Linguistic theory

Linguistic Theory

1. Goals of Linguistic Theory The goals of linguistic theory are to answer such questions as ‘What is language?’ and ‘What properties must something (an organism or a machine) have in order for it to learn and use language?’ Different theories provide different answers to these questions, and there is at present no general consensus as to what theory gives the best answers. Moreover, most lingu...

Linguistic Matrix Theory

Recent research in computational linguistics has developed algorithms which associate matrices with adjectives and verbs, based on the distribution of words in a corpus of text. These matrices are linear operators on a vector space of context words. They are used to construct the meaning of composite expressions from that of the elementary constituents, forming part of a compositional distribut...

Implications for linguistic theory

Group Theory and Linguistic Processing

There is currently much interest in bringing together the tradition of categorial grammar, and especially the Lambek calculus (Lambek, 1958), with the more recent paradigm of linear logic (Girard, 1987) to which it has strong ties. One active research area concerns the design of non-commutative versions of linear logic (Abrusci, 1991; Rdtor6, 1993) which can be sensitive to word order while ret...

Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory.

This article surveys the major kinds of empirical evidence used by linguists, with a particular focus on the relevance of the evidence to the goals of generative grammar. After a background section overviewing the objectives and assumptions of that framework, three broad kinds of data are considered in the three subsequent sections: corpus data, judgment data, and (other) experimental data. The...