Geoffrey Sampson

"Linguistics has become an empirical science again, after several decades when it was preoccupied with speakers' hazy 'intuitions' about language structure. With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analysis, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples ('corpora'). Concrete evidence is brought to bear to resolve long-standing questions such as 'Is there one English language or many Englishes?' and 'Do different social groups use characteristically elaborated or restricted language codes?' Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques for themselves, giving a step-by-step 'recipe-book' method for applying a quantitative technique that was invented by Alan Turing in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and has been rediscovered and widely applied in linguistics fifty years later." "Sampson asks why the discipline lost its way in the closing decades of the twentieth century, showing how the reliance on 'speaker intuitions' resulted from misunderstandings about the nature of science, reinforced by accidents of publication history. Finally, he discusses the distinction between aspects of human language which can and those which cannot be investigated scientifically. Describing the meanings of words is a different kind of enterprise from grammatical analysis. Taking the empirical scientific method seriously means that we must be serious about its limitations also."--Jacket.

"This book records a unique attempt over a ten-year period to use stochastic optimization in the natural language processing domain. Setting the work against the background of the logical rule-based approach, the author provides a context for understanding the differences in assumptions about the nature of language and cognition."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Computer processing of natural language is a burgeoning field, but until now there has been no agreement of a standardized classification of the diverse structural elements that occur in real-life language material. This book attempts to define a 'Linnaean taxonomy' for the English language: an annotation scheme, the SUSANNE scheme, which yields a labelled constituency structure for any string of English, comprehensively identifying all of its surface and logical structural properties. The structure is specified with sufficient rigour that analysts working independently must produce identical annotations for a given example. The scheme is based on large samples of real-life use of British and American written and spoken English. . The book also describes the SUSANNE electronic corpus of English which is annotated in accordance with the scheme. It is freely available as a research resource to anyone working at a computer connected to Internet, and since 1992 has come into widespread use in academic and commercial research environments on four continents.

From the publisher. Sampson offers an enlarged and updated version of a text originally published in 1997, in which he challenges Noam Chomsky's theory of an innate, biologically determined system specific to human beings which provides a normal child with a vast body of a priori knowledge about the nature of any human language. The author draws on recent discoveries about the sequencing of the human genome and other scientific findings, and the increasing accessibility of quantities of concrete data on how people use language in real life, to further his argument. The second edition includes new passages, new chapter-sections, and a full new chapter discussing the relevance of recent research and responding to objections raised by critics of the first edition.

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