Download or read book Natural Language and Universal Grammar Volume 1 written by John Lyons and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-09-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by one of the most influential scholars in modern linguistics, including previously unpublished pieces.

Download or read book Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language written by Charles D. Yang and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The model is makes quantitative and cross-linguistic predictions about child language. It may also be deployed as a predictive model of language change which, when the evidence is available, could explain why grammars change in a particular direction at a particular time.

Download or read book Natural Language and Universal Grammar written by John Lyons and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Natural Language Computing written by Ray C. Dougherty and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book's main goal is to show readers how to use the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky, called Universal Grammar, to represent English, French, and German on a computer using the Prolog computer language. In so doing, it presents a follow-the-dots approach to natural language processing, linguistic theory, artificial intelligence, and expert systems. The basic idea is to introduce meaningful answers to significant problems involved in representing human language data on a computer.

Download or read book As Time Goes by written by Norbert Hornstein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do humans acquire, at a very early age and from fragmentary and haphazard data, the complex patterns of their native language? This is the logical problem of language acquisition, and it is the question that directs the search for an innate universal grammar. As Time Goes By extends the search by proposing a theory of natural-language tense that will be responsive to the problem of language acquisition. The clearly written discussion proceeds step-by-step from simple observations and principles to far-reaching conclusions involving complex data carefully selected and persuasively presented. Throughout, Hornstein focuses on the logical problem of language acquisition, highlighting the importance of explanatory adequacy and the role of syntactic representations in determining intricate properties of semantic interpretation.

Download or read book On Nature and Language written by Noam Chomsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-10 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In On Nature and Language Noam Chomsky develops his thinking on the relation between language, mind and brain, integrating current research in linguistics into the burgeoning field of neuroscience. The volume begins with a lucid introduction by the editors Belletti and Rizzi. This is followed by some of Chomsky's recent writings on these themes, together with a penetrating interview in which Chomsky provides a clear introduction to the Minimalist Program. The volume concludes with an essay on the role of intellectuals in society and government.

Download or read book Natural Language Computing written by Ray C. Dougherty and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc Incorporated. This book was released on 1994 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book's main goal is to show readers how to use the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky, called Universal Grammar, to represent English, French, and German on a computer using the Prolog computer language. In so doing, it presents a follow-the-dots approach to natural language processing, linguistic theory, artificial intelligence, and expert systems. The basic idea is to introduce meaningful answers to significant problems involved in representing human language data on a computer. The book offers a hands-on approach to anyone who wishes to gain a perspective on natural language processing -- the computational analysis of human language data. All of the examples are illustrated using computer programs. The optimal way for a person to get started is to run these existing programs to gain an understanding of how they work. After gaining familiarity, readers can begin to modify the programs, and eventually write their own. The first six chapters take a reader who has never heard of non-procedural, backtracking, declarative languages like Prolog and, using 29 full page diagrams and 75 programs, detail how to represent a lexicon of English on a computer. A bibliography is programmed into a Prolog database to show how linguists can manipulate the symbols used in formal representations, including braces and brackets. The next three chapters use 74 full page diagrams and 38 programs to show how data structures (subcategorization, selection, phrase marker) and processes (top-down, bottom-up, parsing, recursion) crucial in Chomsky's theory can be explicitly formulated into a constraint-based grammar and implemented in Prolog. The Prolog interpreters provided with the book are basically identical to the high priced Prologs, but they lack the speed and memory capacities. They are ideal since anything learned about these Prologs carries over unmodified to C-Prolog and Quintas on the mainframes. Anyone who studies the prolog implementations of the lexicons and syntactic principles of combination should be able to use Prolog to represent their own linguistic data on the most complex Prolog computer available, whether their data derive from syntactic theory, semantics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language acquisition, language learning, or some related area in which the grammatical patterns of words and phrases are more crucial than concepts of quantity. The printed examples illustrate C-Prolog on an Ultrix Vax, a standard university configuration. The disk included with the book contains shareware version of Prolog-2 (IBM PC) and MacProlog (Macintosh) plus versions of the programs that run on C-Prolog, Quintas, Prolog-2, and MacProlog. Appendix II contains information about how to use the Internet, Gopher, CompuServe, and the free More BBS to download the latest copies of Prolog, programs, lexicons, and parsers. All figures (100+) in the book are available scaled to make full size transparencies for class lectures. Valuable special features of this volume include: * more than 100 full page diagrams illustrating the basic concepts of natural language processing, Prolog, and Chomsky's linguistic theories; * more than 100 programs -- illustrated in at least one script file -- showing how to encode the representations and derivations of generative grammar into Prolog; * more than 100 session files guiding readers through their own hands-on sessions with the programs illustrating Chomsky's theory; * a 3.5" disk (IBM Format) containing: 1. all programs in versions to run in C-Prolog or Quintas Prolog on an Ultrix Vax, and on an IBM PC and a Macintosh, 2. a shareware version of Prolog-2 for IBM PC clones which runs all programs in the book, 3. a shareware version of MacProlog for Macintosh which runs all programs in the book; * instructions on using Internet, CompuServe, and the free More BBS to download the latest copies of Prolog, programs, lexicons, and parsers; and * numerous references enabling interested students to pursue questions at greater depth by consulting the items in the extensive bibliography.

Download or read book Universal Grammar in Second Language Acquisition written by Margaret Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the ancient Mediterranean world to the present day, our conceptions of what is universal in language have interacted with our experiences of language learning. This book tells two stories: the story of how scholars in the west have conceived of the fact that human languages share important properties despite their obvious differences, and the story of how westerners have understood the nature of second or foreign language learning. In narrating these two stories, the author argues that modern second language acquisition theory needs to reassess what counts as its own past. The book addresses Greek contributions to the prehistory of universal grammar, Roman bilingualism, the emergence of the first foreign language grammars in the early Middle Ages, and the Medieval speculative grammarians efforts to define the essentials of human language. The author shows how after the renaissance expanded people's awareness of language differences, scholars returned to the questions of universals in the context of second language learning, including in the 1660 Port-Royal grammar which Chomsky notoriously celebrated in Cartesian Linguistics. The book then looks at how Post-Saussurean European linguistics and American structuralism up to modern generative grammar have each differently conceived of universals and language learning. Universal Grammar in Second Language Acquisition is a remarkable contribution to the history of linguistics and will be essential reading for students and scholars of linguistics, specialists in second language acquisition and language teacher-educators.

Download or read book Non Nuclear Cases written by Nicole Delbecque and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contrast with the central arguments of the event structure, which have been extensively studied, much less attention has been given to non-arguments. To bridge this gap, the present volume focuses on prepositional and adverbial phrases expressing instrumental, causal, spatial, temporal roles and the like, i.e. semantic roles which have been typically associated with oblique case. The various contributions show that case in general, and oblique case in particular, is at the intersection between form and meaning: at issue are the nuclear versus non-nuclear status of these phrases and the semantic roles they express. The import of these phrases on the event structure is described in a functional-cognitive perspective for Cora, Nyulnyul, German, Dutch, French and Spanish. The specific analyses of empirical phenomena presented in this volume, as well as their implications for linguistic theory in general, will be of interest for scholars interested in syntax, semantics and pragmatics. This is the sixth and final volume of the Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages project.

Download or read book Language written by Daniel L. Everett and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold and provocative study that presents language not as an innate component of the brain—as most linguists do—but as an essential tool unique to each culture worldwide. For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. But linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows how the evolution of different language forms—that is, different grammar—reflects how language is influenced by human societies and experiences, and how it expresses their great variety. For example, the Amazonian Pirahã put words together in ways that violate our long-held under-standing of how language works, and Pirahã grammar expresses complex ideas very differently than English grammar does. Drawing on the Wari’ language of Brazil, Everett explains that speakers of all languages, in constructing their stories, omit things that all members of the culture understand. In addition, Everett discusses how some cultures can get by without words for numbers or counting, without verbs for “to say” or “to give,” illustrating how the very nature of what’s important in a language is culturally determined. Combining anthropology, primatology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and his own pioneering—and adventurous—research with the Amazonian Pirahã, and using insights from many different languages and cultures, Everett gives us an unprecedented elucidation of this society-defined nature of language. In doing so, he also gives us a new understanding of how we think and who we are.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar written by Ian G. Roberts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ''This handbook provides a critical guide to the most central proposition in modern linguistics: the notion, generally known as universal grammar, that a universal set of structural principles underlies the grammatical diversity of the world's languages. It will be a vital reference for linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists.''--

Download or read book Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar written by William A. Foley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-09-13 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The key argument of this book, originally published in 1984, is that when human beings communicate with each other by means of a natural language they typically do not do so in simple sentences but rather in connected discourse - complex expressions made up of a number of clauses linked together in various ways. A necessary precondition for intelligible discourse is the speaker's ability to signal the temporal relations between the events that are being discussed and to refer to the participants in those events in such a way that it is clear who is being talked about. A great deal of the grammatical machinery in a language is devoted to this task, and Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar explores how different grammatical systems accomplish it. This book is an important attempt to integrate the study of linguistic form with the study of language use and meaning. It will be of particular interest to field linguists and those concerned with typology and language universals, and also to anthropologists involved in the study of language function.

Download or read book Meaning and Universal Grammar written by Cliff Goddard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume one of a set of studies that is founded on the idea that universal grammar is based on - indeed, inseparable from - meaning. The theoretical framework is the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka and developed in collaboration with Cliff Goddard.

Download or read book A Theory of Syntax written by Norbert Hornstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses a topical set of issues in syntactic theory, including a number of original proposals at the cutting edge of research in this area. The book provides a theory of the basic grammatical operations and suggests that there is only one that is distinctive to language.

Download or read book Natural Language Parsing and Linguistic Theories written by U. Reyle and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: presupposition fails, we now give a short introduction into Unification Grammar. Since all implementations discussed in this volume use PROLOG (with the exception of BlockjHaugeneder), we felt that it would also be useful to explain the difference between unification in PROLOG and in UG. After the introduction to UG we briefly summarize the main arguments for using linguistic theories in natural language processing. We conclude with a short summary of the contributions to this volume. UNIFICATION GRAMMAR 3 Feature Structures or Complex Categories. Unification Grammar was developed by Martin Kay (Kay 1979). Martin Kay wanted to give a precise defmition (and implementation) of the notion of 'feature'. Linguists use features at nearly all levels of linguistic description. In phonetics, for instance, the phoneme b is usually described with the features 'bilabial', 'voiced' and 'nasal'. In the case of b the first two features get the value +, the third (nasal) gets the value -. Feature value pairs in phonology are normally represented as a matrix. bilabial: + voiced: + I nasal: - [Feature matrix for b.] In syntax features are used, for example, to distinguish different noun classes. The Latin noun 'murus' would be characterized by the following feature-value pairs: gender: masculin, number: singular, case: nominative, pred: murus. Besides a matrix representation one frequently fmds a graph representation for feature value pairs. The edges of the graph are labelled by features. The leaves denote the value of a feature.

Download or read book Universals of Language Today written by Sergio Scalise and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-10-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects the contributions presented at the international congress held at the University of Bologna in January 2007, where leading scholars of different persuasions and interests offered an up-to-date overview of the current status of the research on linguistic universals. The papers that make up the volume deal with both theoretical and empirical issues, and range over various domains, covering not only morphology and syntax, which were the major focus of Greenberg’s seminal work, but also phonology and semantics, as well as diachrony and second language acquisition. Diverse perspectives illustrate and discuss a huge number of phenomena from a wide variety of languages, not only exploring the way research on universals - tersects with different subareas of linguistics, but also contributing to the ongoing debate between functional and formal approaches to explaining the universals of language. This stimulating reading for scientists, researchers and postgraduate students in linguistics shows how different, but not irreconcilable, modes of explanation can complement each other, both offering fresh insights into the investigation of unity and diversity in languages, and pointing to exciting areas for future research. • A fresh and up-to-date survey of the present state of research on Universals of Language in an international context, with original contributions from leading specialists in the eld. • First-hand accounts of substantive ndings and theoretical observations in diff- ent subareas of linguistics. • Huge number of linguistic phenomena and data from diffferent languages a- lyzed and discussed in detail.

Download or read book Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar written by Lydia White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents