Empirical Linguistics

Description

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"). Sampson asks why the discipline lost its way in the closing decades of the twentieth century, showing how the reliance on "speaker intuitions" resulted from misunderstandings about the nature of science, reinforced by accidents of publication history. Finally, he discusses the distinction between aspects of human language which can and those which cannot be investigated scientifically.

Geoffrey Sampson is a former Professor of Natural Language Computing at the School of Informatics, University of Sussex. He is now a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa.

"This is important and fruitful work....Sampson and his fellow knights are doing useful work."--The Times Higher Education Supplement