We explore the implications of Zipf’s law for the understanding of linguistic productivity. Focusing on language acquisition, we show that the item/usage based approach has not been supported by adequate statistical evidence. By contrast, the quantitative properties of a productive grammar can be precisely formulated, and are consistent with even very young children’s language. Moreover, drawin...

The aim of the present investigation is to examine applied linguistics and english language teaching. Many resent researches concerned with applied linguistics have led to a phenomenon to resolve language problems in general and in particular english language. In general, language phenomenon is complex. Finegan and Besiner defined language as a finite system of elements and principles that make...

this paper reports results from a corpus-based study that explored the frequency of words in the abstracts of applied linguistics journal articles. the abstracts of major articles in leading applied linguists journals, published since 2005 up to november 2001 were analyzed using software modules from the compleat lexical tutor. the output includes a list of the most frequent content words, list...

This article introduces a quantitative, data-driven method to identify clusters of groups of data points in longitudinal data. We illustrate this method with examples from firstlanguage acquisition research. First, we discuss a variety of shortcomings of current practices in the identification and handling of stages in studies of language acquisition. Second, we explain and exemplify our method...

We propose a hierarchical clustering approach designed to group linguistic features for supervised machine learning that is inspired by variationist linguistics. The method makes it possible to abstract away from the individual feature occurrences by grouping features together that behave alike with respect to the target class, thus providing a new, more general perspective on the data. On the ...

The paper presents the Etymological DICtionary ediTOR (EDICTOR), a free, interactive, web-based tool designed to aid historical linguists in creating, editing, analysing, and publishing etymological datasets. The EDICTOR offers interactive solutions for important tasks in historical linguistics, including facilitated input and segmentation of phonetic transcriptions, quantitative and qualitativ...

The field of language dynamics encompasses the study and modeling of how languages develop (language evolution), change, and interact (language competition). It contrasts with traditional historical linguistics in several ways: the focus is on the world’s linguistic diversity rather than just on specific languages or language families; methods are quantitative rather than qualitative; computer ...

Computational modeling of human language processes is a small but growing subfield of computational linguistics. This paper describes a course that makes use of recent research in psychocomputational modeling as a framework to introduce a number of mainstream computational linguistics concepts to an audience of linguistics, cognitive science and computer science doctoral students. The emphasis ...

The rise of social media has brought computational linguistics in ever-closer contact with bad language: text that defies our expectations about vocabulary, spelling, and syntax. This paper surveys the landscape of bad language, and offers a critical review of the NLP community’s response, which has largely followed two paths: normalization and domain adaptation. Each approach is evaluated in t...

The aim of this paper is to present the methodology and results of a detailed analysis of syntactic structures in Czech, performed with the aid of computer. This work is a part of a large and long-term project, known as Quantitative analysis of present-day standard Czech, which is carried out in the Department of mathematical linguistics at the Czech language Institute under the leadership of M...