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Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable

2009-02-26 Language Arts & Disciplines
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Release : 2009-02-26
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 663/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable by : Geoffrey Sampson

Download or read book Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable written by Geoffrey Sampson. This book was released on 2009-02-26. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some languages are at a later stage of evolution than others. It also appears to be an inevitable outcome of one of the central axioms of generative linguistic theory: that the mental architecture of language is fixed and is thus identical in all languages and that whereas genes evolve languages do not. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable reopens the debate. Geoffrey Sampson's introductory chapter re-examines and clarifies the notion and theoretical importance of complexity in language, linguistics, cognitive science, and evolution. Eighteen distinguished scholars from all over the world then look at evidence gleaned from their own research in order to reconsider whether languages do or do not exhibit the same degrees and kinds of complexity. They examine data from a wide range of times and places. They consider the links between linguistic structure and social complexity and relate their findings to the causes and processes of language change. Their arguments are frequently controversial and provocative; their conclusions add up to an important challenge to conventional ideas about the nature of language. The authors write readably and accessibly with no recourse to unnecessary jargon. This fascinating book will appeal to all those interested in the interrelations between human nature, culture, and language.

Linguistic Complexity

2012-05-29 Foreign Language Study
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Release : 2012-05-29
Genre : Foreign Language Study
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 226/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Linguistic Complexity by : Bernd Kortmann

Download or read book Linguistic Complexity written by Bernd Kortmann. This book was released on 2012-05-29. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the intricacies of thinking about the complexity of languages and language varieties (here: of English) in three major contact-related fields of (and schools in) linguistics: creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies (i.e. in the realm of English linguistics, the “World Englishes” community), and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: How can we adequately assess linguistic complexity? Should we be interested in absolute complexity or rather relative complexity? What is the extent to which language contact and/or (adult) language learning might lead to morphosyntactic simplification? The authors in this volume are all leading linguists in different areas of specialization, and they were asked to elaborate on those facets of linguistic complexity which are most relevant in their area of specialization, and/or which strike them as being most intriguing. The result is a collection of papers that is unique in bringing together leading representatives of three often disjunct fields of linguistic scholarship in which linguistic complexity is seen as a dynamic and inherently variable parameter.

Language Complexity

2008 Language Arts & Disciplines
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Release : 2008
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 048/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Language Complexity by : Matti Miestamo

Download or read book Language Complexity written by Matti Miestamo. This book was released on 2008. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume – a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 – is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.

Computational Complexity and Natural Language

1987 Psychology
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Release : 1987
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 056/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Computational Complexity and Natural Language by : G. Edward Barton

Download or read book Computational Complexity and Natural Language written by G. Edward Barton. This book was released on 1987. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A nontechnical introduction to complexity theory: its strengths, its weaknesses, and how it can be used to study grammars.

The Language Complexity Game

1993 Computers
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Release : 1993
Genre : Computers
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 471/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Language Complexity Game by : Eric Sven Ristad

Download or read book The Language Complexity Game written by Eric Sven Ristad. This book was released on 1993. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work elucidates the structure and complexity of human language in terms of the mathematics of information and computation. It strengthens Chomsky's early work on the mathematics of language, with the advantages of a better understanding of language and a more precise theory of structural complexity. Ristad argues that language is the process of constructing linguistic representations from the forms produced by other cognitive modules and that this process is NP-complete. This NP-completeness is defended with a phalanx of elegant and revealing proofs that rely only on the empirical facts of linguistic knowledge and on the uncontroverted assumption that these facts generalize in a reasonable manner. For this reason, these complexity results apply to all adequate linguistic theories and are the first to do so. Eric Sven Ristad is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is the coauthor of Computational Complexity and Natural Language. Contents:Foundation of the Investigation. Anaphora. Ellipsis. Phonology. Syntactic Agreement and Lexical Ambiguity. Philosophical Issues.

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