E-Book Overview
Linguistics has become an empirical science again after several decades when it was preoccupied with speakers' hazy intuitions about language structure. With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analyses, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples (corpora). Concrete evidence is brought to bear to resolve long-standing questions such as Is there one English language or many Englishes? and Do different social groups use characteristically elaborated or restricted language codes? Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques for themselves, giving a step-by-step recipe-book method for applying a quantitative technique that was invented by Alan Turing in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and has been rediscovered and widely applied in linguistics fifty years later.
E-Book Content
Empirical Linguistics
Open Linguistics Series Series Editor Robin Fawcett, Cardiff University This series is 'open' in two related ways. First, it is not confined to works associated with any one school of linguistics. For almost two decades the series has played a significant role in establishing and maintaining the present climate of 'openness' in linguistics, and we intend to maintain this tradition. However, we particularly welcome works which explore the nature and use of language dirough modelling its potential for use in social contexts, or through a cognitive model of language - or indeed a combination of the two. The series is also 'open' in the sense that it welcomes works that open out 'core' linguistics in various ways: to give a central place to the description of natural texts and the use of corpora; to encompass discourse 'above the sentence'; to relate language to odier semiotic systems; to apply linguistics in fields such as education, language pathology, and law; and to explore the areas that lie between linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines such as semiotics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and cultural and literary studies. Continuum also publishes a series that offers a forum for primarily functional descriptions of languages or parts of languages - Functional Descriptions of Language. Relations between linguistics and computing are covered in the Communication in Artificial Intelligence series, two series, Advances in Applied Linguistics and Communication in Public Life, publish books in applied linguistics, and the series Modern Pragmatics in Theory and Practice publishes both social and cognitive perspectives on the making of meaning in language use. We also publish a range of introductory textbooks on topics in linguistics, semiotics and deaf studies. Recent titles in this series Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Functional Perspective, Frances Christie Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, Helen SpencerOatey (ed.) Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School, Frances Christie and J. R. Martin (eds) Learning through Language in Early Childhood, Clare Painter Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes, Frances Christie (ed.) Relations and Functions within and around Language, Peter H. Fries, Michael Cummings, David Lockwood and William Spruiell (eds) Syntactic Analysis and Description: A Constructional Approach, David G. Lockwood Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology, Howard Jackson and Etienne Ze Amvela Working with Discourse: Meaning beyond the Clause, J. R. Martin and David Rose
Empirical Linguistics
Geoffrey Sampson
continuum LONDON ? NEW YORK
Continuum The Tower Buildine. 11 York Road, Lond