Language is like a vast spider's web. In this volume Jean Aitchison explores the different facets of this web. She begins with the cobweb of false worries which surrounds language. She then discusses how language evolved in the human species, how children acquire it, and how educated English speakers remember 50,000 or more words. Finally, she argues that people are right to be concerned about language, though not in the ways traditionally assumed. This is the text of the 1996 BBC Reith lectures, slightly revised for publication, with illustrations and full references, and an afterword which looks at the reception of the lectures.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.
The official book on the Rust programming language, written by the Rust development team at the Mozilla Foundation, fully updated for Rust 2018. The Rust Programming Language is the official book on Rust: an open source systems programming language that helps you write faster, more reliable software. Rust offers control over low-level details (such as memory usage) in combination with high-level ergonomics, eliminating the hassle traditionally associated with low-level languages. The authors of The Rust Programming Language, members of the Rust Core Team, share their knowledge and experience to show you how to take full advantage of Rust's features--from installation to creating robust and scalable programs. You'll begin with basics like creating functions, choosing data types, and binding variables and then move on to more advanced concepts, such as: Ownership and borrowing, lifetimes, and traits Using Rust's memory safety guarantees to build fast, safe programs Testing, error handling, and effective refactoring Generics, smart pointers, multithreading, trait objects, and advanced pattern matching Using Cargo, Rust's built-in package manager, to build, test, and document your code and manage dependencies How best to use Rust's advanced compiler with compiler-led programming techniques You'll find plenty of code examples throughout the book, as well as three chapters dedicated to building complete projects to test your learning: a number guessing game, a Rust implementation of a command line tool, and a multithreaded server. New to this edition: An extended section on Rust macros, an expanded chapter on modules, and appendixes on Rust development tools and editions.
The Wolfram Language represents a major advance in programming languages that makes leading-edge computation accessible to everyone. Unique in its approach of building in vast knowledge and automation, the Wolfram Language scales from a single line of easy-to-understand interactive code to million-line production systems. This book provides an elementary introduction to the Wolfram Language and modern computational thinking. It assumes no prior knowledge of programming, and is suitable for both technical and non-technical college and high-school students, as well as anyone with an interest in the latest technology and its practical application.
Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from their memory as soon as they had scribbled their last NFA to DFA conversion on the final exam. That fearsome reputation belies a field that is rich with useful techniques and not so difficult as some of its practitioners might have you believe. A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer and teach you concepts and data structures you'll use the rest of your coding days. You might even have fun. This book teaches you everything you need to know to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You'll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. Starting from main(), you will build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.
The World Wide Web constitutes the largest existing source of texts written in a great variety of languages. A feasible and sound way of exploiting this data for linguistic research is to compile a static corpus for a given language. There are several adavantages of this approach: (i) Working with such corpora obviates the problems encountered when using Internet search engines in quantitative linguistic research (such as non-transparent ranking algorithms). (ii) Creating a corpus from web data is virtually free. (iii) The size of corpora compiled from the WWW may exceed by several orders of magnitudes the size of language resources offered elsewhere. (iv) The data is locally available to the user, and it can be linguistically post-processed and queried with the tools preferred by her/him. This book addresses the main practical tasks in the creation of web corpora up to giga-token size. Among these tasks are the sampling process (i.e., web crawling) and the usual cleanups including boilerplate removal and removal of duplicated content. Linguistic processing and problems with linguistic processing coming from the different kinds of noise in web corpora are also covered. Finally, the authors show how web corpora can be evaluated and compared to other corpora (such as traditionally compiled corpora).
A revised and updated edition offers comprehensive coverage of ECMAScript 5 (the new JavaScript language standard) and also the new APIs introduced in HTML5, with chapters on functions and classes completely rewritten and updated to match current best practices and a new chapter on language extensions and subsets. Original.
In Language Online, David Barton and Carmen Lee investigate the impact of the online world on the study of language. The effects of language use in the digital world can be seen in every aspect of language study, and new ways of researching the field are needed. In this book the authors look at language online from a variety of perspectives, providing a solid theoretical grounding, an outline of key concepts, and practical guidance on doing research. Chapters cover topical issues including the relation between online language and multilingualism, identity, education and multimodality, then conclude by looking at how to carry out research into online language use. Throughout the book many examples are given, from a variety of digital platforms, and a number of different languages, including Chinese and English. Written in a clear and accessible style, this is a vital read for anyone new to studying online language and an essential textbook for undergraduates and postgraduates working in the areas of new media, literacy and multimodality within language and linguistics courses.
