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For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective.
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Probabilistic Linguistics
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Probabilistic Linguistics
edited by Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stefanie Jannedy
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
6 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Times New Roman on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Probabilistic linguistics / editors: Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, Stefanie Jannedy. p. cm. ‘‘ . . . originated as a symposium on ‘Probability theory in linguistics’ held in Washington, D.C. as part of the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January 2001’’—Preface. ‘‘Bradford books.’’ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-025360-1 (hc. : alk. paper