Posts Tagged ‘Linguistics’
Universal Grammar
Introduction To Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky
Universal grammar is the brainchild of Noam Chomsky. In contrast to taxonomic approach of traditional grammar, universal grammar adopts cognitive approach. Cognition is the study of processes by means of which what human beings get to know the world. Human beings have tacit (i.e. Subconscious) knowledge of grammar. That is humans know how to form and interpret expressions in their native languages. they know but they may not explain how they get this ability. This is because they have no conscious awareness of the processes involved.
Competence and Performance
Chomsky says that native speakers have grammatical competence (i.e. Tacit knowledge) in their native language. Chomsky made difference between competence and performance. According to him while competence is knolwedge of language performance is the actual use of language in concrete situations. Universal grammar is concerned with competence in that it tells what someone should know to have competence in a language. Note that performance is properly studied in psycholinguistics. Theoretically Universal Grammar (UG) generalises from the grammars of particular I-languages (i.e. Internalised linguistic system) to the grammars of all possible natural I- languages.
Universal Grammar Theory
Universal grammar is a theory of knolwedge. It is not a theory of behaviour. It mainly concerns with the internal structure of human mind. Universal grammar theory holds that the speaker knows a set of principles that apply to all languages, and parameters that vary from one language to another. Universal grammar theory is making precise statements about properties of the mind based on specific evidence. It important to note that the theory attempts to integrate grammar, mind and langauge at very moment.
Chomsky’s Questions on Linguistics
Following questions of Chomsky summarizes the aims of linguistics.
1. What constitutes knowledge of language? The linguists duty is to describe what people know about language.
2. How is such knowledge acquired? A linguist has to discover how people acquire this knowledge.
3. How is such knowledge put to use? The linguists have to see how people use the language knowledge acquired.
Sometimes there is a fourth question also.
4. What are the physical mechanisms that serve as the material basis for this system of knowledge and for the use of this knowledge? There must be some physical correlate to this mental knowledge. That is there should be a link between mind and brain.
I-Language and E-Language
Chomsky distinguises Externalized (E-) langauge from Internalized (I-) language. E language linguistics aims to collect samples of language and then to describe their properties. The linguist’s task is to bring order to the set of external facts that make up the language. The resulting grammar is described in terms of properties of such data through ’structures’ or ‘patterns’. I-language linguists on the other hand is concerned with what a speaker knows about a language and where this langauge knowledge comes from. I-language treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than something external. Chomsky’s theories fall within the I-language tradition and aim at exploring the mind rather than environment. I-language theory claims that establishing knowledge itself logically precedes studying how people acquire and use that knowledge. Chomsky introduced the term pragmatic competence: knowedge of how language is related to the situation in which it is used. Knowledge of language use is different from knowledge of language itself. So it may be possible to have grammatical competence without pragmatic competence.
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What is grammar?
Grammar
Grammar studies the way in which words/morphemes join to form meaningful sentences. Syntax is the basic ingredient of grammar. Grammar tells us the difference between sets of sentences [1].
There are five fundamental units of grammatical structure: morpheme, word, phrase, clause, and sentence. Morpheme is the lowest unit. Morphemes joined to form word. Phrase and clause are group of words. While phrase does not have subject and predicate, clause does have its own subject and predicate. In a sentence, Joe sings, Joe is subject and sings is predicate. Sentence is also a group of words that convey some meaning.
Note that what is described above is called traditioanal grammar. Subject, predicate, etc are called grammatical functions. Parts-of-speech such as verb, noun, adjective are called grammatical categories.
For Further Study
1. Pushpinder Syal, D.V.Jindal, An Inroduction to Linguistics, Second Edition, PHI, 2009.
2. Andrew Radford, Minimalist Sytax, Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2004.
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Corpus Linguistics
What is Corpus Linguistics?
Corpus Linguistics is a branch of linguistics that uses a large collection of natural texts known as corpus for analysis. It is a complementary approach to traditional approaches. Corpus linguistics gets its real power by using computers for analysis.
Characteristics Of Corpus Linguistics
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It is empirical analyzing the actual patterns of use in natural texts.
It utilizes a corpus as the basis for analysis.
It makes use of computers for analysis. It uses both automatic and interactive techniques.
It depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques.
Corpus Annotation
Corpus annotation is an area of corpus linguistics. This is to annotate corpus texts with linguistic information. The resultant annotated corpus is extremely useful for corpus based machine translation. Annotation by hand is painful and time-consuming process. So corpus annotation is usually done either automatically or semi-automatically. NLP tools such as lemmatizers and part-of-speech taggers are used for this purpose. As these tools are not accurate, manual correction is required to have the corpus accurate.
Advantages Of Corpus Linguistics
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Linguistic analysis is consistent and reliable.
As computers are used it is possible to identify and analyze complex patterns of language use.
Computers allow linguists to store and analyse larger database of natural language.
Interaction between computers and linguists gives double advantage: while computers manage data, linguists can make difficult linguistic judgements.
Applications of Corupus Linguistics
Corpus linguistics is ued to study a wide variety of topics within linguistics. Corpus based techniques allow to study core areas of linguistic structure such as lexicography and grammar. Dictionary makers use these techniques to include information about the most common uses, frequency of related words, and the contexts in which words and meanings are most commonly found. Corpus bsed techniques allow socio-linguists to investigate dialect and register patterns. Copus linguistics is also used for language acquisition. With the use of corpora of learner’s language, studies can be based on large number of learners and it is also possible to examine general pattern across learners. Corpus based studies are applied to educational linguistics to design effective materials and activities for classroom.
Analytical Tools
Corpusbench: It is used for word counts, concordancing, grammatical and morphological analyses.
LEXA: It is a powerful shareware program for concordancing and simple tagging.
MicroConcord: It is used for word counts, concordancing, syntactic and morphological analyses.
TACT: It is a shareware program for frequency counts, concordancing, and collocations.
WordCruncher: It is a concordancing program. It also produces frequency lists and collocations.
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Lingustics: Overview
Tokenization
For Further Study
Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics)
What is Corpus?
This article gives a brief overview of what is corpus, types, applications and a short note on British National Corpus.
What is Corpus?
Corpus is a large collection of texts. It is a body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic analysis is based. The plural form of corpus is corpora. Some popular corpora are British National Corpus (BNC), COBUILD/Birmingham Corpus, IBM/Lancaster Spoken English Corpus. Monolingual corpora represent only one language while bilingual corpora represent two languages. European Corpus Initiative (ECI) corpus is multilingual having 98 million words in Turkish, Japenese, Russian, Chinese, and other languages. The corpus may be composed of written language, spoken language or both. Spoken corpus is usually in the form of audio recordings. A corpus may be open or closed. An open corpus is one which does not claim to contain all data from a specific area while a closed corpus does claim to contain all or nearly all data from a particular field. Historical corpora, for example, are closed as there can be no further input to an area.
What is the use of Corpus?
A corpus provides grammarians, lexicographers, and other interested parties with better discriptions of a language. Computer-procesable corpora allow linguists to adopt the principle of total accountability, retrieving all the occurrences of a particular word or structure for inspection or randomly selcted samples. Corpus analysis provide lexical information, morphosyntactic information, semantic information and pragmatic information.
Linguistic information is provided by concordance and frequency counts.
What is Concordance?
Concordances are listings of the occurrences of a particular feature or combination of fearures in a corpus. Each occurrence found (or hit) is displayed with a ceratain amount of context, the text preceding and following it. The most commonly used concordance type is KWIC whichs stands for Key Word In Context. It shows one hit per line of screen or print-out with principal search feature (or focus) highlighted in the centre. Concordance is used to determine the syntax in which a form is embedded. Concordances can be generated with Corpus Presenter and with Corpus Presenter Flash, programs allow one to retrieve the contexts in which a word occurs.
Frequency Counts
Frequency Counts the number of hits. Frequency counts require finding all the occurences of a particular feature in the corpus. So it is implicit in concordancing. Software is used for this purpose. Frequency counts can be explained statistically.
British National Corpus
British National Corpus (BNC) consists of a sample collection representing the universe of contemporary British English. BNC is a balanced corpus in the sense that it attempts to capture the full range of varieties of language use. It is also a mixed corpus containing both written and spoken ones. The spoken texts are the transcriptions of narurally occuring speech. It is estimated that BNC corpus has 100 million words. Ninety percent of the BNC is made up of written texts.
Applications of Corpus
Corpora are used in the development of NLP tools. Applications include spell-checking, grammar-checking, speech recognition, text-to-speech and speech-to-text synthesis, automatic abstraction and indexing, information retrieval and machine translation. Corpora also used for creation of new dictionaries and grammars for learners.
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Linguistics-Overview
What is Linguistics?
Linguistics is the study of human languages. It follows scientific approach. So it is also referred to as linguistic science. Linguistics deals with describing and explaining the nature of human languages. it treats language and the ways people use it as phenomena to be studied. Linguist is one who is expertise in linguistics. Linguist studies the general principles of language organization and language behavior.
Linguistic analysis concerns with identifying the structural units and classes of language. Linguists also attempt to describe how smaller units can be combined to form larger grammatical units such as how words can be combined to form phrases, phrases can be combined to form clauses, and so on. They also concerns what constrains the possible meanings for a sentence. Linguists use intuitions about well- formedness and meaning and mathematical models of structure such as formal language theory and model theoretic semantics.
Structure of language include morphemes, words, phrases, and grammatical classes.
Sub-fields with respect to linguistic structure are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.
There are many branches of linguistics including applied linguistics, computational linguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics.