Exploring the evolution of functional linguistics: linking Arabic theoretical linguistics with modern linguistics

Linguistics and Linking Problems

I am not an expert on language disorders. As a relative outsider at the meeting that this volume is based upon, I was impressed by two general conclusions. First, I was impressed by the extreme specificity that is now possible in the descriptions of both genotypes and phenotypes for a number of different developmental disorders that affect language. Second, I was impressed by the gulf that lies...

Arabic Computational Linguistics: Current Implementations

Modern Linguistics versus Traditional Hermeneutics

An emerging field of study among evangelica ls goes by the name modern linguistics. Its terminology, self-appraisal, approach to language analysis, and relationship to traditional exegesis furnish an introduction to a comparison with grammatical-historical hermeneutics. Indispensable to an analysis of modern linguistics is a grasping of its preunderstanding—its placing of the language of the Bi...

The Evolution of Evolutionary Linguistics

For more than a century after Darwin’s Origin of Species, linguists said little about the origins of human speech. In the past 30 years, however, some linguists and evolutionary biologists have proposed descriptions of the roles of gestures, the vocal apparatus, cognition, syntax, and social interaction in the emergence of language. This paper summarizes some of their claims, especially those t...

Computational Linguistics: What About the Linguistics?

But this journal content is of interest here for another reason than these scholarly ones. First, references to computing are conspicuous by their absence. Just occasionally, grammar types or semantic models appear that have computational connections, for example in a shared view of feature sets; and there are references to computational corpus analysis, though more often in reviews than in maj...