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Digital Infinity
Digital infinity is a technical term in theoretical linguistics. Alternative formulations are "discrete infinity" and "the infinite use of finite means". The idea is that all human languages follow a simple logical principle, according to which a limited set of digits—irreducible atomic sound elements—are combined to produce an infinite range of potentially meaningful expressions. Noam Chomsky cites Galileo as perhaps the first to recognise the significance of digital infinity. This principle, notes Chomsky, is "the core property of human language, and one of its most distinctive properties: the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts". In his '' Dialogo'', Galileo describes with wonder the discovery of a means to communicate one's "most secret thoughts to any other person ... with no greater difficulty than the various collocations of twenty-four little characters upon a paper." "This is the greatest of all human inventions," Galileo continues, notin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theoretical Linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics that, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to the theory of language, or the branch of linguistics that inquires into the nature of language and seeks to answer fundamental questions as to what language is, or what the common ground of all languages is. The goal of theoretical linguistics can also be the construction of a general theoretical framework for the description of language. Another use of the term depends on the organisation of linguistics into different sub-fields. The term 'theoretical linguistics' is commonly juxtaposed with applied linguistics. This perspective implies that the aspiring language professional, e.g. a student, must first learn the ''theory'' i.e. properties of the linguistic system, or what Ferdinand de Saussure called ''internal linguistics''. This is followed by ''practice,'' or studies in the applied field. The dichotomy is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ferdinand De Saussure
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or ''semiology'', as Saussure called it. One of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of "the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and anthropology." Although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. As Leonard Bloomfield stated after reviewing Saussure's work: "he has given us the theoretical basis for a science of h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistics Wars
The linguistics wars were extended disputes among American theoretical linguists that occurred mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from a disagreement between Noam Chomsky and several of his associates and students. The debates started in 1967 when linguists Paul Postal, John R. Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley —self-dubbed the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"—proposed an alternative approach in which the relation between semantics and syntax is viewed differently, which treated Deep structure and surface structure, deep structures as meaning rather than syntactic objects. While Chomsky and other generative grammar, generative grammarians argued that meaning is driven by an underlying syntax, generative semanticists posited that syntax is shaped by an underlying meaning. This intellectual divergence led to two competing frameworks in generative semantics and interpretive semantics. Eventually, generative semantics spawned a different linguistic paradigm, kno ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Generative Semantics
Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntax, syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meaning (linguistics), meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational-generative grammar, transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the linguistics wars. Its proponents included John R. Ross, Haj Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse". Generative semantics is no longer practiced under that name, though many of its central ideas have blossomed in the cognitive linguistics tradition. It is also regarded as a key part of the intellectual heritage of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) and construction grammar, and some of its insights live on in mains ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morris Halle
Morris Halle, Pinkowitz (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018), was a Latvian-born American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and '' The Sound Pattern of English'' in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored (with Samuel Jay Keyser) the earliest theory of generative metrics, and developed the Distributed Morphology framework with Alec Marantz. Life and career Halle was born - as Morris Pinkowitz () - on July 23, 1923, in Liepāja, Latvia. In 1929 he moved with his Jewish family to Riga. He arrived in the United States in 1940 and graduated from George Washington High School. From 1941 to 1943, he studied engineering at the City College of New York. He entered the United States Army in 1943 a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world. Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book ''Tristes Tropiques'' (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been def ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morphophonology
Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words. The origins of morphophonology trace back to the early 20th century with foundational works in structural linguistics. Notable contributions include Roman Jakobson's insights into phonological alternations and Chomsky and Halle's ''The Sound Pattern of English'' (1968), which formalized the relationship between phonology and morphology within generative grammar. Subsequent theories, such as Autosegmental Phonology and Optimality Theory, have refined the analysis of morphophonological patterns Morphophonological analysis often involves an attempt to give a series of formal rules or constraints that successfully predict the regular sound changes occurring in the morphemes of a given ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce's semiotics, as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, and the visual arts including cinema. Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among others, Jakobson b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distinctive Features
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonology, phonological structure that distinguishes one Phone (phonetics), sound from another within a language. For example, the feature [+Voice (phonetics), voice] ''distinguishes'' the two bilabial plosives: [p] and [b] (i.e., it makes the two plosives ''distinct'' from one another). There are many different ways of defining and arranging features into ''feature systems'': some deal with only one language while others are developed to apply to all languages. Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segment (linguistics), segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features, and place features. These feature categories in turn are further specified on the basis of the phonetics, phonetic properties of the segments in question. Since the inception of the phonological analysis of distinctive features in the 1950s, features traditionally have be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasalisation
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: is the nasalized equivalent of , and is the nasalized equivalent of . A subscript diacritic , called an or , is sometimes seen, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would interfere with the superscript tilde. For example, are more legible in most fonts than . Nasal vowels Many languages have nasal vowels to different degrees, but only a minority of world languages around the world have nasal vowels as contrasting phonemes. That is the case, among others, of French, Portuguese, Hindustani, Nepali, Breton, Gheg Albanian, Hmong, Hokkien, Yoruba, and Cherokee. Those nasal v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palatalization (phonetics)
In phonetics, palatalization (, ) or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing a superscript ''j'' ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization is not Phonemic contrast, phonemic in English, but it is in Slavic languages such as Russian language, Russian and Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, Finnic languages such as Estonian language, Estonian, Karelian language, Karelian, and Võro language, Võro, and other languages such as Irish language, Irish, Marshallese language, Marshallese, Kashmiri language, Kashmiri, and Japanese language, Japanese. Types In technical terms, palatalization refers to the secondary articulation of consonants by which the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate and the alveolar ridge during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts: *Voicing can refer to the ''articulatory process'' in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. *It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters ⟨s⟩ and ⟨z⟩. The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
