Martin Kay, in his speech delivered in 2005 on receipt of his ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, specified computational linguistics as follows: “Computational linguistics is trying to do what linguists do in a computational manner” (Kay 2005, page 429). I believe it is a legitimate question for a computational linguist to ask what linguists do. Coming from Prague, it is then quite a natural quest...

As the text databases available to users become larger and more heterogeneous, genre becomes increasingly important for computational linguistics as a complement to topical and structural principles of classification. We propose a theory of genres as bundles of facets, which correlate with various surface cues, and argue that genre detection based on surface cues is as successful as detection b...

An analogy is presented between music and linguistic discourse in terms of lexical cohesion. Linguistic discourse and music are two different manifestations of human communication. They are both meaningful and coherent, and both are processes inherently temporal. Lexical cohesion is a semantic relation manifested in the lexical level of language. A short sample of discourse is analysed and comp...

LINGUISTICS, as every other empirical science, is a complex mixture of theory and observation. The precise nature of this mixture is still not too well understood, and in this respect the difference between linguistics and, say, physics is probably at most one of degree. This lack of methodological insight has often led to futile disputes between linguists and other scientists dealing with lang...

The formulation of explicit structural hypotheses is one of the striking developments of linguistics in the last decades. From the demand that linguistic analysis be based on form, followed the study of formal properties and relations which were observable in individual languages. Since all known languages display underlying similarities, concern with form in linguistics has led to combined for...

The concept of a structural distribution function originates from linguistics. Let M denote the size of the vocabulary of an author and consider a text of this author that contains n words. Every choice of a word in the text from the vocabulary can be seen as the realization of a multinomial random vector. The whole text consists of a sequence of such choices X = (X (i) 1,M , . . . , X (i) M,M)...

Sign language descriptions that use an analytic model borrowed from spoken language structural linguistics have proved to be not fully appropriate. Pictorial and action-like modes of expression are integral to how signed utterances are constructed and to how they work. However, observation shows that speakers likewise use kinesic and vocal expressions that are not accommodated by spoken languag...

In his Course in General Linguistics, first published in 1916, Saussure postulated the existence of a general science of signs, or Semiology, of which linguistics would form only one part. Semiology therefore aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ri...

In modern linguistics, the functional and communicative side phenomena are growing towards pragmatic aspect of language. However, problem relationship between meaning its expression still remains in focus linguists’ attention. The characterizing sentences linguistics has not yet been analyzed. This research is first instance a systematic study syntactic structures ways expressing this case, mai...