The Conduct of Linguistic Inquiry PDF Download

Author: Rudolf P. Botha
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110822946
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262530422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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While the study of government and binding is an outgrowth of Chomsky's earlier work in transformational grammar, it represents a significant shift in focus and a new direction of investigation into the fundamentals of linguistic theory.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Research on current topics in linguistic theory, including new theoretical developments based on the latest international discoveries.

Author: Dorthe Duncker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351060376
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This book explores the reflexivity of language both from the perspective of the lay speaker and the linguistic analyst. Linguistic inquiry is conditional upon linguistic reflexivity, but so is language. Without linguistic reflexivity, we would not be able to make sense of everyday linguistic communication, and the idea of a language would not be conceivable. Not even fundamental notions such as words or meaning would exist. Linguistic reflexivity is a feature of the communication process, and it essentially depends on situated participants and time. It is a defining characteristic of the human language but despite its obvious importance, it is not very well understood theoretically, and it is strangely under-researched empirically. Throughout history and in modern linguistics, it has mostly either been taken for granted, misconstrued, or ignored. Only integrational linguistics fully recognizes its specifically linguistic implications. However, integrational linguistics does not provide the necessary methodological basis for investigating linguistic phenomena empirically. This catch-22 situation means that the goal of the book is twofold: one part is to explore the reflexivity of language theoretically, and the other part is to propose an applied integrational linguistics and to implement this proposal in practice.

Author: Carlo Cecchetto
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262327236
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A new theory of labeling that sheds light on such syntactic phenomena as relativization, successive cyclicity, island phenomena, and Minimality effects. When two categories merge and a new syntactic object is formed, what determines which of the two merged categories transmits its properties one level up—or, in current terminology, which of the two initial categories labels the new object? In (Re)labeling, Carlo Cecchetto and Caterina Donati take this question as the starting point of an investigation that sheds light on longstanding puzzles in the theory of syntax in the generative tradition. They put forward a simple idea: that words are special because they can provide a label for free when they merge with some other category. Crucially, this happens even when a word merges with another category as a result of syntactic movement. This means that a word has a “relabeling” power in that the structure resulting from its movement can have a different label from the one that the structure previously had. Cecchetto and Donati argue that relabeling cases triggered by the movement of a word are pervasive in the syntax of natural languages and that their identification sheds light on such phenomena as relativization, explaining for free why relatives clauses have a nominal distribution, successive cyclicity, island effects, root phenomena, and Minimality effects.

Author: Naomi L. Shin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263345
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Across the world, professional linguistic inquiry is in full bloom, largely as result of pioneering thinkers who helped rapidly modernize the study of human language in the last century. As the field continues to move forward, further solidifying its position as a conduit of insight into the human condition, it is essential to take stock of the theoretical primitives that have given linguistics its intellectual foundation. This volume does precisely that, inspecting the load-bearing components of the edifice upon which contemporary linguistics has been constructed. The volume’s authors – whose expertise spans the Generativist, Functionalist, and Variationist research traditions – remind us of the need to revisit the conceptual bedrock of the field, clarifying and assessing our primary theoretical moves, including those relating to such elemental components as the ‘linguistic sign’, ‘a language’, ‘structural relations’, ‘grammatical category’, ‘acquisition’, ‘bilingual’, ‘competence’, and ‘sociolinguistic variable’.

Author: Danny Fox
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262561211
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Exploring the relevance of principles of optimization to the interface between syntax and semantics. In Economy and Semantic Interpretation, Danny Fox investigates the relevance of principles of optimization (economy) to the interface between syntax and semantics. Supporting the view that grammar is restricted by economy considerations, Fox argues for various economy conditions that constrain the application of covert operations. Among other things, he argues that syntactic operations that do not affect phonology cannot apply unless they affect the semantic interpretation of a sentence. This position has a number of consequences for the architecture of grammar. For example, it suggests that the modularity assumption, according to which a language's syntax must be characterized independently of its semantics, needs to be revised. Another consequence concerns new answers to the question of exactly where in the syntactic derivation the various constraints on interpretation apply. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 35Copublished with the MIT Working Papers in Linguistics series.

Author: Richard S. Kayne
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611077
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. This book proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. For example, English and Japanese phrases consisting of a verb and its complement are thought of as symmetrical to one another, differing only in linear order. The Antisymmetry of Syntax proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. More specifically, Richard Kayne shows that asymmetric c-command invariably maps into linear precedence. From this follows, with few further hypotheses, a highly specific theory of word order in UG: that complement positions must always follow their associated head, and that specifiers and adjoined elements must always precede the phrase that they are sister to. A further result is that standard X-bar theory is not a primitive component of UG. Rather, X-bar theory expresses a set of antisymmetric properties of phrase structure. This antisymmetry is inherited from the more basic antisymmetry of linear order. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 25

Author: Rens Bod
Publisher: A Bradford Book
ISBN: 0262025361
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.

Author: Gabe Ignatow
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 150633699X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Students in social science courses communicate, socialize, shop, learn, and work online. When they are asked to collect data for course projects they are often drawn to social media platforms and other online sources of textual data. There are many software packages and programming languages available to help students collect data online, and there are many texts designed to help with different forms of online research, from surveys to ethnographic interviews. But there is no textbook available that teaches students how to construct a viable research project based on online sources of textual data such as newspaper archives, site user comment archives, digitized historical documents, or social media user comment archives. Gabe Ignatow and Rada F. Mihalcea's new text An Introduction to Text Mining will be a starting point for undergraduates and first-year graduate students interested in collecting and analyzing textual data from online sources, and will cover the most critical issues that students must take into consideration at all stages of their research projects, including: ethical and philosophical issues; issues related to research design; web scraping and crawling; strategic data selection; data sampling; use of specific text analysis methods; and report writing.