Formal linguistics is the branch of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

which uses applied mathematical methods for the analysis of

natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...

s. Such methods include

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of symb ...

formal grammar In formal language theory, a grammar (when the context is not given, often called a formal grammar for clarity) describes how to form strings from a language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe ...

s and

first-order logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...

al expressions. Formal linguistics also forms the basis of

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

. Since the 1980s, the term is often used to refer to Chomskyan linguistics.

Approaches

Semiotic

Methods of formal linguistics were introduced by

semioticians Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, ...

such as

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...

and

Louis Hjelmslev Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studied ...

. Building on the work of

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...

and

Rudolf Carnap Rudolf Carnap (; ; 18 May 1891 – 14 September 1970) was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He ...

, Hjelmslev proposed the use of formal grammars to analyse, generate and explain language in his 1943 book ''Prolegomena to a Theory of Language''. In this view, language is regarded as arising from a mathematical relationship between meaning and form. The formal description of language was further developed by linguists including

J. R. Firth John Rupert Firth (June 17, 1890 in Keighley, Yorkshire – December 14, 1960 in Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist and a leading figure in British linguistics during the 1950s. Education and career F ...

and

Simon Dik Simon Cornelis Dik (September 6, 1940 in Delden – March 1, 1995 in Holysloot) was a Dutch linguist, most famous for developing the theory of functional grammar. He occupied the chair of General Linguistics at University of Amsterdam betwe ...

, giving rise to modern grammatical frameworks such as

systemic functional linguistics # * Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hea ...

and

functional discourse grammar Functional grammar (FG) and functional discourse grammar (FDG) are grammar models and theories motivated by functional theories of grammar. These theories explain how linguistic utterances are shaped, based on the goals and knowledge of natural lan ...

. Computational methods have been developed by the framework functional generative description among others.

Dependency grammar Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of phrase structure) and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesni� ...

, created by French structuralist

Lucien Tesnière Lucien Tesnière (; May 13, 1893 – December 6, 1954) was a prominent and influential French linguist. He was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan on May 13, 1893. As a maître de conférences (senior lecturer) in University of Strasbourg (1924), and l ...

, has been used widely in

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

Psychological

Analytical models based on semantics and

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...

were rejected by the Bloomfieldian school of linguistics whose derivatives place the

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

into the

verb phrase In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of a verb and its arguments except the subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause. Thus, in the sentence ''A fat man quickly put the money into the box'', the words ''quic ...

, following from

Wilhelm Wundt Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and ...

Völkerpsychologie Völkerpsychologie is a method of psychology that was founded in the nineteenth century by the famous psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt. However, the term was first coined by post-Hegelian social philosophers Heymann Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus. Wundt ...

. Formalisms based on this convention were constructed in the 1950s by

Zellig Harris Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...

and

Charles Hockett Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post- Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as ...

. These gave rise to modern

generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...

. It has been suggested that

dependency relation In computer science, in particular in concurrency theory, a dependency relation is a binary relation on a finite domain \Sigma, symmetric, and reflexive; i.e. a finite tolerance relation. That is, it is a finite set of ordered pairs D, such t ...

s are caused by a random

mutation In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA or viral replication, mi ...

in the

human genome The human genome is a complete set of nucleic acid sequences for humans, encoded as DNA within the 23 chromosome pairs in cell nuclei and in a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria. These are usually treated separately as the n ...

. Generative models of formal linguistics, such as

head-driven phrase structure grammar Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to ...

, have also been used in natural language processing.

References

Linguistics Formal sciences {{Ling-stub

Approaches

Semiotic

Psychological

See also

References