For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective.
This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.

The Routledge History of Literature in English - Britain and Ireland
This new guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish Literature uniquely charts some of the main features of literary language development and highlights key language topics. Clearly structured and highly readable, unlike traditional histories of literature it spans over a thousand years of literary history from AD 600 to the present day. It emphasises the growth of literary writing, its traditions, conventions and changing characteristics, and includes literature from the margins, both geographical and cultural.
Key features of the book are:
* an up-to-date guide to the major periods of literature in English in Britain and Ireland
* extensive coverage of post-1945 literature
* language notes spanning AD 600 to the present
* extensive quotations from poetry, prose and drama
* a timeline of the important historical and political events
This will be essential reading for all students of English literature and language.

Ultralingua English Definitions and Thesaurus 4.4.1
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Ultralingua revolutionizes the way you work with language.
Computerized dictionaries offer speed and ease of use far exceeding the capabilities of paper dictionaries. Moreover, Ultralingua dictionaries offer access to information in a variety of ways, thanks to the indexing system, the reverse translation / auxiliary definition feature, and the extensive language references.