Linguistic Databases


Book Description

Linguistic Databases explores the increasing use of databases in linguistics. The enormous potential in linguistic data - billions of utterances and messages daily - has been difficult to exploit. Many linguists have had to concentrate on introspective data with its inevitable blinders toward frequency, variation, and naturalness. Applications of linguistics have been handicapped. This volume explores the potential advantages of database applications to linguistics. Included in this volume are reports on database activities in phonetics, phonology, lexicography and syntax, comparative grammar, second-language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, and language pathology. The book presents the specialized problems of multi-media (especially audio) and multi-lingual texts, including those in exotic writing systems. Implemented solutions are also discussed. The opportunities to use existing, minimally structured text repositories are presented.




The Use of Databases in Cross-Linguistic Studies


Book Description

This book promotes the development of linguistic databases by describing a number of successful database projects, focusing especially on cross-linguistic and typological research. It has become increasingly clear that ready access to knowledge about cross-linguistic variation is of great value to many types of linguistic research. Such a systematic body of data is essential in order to gain a proper understanding of what is truly universal in language and what is determined by specific cultural settings. Moreover, it is increasingly needed as a tool to systematically evaluate contrasting theoretical claims. The book includes a chapter on general problems of using databases to handle language data and chapters on a number of individual projects. Note: This title was originally announced as including a CD-Rom with databases. The CD-Rom, however, was replaced by a list of URLs within the book. More information as well as links to the databases can also be found here.




MLA International Bibliography


Book Description

Provides access to citations of journal articles, books, and dissertations published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage is international and subjects include literature, language and linguistics, literary theory, dramatic arts, folklore, and film since 1963. Special features include the full text of the original article for some citations and a collection of images consisting of photographs, maps, and flags.




Excursions Into Syntactic Databases


Book Description

This book is about syntactic databases (a.k.a. treebanks), collections of text material in which the syntactic relations have been made visible. It starts off with a general intro-duction to the subject and then continues with three in-depth investigations of more specialized aspects. In the introduction, syntactic databases are first placed in the larger context of linguistic databases, text collections with a broader linguistic annotation than just a syntactic one. Then some examples of syntactic databases are given, illustrating the range of annotation actually encountered. The introduction is completed with an investigation of database management systems for syntactic databases. The first in-depth investigation concerns the treatment of ambiguous structures in syntactic analysis trees, focussing on a very efficient representation for such structures and the means to create this representation. Next, classroom use of syntactic databases is examined. A computer program for this purpose, CLUES, is discussed, along with a suggested series of syntax exercises. The final subject is the importance of including function and attribute information in the annotation of texts. The central line of investigation here is a probabilistic parsing experiment in which the use of function and attribute information is the main variable.




Loanwords in the World's Languages


Book Description

"This landmark publication in comparative linguistics is the first comprehensive work to address the general issue of what kinds of words tend to be borrowed from other languages. The authors have assembled a unique database of over 70,000 words from 40 languages from around the world, 18,000 of which are loanwords. This database allows the authors to make empirically founded generalizations about general tendencies of word exchange among languages." --Book Jacket.




Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk


Book Description

This book offers an HPSG-based discourse grammar for a controlled language (Air Traffic Control) that allows the identification of well-formed discourse patterns. A formalisation of discourse theoretical structures that occur especially in crisis situations that involve potential aviation disasters is introduced. Of particular importance in this context are discourse sequences that help secure uptake among the crew and between crew and tower in order to coordinate actions that might result in avoiding a potential disaster. In order to describe the relevant phenomena, an extended HPSG formalism is used. The extension concerns the capability of modelling speech acts as proposed by Searle & Vanderveken (1985). The grammar is modelled by employing XML as a denotational semantics and is applied to the corpus data. This work thus lays the foundation for the automatic recognition of discourse structures in aviation communication.




Language Engineering and Translation


Book Description

At a time when information technology has become a regular tool of specialised translators in all aspects of their work, it is useful to place the activity of technical translation into its appropriate environment and to describe it from the point of view of its role in the broader context of communication in which it occurs. The advent of automated alternatives to human translation has fundamentally affected the profession, its products and the relationship between translators and their clients.This book presents and discusses the process of translation against this background. The context in which translation is normally studied is widened in order to re-examine the process of translation as part of interlingual text production and to analyse the manner in which the new tools affect the product of translation.This book is of particular relevance in modern translator training courses. Contents 1. The language industry and translation, 2. Aspects of language, 3. Elements of communication theory, 4. A theory of text types and messages, 5. The nature of translation, 6. Specifications: Factors influencing the translation, 7. Preparation for translation, 8. Steps in translation, 9. Human and Machine Translation, 10 Pragmatic circumstances of automation, 11. Translation in an information technology environment. Bibliography + Index.




Searching Speech Databases


Book Description

This book presents techniques for audio search, aimed to retrieve information from massive speech databases by using audio query words. The authors examine different features, techniques and evaluation measures attempted by researchers around the world. The topics covered also include available databases, software / tools, patents / copyrights, and different platforms for benchmarking. The content is relevant for developers, academics, and students.​




Corpus-based Studies in Language Use, Language Learning, and Language Documentation


Book Description

This volume consists of selected papers from the 2009 meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics. The chapters cover aspects of language use (usage-based accounts of morphology/syntax of English and Tok Pisin), language learning (corpus-based learning of English, syntactic development observable in a Learner Corpus of English, “core” vocabulary items for learners of English) and language documentation (a new and innovative usage-based frequency dictionary of English, proposals to broaden the traditional understanding of a corpus in various directions, e.g., constructing a corpus of the content of Japanese manga comics). Taken together, the thirteen chapters represent a good cross-section of strands of new work in corpus linguistics, as practised by international scholars working on English and other languages.




LINGUISTICS -Volume I


Book Description

Linguistics is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Linguistics discusses: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphologically Engineered Words, Syntax, Semantics, Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, Language and Identity, Sign Languages, Pidgins and Creoles, Code-Switching, Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Language Teaching Methodology and Second Language Acquisition, EcoLinguistics, The Art Of Lexicography, Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction, Historical Evolution of World Languages This volume is aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers, NGOs and GOs.