Evolutionary theorists since Darwin have been interested in the parallels and interactions between biological and cultural evolution. Recent applications of empirical techniques originally developed to analyze molecular genetic data to linguistic data offer new insights into the historical evolution of language, revealing fascinating parallels between language change and biological evolution. T...

Culture issues in translation have attracted increasing attention among Chinese translators since 1980s. On the basis of modern translatology, Chinese scholars have done a series of fruitful researches on translation from many perspectives including culturalogy, cross-cultural communication and cultural linguistics. Chinese are deeply influenced by Chinese cultural philosophy. They stress on th...

Corpora have been put to many different uses in fields as varied as natural language processing, critical discourse analysis and applied linguistics, to mention just a few. As is to be expected, within each of those areas corpora fulfil different roles, from providing data to build statistical machine translation systems to revealing ideological stance in politicallysensitive texts. ‘Corpus lin...

Historical inference is at its most powerful when independent lines of evidence can be integrated into a coherent account. Dating linguistic and cultural lineages can potentially play a vital role in the integration of evidence from linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and genetics. Unfortunately, although the comparative method in historical linguistics can provide a relative chronology, it ...

This chapter gives an overview of language variation and how the dynamics of language are explored through formal models. It briefly outlines the dimensions over which language structures can vary, then looks at some of the very different ways in which language change has been investigated (sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, evolutionary linguistics). It describes how dynamic models of c...

Until recently, the study of writing systems was something of a Cinderella subject within the discipline of linguistics. For a long time there was only one standard monograph, I.J. Gelb’s 1952 book A Study of Writing, which was valuable but was little influenced by the insights of modern structural linguistics. Many linguists saw human language as a window onto biologically-determined structure...

Our times are often referred to as the ‘new world order’ with its ‘new economy’. What this means is that capitalism has been restructured on a global scale, and people of widely different cultural and linguistic backgrounds have been thrown into contact more than ever before. Cultural and linguistic contact may occur in the flows of information and mass media, as well as in the flows of actual ...

There has been growing interest in the study of the human conceptual system across several disciplines and sub-disciplines in the last two decades. Cognitive scientists have been involved in modeling the architecture of the human conceptual system. For instance, a fairly recent paradigm in cognitive science called "connectionism" models the human conceptual system as a network composed of a lar...

As museums develop increasingly powerful tools for producing and publishing cultural data, many are beginning to face the challenge of optimizing a deluge of content for online visitors, while grappling with the requirement to organize and manage their growing datasets in local systems. And as they seek tools and methods for automating the management of information, both professionaland user-ge...

Avertissement Le contenu de ce site relève de la législation française sur la propriété intellectuelle et est la propriété exclusive de l'éditeur. Les œuvres figurant sur ce site peuvent être consultées et reproduites sur un support papier ou numérique sous réserve qu'elles soient strictement réservées à un usage soit personnel, soit scientifique ou pédagogique excluant toute exploitation comme...