Deciphering Methods as a Means of Linguistic Research

Methods of linguistic deciphering may be regarded as a set of procedures aimed at the recognition of linguistic objects in a text whose language is not known to the investigator. They combine many advantages of the formal approach to language. Assuming that each deciphering procedure may serve as a definition of the respective linguistic object we may view the set of such procedures as a certain linguistic theory which has the following properties: 1) A great degree of generalization, because its definitions should be valid both for the known and unknown languages. 2) Formality, because naturally enough, the deciphering procedures should be presented in the shape of algorithms. 3) Constructivity, i.e. the possibility of identifying a certain linguistic object with the help of a deciphering procedure within a reasonable (finite) time interval. To identify a linguistic object a deciphering algorithm makes use of a set of its features. Those features are sufficient for a non-constructive definition of the object under investigation and to a very great extent determine the kind of the recognition algorithm. It seems obvious that a linguistic object cannot be defined by means of binary features alone. A definition based on binary features will be either too specific and valid only for a chosen language, or too abstract and insufficient for identifying the object in a given text. The following scheme seems to be better founded: (1) Binary features are used to determine the general type of certain linguistic objects. The objects belonging to that type form the set of admissible solutions of a deciphering problem. (2) An objective function which estimates the quality of each solution is introduced on the set of admissible solutions. The values of the objective function are calculated with the help of the investigated text. They reflect the individuality of the given language.