A range of electronic corpora has become increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. Less attention, however, has been paid to making other types of digital data available. This is especially true of that which one might describe as 'unconventional', namely, dialects, child language and bilingual databases. This book is a first step toward developing similar standards for enriching and preserving these neglected resources.

 

The work reported in this book came about as a result of the realization that the issue of the role of syntactic gaps in processing was unresolved. It is surprising that this should be the case, since there are few fields of study which seem to allow experimental approaches to produce answers to syntactic questions, and these few are generally investigated with great zeal. Gap processing shows the potential to be such a field, and it too had been very popular in the late eighties and the first half of the nineties.

The articles collected in this volume provide an overview of the status of derivational theory within one of the most popular frameworks in present-day phonology, Optimality Theory. According to Anderson (1985), the history of phonology in the twentieth century can be seen as a sequence of periods in which the emphasis is on the structure of phonological representations, alternating with periods in which the emphasis is on phonological derivations.

A systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. Introduces three approaches and explains the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach.