How Language Works - AnINTRODUCTION - 140110

Uploaded by

minoas

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

0% found this document useful (0 votes)

116 views6 pages

How Language Works - AnINTRODUCTION - 140110

Uploaded by

minoas

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

You are on page 1/ 6

Mike Gasser

Indiana University

How Language Works

edition 3.0
II
To βιβλίο αυτό ανευρέθηκε και ανακτήθηκε από το ∆ιαδύκτιο στην
ηλεκτρονική διεύθυνση :http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/book.html στις
14 Ιανουαρίου 2010. Tα τµήµατα 6.7 (Sentence functıons), 7.4
(Morphophonology), 7.5 (Linguistic relativity), 8.2 (Foregrounding and
Backgrounding), 8.3 (Active and passive voice), 8.4 (More verb derivation)
λείπουν επειδή δεν είχαν ολοκληρωθεί από τον ίδιο τον συγγραφέα. Ορισµένα
βασικά στοιχεία µορφοποίησης όπως η γραµµατοσειρά (Garamond),
προσαρµόστηκαν µε γνώµονα την ανετότερη ανάγνωση του βιβλίου σε έντυπη
µορφή. Παραλείφθηκαν τα χαρακτηριστικά υπερκειµένου (hypertext), καθώς
αναγκαστικά και τα ενσωµατωµένα αρχεία ήχου και βίντεο της πρωτότυπης
µορφής . Οι περισσότερες εικόνες προέρχονται από την ηλεκτρονική διεύθυνση
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/clpp/images/cartoons. Για την αντιγραφή και
προσαρµογή του πρωτοτύπου: Αντώνης Κατσαράκης, [email protected]

III
IV
The book
I started writing this book because I was teaching an introductory linguistics
course, and I was dissatisfied with the available textbooks. In particular, I felt
that they did not do a good job of showing how the study of language fits into
the larger field of cognitive science. Once I got into it, the book turned into
more than a textbook on linguistics because it began to veer off into areas of
study that usually don't count as linguistics. One way to define linguistics is as
the study of language itself, which can be contrasted with language behavior.
Language behavior is studied by people in the fields of psycholinguistics,
language development, natural language processing, and computational
linguistics, and there is often an attempt to keep these fields distinct from
linguistics "proper". I believe that it is more productive to see all of these fields
as making up "the language sciences" or "language science", and it is really this
meta-field that is the topic of this book.

I also think that most introductory textbooks (on all topics, not just
linguistics) try to introduce too many concepts and fail to tie them together in
terms of a small number of themes. I believe that the way language works
makes sense (not all linguists agree), and I've tried to organize the book around
this idea. I also believe that a basic understanding of how language works is just
as important to a basic education as an understanding of algebra or geography,
and I hope that I've made it clear in the book why I believe this.

Finally, I've tried to incorporate several other novel ideas of mine about how
best to teach about language: start with simplified, artificial examples; select
real examples from a relatively small number of languages (especially those that
are somewhat familiar to the author); and be open about the large gaps in our
knowledge about language, as well as the excitement that comes with a young
field.

This is edition 3.0 of How Language Works. It is quite different from the last
edition (2.0). In particular, it includes material on computational approaches to
language. Long after coming up with the title, I realized that there were several
published books with the same title (and at least one more has appeared since I
released this book). So if you refer to this book elsewhere, be sure to make it
clear that you are referring to "How Language Works (edition 3.0) by Michael
Gasser". The book is freely available to anyone, under the terms of GNU Free
Documentation License, Version 1.2. If you have any comments, suggestions,
or questions about the material, please contact me.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

URL: www.indiana.edu/~hlw/book.html
Edition 3.0; 2006-08-25

V
The author: Michael Gasser
I teach in the School of Informatics and
Computing and the Cognitive Science
Program at Indiana University in
Bloomington, Indiana, USA. In my
research I've worked on various problems
related to language. I used to focus on
how language is learned by people,
specifically how this process relates to the
rest of cognition: to memory, to
categorization, to attention, and to
perception. I built computational models
of language learning; that is, I tried to
understand how humans learn language by
simulating some aspects of the process on a computer. The particular models
that I worked with belong to the category known as neural networks because
they are based loosely on how the brain works.

There is a big debate in linguistics and other areas of cognitive science dealing
with language on whether such models are powerful enough to handle all
aspects of language, especially grammar, and my research tried show where
they were and perhaps were not. Now I'm concerned with how the insights
from studying language, especially studying it computationally and studying
how people learn it, can guide us in building computational tools that will make
it easier for people to find and evaluate information on the Internet. Together
with my collaborators, I'm focusing on two kinds of tools. One will use
machine translation to help translate documents into and out of languages that
are currently under-represented on the Internet. The other will guide people in
critical reading of texts on controversial texts by highlighting loaded words that
may help to identify the writer's ideological bias. I enjoy studying languages,
and I believe that studying a variety of languages has helped me to appreciate
what theories of language have to accomplish. The languages I know best are
Amharic, German, Spanish, Japanese, and French.

My teaching has been closely tied to my research. I've focused on developing

courses that deal with intelligence, especially with the linguistic part of
intelligence, and how to simulate it on a computer. One specific interest has
been introducing the study of language to undergraduate and graduate
students, including those who may not feel any particular attraction to the
topic. I enjoy this because it gives me a chance to share the excitement I feel
for language and because I think the scientific study of language has important
insights to offer everyone. You can find out more about me, including my life
outside of work, on my webpage

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~gasser/