TEX and Linguistics

TEX has long been associated with mathematics and “hard” sciences such as physics. But even during the early days of TEX, linguists were attracted to the system, and today a growing number of them are turning to TEX (LATEX, ConTEXt). Aside from the general advantages of TEX for producing academic papers, it offers linguists largely intuitive means for dealing with often complex notational issues. In this paper, an abbreviated version of my Practical TEX 2004 talk, I show some notational issues and their solutions in TEX. Why TEX? As a linguist and an avid user of TEX, I’m frequently asked why linguists would want to use TEX, as opposed to a word processor, to write their papers. Of course, there are the general reasons why any academic would benefit from TEX, such as easy handling of numbered examples, footnotes that make sense, bibliographic management via BibTEX, etc. For me, the main reason to use TEX to typeset linguistic papers and books is due to the complex, but often mathematically-inspired, notational systems used in the various subfields of linguistics. In fact, there are some cases1 where the ability of TEX to format certain constructs aided their adoption by the field. In this paper, I discuss various aspects of using TEX and LATEX to typeset linguistics. One thing you will find largely absent here is a discussion of Omega, which should offer great hope for linguists using TEX. Until its development is further along, discussion of it only presents users with a utopian taste of what might be. I would dearly love for Omega to advance, but the wait (for me) has been painful. Your mileage may of course vary. Digital Typography Using LATEX [1] has a good overview of language support in Omega. I should note that the union of TEX and linguistics goes back quite far, even here in the pages of TUGboat [2, 3]. Donald E. Knuth2 notes that linguists were among the first outside of mathematics to embrace TEX. 1 Such as Attribute Value Matrices in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. 2 Personal communication at the Practical TEX banquet. The field of linguistics Linguistics is a large field that stands at the crossroads of several other disciplines, but is united in dealing with the scientific study of language. As you might expect from a large field, linguistics is commonly subdivided into various disciplines, each of which has various notational traditions and goals. What is important for TEXnicians is that the notational issues presented here fall essentially into the general categories of “special symbols” or “special layouts”. In order to partition the field into units we can deal with here, though, let us instead adopt a fairly traditional division that linguists often use.