a series of studies of morphological processing in Germanic (English, German, Dutch), Romance (French, Italian), and Slavic (Polish, Serbian) languages. The question of how morphologically complex words are organized and processed in the mental lexicon is addressed from different theoretical perspectives (single and dual route models), for different modalities (auditory and visual comprehension, writing), and for language development. Experimental work is reported, as well as computational and statistical modeling. Thus, this volume provides a useful overview of the range of issues currently attracting reseach at the intersection of morphology and psycholinguistics.


Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing

Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing

Author: Emily M. Bender

Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1627050124

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Many NLP tasks have at their core a subtask of extracting the dependencies—who did what to whom—from natural language sentences. This task can be understood as the inverse of the problem solved in different ways by diverse human languages, namely, how to indicate the relationship between different parts of a sentence. Understanding how languages solve the problem can be extremely useful in both feature design and error analysis in the application of machine learning to NLP. Likewise, understanding cross-linguistic variation can be important for the design of MT systems and other multilingual applications. The purpose of this book is to present in a succinct and accessible fashion information about the morphological and syntactic structure of human languages that can be useful in creating more linguistically sophisticated, more language-independent, and thus more successful NLP systems. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction/motivation / Morphology: Introduction / Morphophonology / Morphosyntax / Syntax: Introduction / Parts of speech / Heads, arguments, and adjuncts / Argument types and grammatical functions / Mismatches between syntactic position and semantic roles / Resources / Bibliography / Author's Biography / General Index / Index of Languages


Sign Language Phonology

Sign Language Phonology

Author: Diane Brentari

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-11-21

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1107113474

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Surveys key findings and ideas in sign language phonology, exploring the crucial areas in phonology to which sign language studies has contributed.


Highly Complex Syllable Structure

Highly Complex Syllable Structure

Author: Shelece Easterday

Publisher: Saint Philip Street Press

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 9781013294563

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The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language whose strongest cross-linguistic patterns are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure. Syllable patterns involving long sequences of consonants are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized, with few approaches treating these as natural or unproblematic structures. This book is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The two aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that they constitute a distinct linguistic type, and (ii) to identify possible diachronic paths and natural mechanisms by which these patterns come about in the history of a language. These issues are investigated in a diversified sample of 100 languages, 25 of which have highly complex syllable patterns. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.