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Probabilistic linguistics

By Rens Bod , Jennifer Hay , Stefanie Jannedy

Book information

Publisher
The MIT Press
Year
2003
ISBN
0262523388, 9780262523387
LCC
P128.P73 P76 2003
Open Library ID
OL18918416M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
5 MB (5349100 bytes)
Series
Bradford Books
Pages
464\464
Library
mexmat
Time added
2009-07-20 03:45:11

Description

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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