In Case, Mark Baker develops a unified theory of how the morphological case marking of noun phrases is determined by syntactic structure. Designed to work well for languages of all alignment types – accusative, ergative, tripartite, marked nominative, or marked absolutive – this theory has been developed and tested against unrelated languages of each type, and more than twenty non-Indo-European...

Fortunately, scholarly and political conferences have nothing in common. The success of a political convention depends on the generic agreement of the majority or totality of its participants. The use of votes and vetoes, however, is alien to scholarly discussion, where disagreement generally proves to be more productive than agreement. Disagreement discloses antinomies and tensions within the ...

A discovery system for detecting correspondences in data is described, based on the familiar induction methods of J. S. Mill. Given a set of observations, the system induces the “causally” related facts in these observations. Its application to empirical linguistic discovery is described. The paper is organized as follows. I begin the discussion by revealing two developments, the transformation...

The work reported in this study is based on research that has been carried out while developing a sign synthesis system for Greek Sign Language (GSL): theoretical linguistic analysis as well as lexicon and grammar resources derived from this analysis. We focus on the organisation of linguistic knowledge that initiates the multi-functional processing required to achieve sign generation performed...

p. 1, par. 2: Until relatively recently, however, words and syntactic patterns, or constructions, were treated on a par not only theoretically, but also empirically. → It is only since recently, however, that words and syntactic patterns, or constructions, are treated on a par not only theoretically, but also empirically. p. 1, first bullet: how much does give prefer to occur in the ditransitiv...

During the past quarter of a century, Brain and Language (B & L) has recorded and stimulated research on the biological/neurological basis for human language. As noted in the Whitaker editorial in the first issue of the first volume (Whitaker, 1974), although for centuries scholars of different disciplines had been interested in the question of brain function and cognition, specifically languag...

The 80s can be characterized as the era of Linguistics-based MT (LBMT) and of its failure in the history of MT, in which (computational) linguists have initiated the first serious attempt at constructing scientific or computational theories of MT. Partly because of a large discrepancy between scientific interests and engineering practices, this work has little influence on the performance of co...

Due to the importance of communication between two or more people, companies, or even nations, the need for good translators has long been obvious around the world, and since humans are faulty, it is not surprising that many attempts to automate the process of translation have been made throughout history. This is called machine translation. Corpus linguistics, a branch of the machine translati...

The relation of linguistics to psychology is [...] implied in the basic position of the latter among the mental sciences. [...] As language is in its forms the least deliberate of human activities, the one in which rationalizing explanations are most grossly out of place, linguistics is, of all the mental sciences, most in need of guidance at every step by the best psychologic insight available...