This book offers a highly accessible introduction to Natural Language Processing, the field that underpins a variety of language technologies ranging from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. You'll learn how to write Python programs to analyze the structure and meaning of texts, drawing on techniques from the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence.
A Natural History of Infixation (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)
This book presents the first cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like "im-bloody-possible", and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: Professor Yu explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics, considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. He examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Guinea, and South America.
Defenders of threatened languages all over the world, from advocates of biodiversity to dedicated defenders of their own cultural authenticity, are often humbled by the dimensity of the task that they are faced with when the weak and the few seek to find a safe-harbour against the ravages of the strong and the many. This book provides both practical case studies and theoretical directions from all five continents and advances thereby the collective pursuit of "reversing language shift" for the greater benefit of cultural democracy everywhere.
Language Acquisition of a Bilingual Child: A Sociolinguistic Perspective
The present study was begun 15 years ago and it will probably continue for many more years to come as it is my hope that this will become a truly longitudinal investigation. It is a developmental study of dual language acquisition by a single individual. And although the specifics of a single case study can never be directly generalized to other populations, what may be extrapolated is the interplay of variables which form the process of language development which we are attempting to understand more fully.
The Making of Language presents an alternative to the prevalent view of language as the product of human genetics. It argues instead that language originated in the cooperative activity of early humans: "We made language, as we made pots and pans." Author Mike Beaken shows how early forms of communication developed in step with technology, culture, and social organization. Thoroughly revised, this second edition also considers the significance of music in relation to other forms of communication.
