Geoffrey Sampson
Biographic Data
| ID | 713649 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoffrey Sampson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Sampson |
| SIGNATURE | SAMPSON G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
From phonemic spelling to distinctive spelling
Whether spelling is phonemic is only one factor in whether a writing system is suitable for a given language; another consideration is "lexical distinctiveness" of spelling, in two separate senses, and the importance of lexical distinctiveness grows as a writing system matures. Seen in this light, the increasing irregularity of English spelling, over the period when English has been a written language, has been a desirable response to the changin…
The redundancy of self-organization as an explanation of English spelling
The redundancy of self-organization as an explanation of English spelling Geoffrey Sampson Kristian Berg and Mark Aronoff (2017; henceforth B&A) use historical data on the spellings of various English suffixes to argue for the role of 'self-organization' as a process by which system emerges spontaneously in an unregulated linguistic domain. They argue that choices of spelling for given phonological suffixes gradually settled down in such a way th…
Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater. 2016. Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing
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Letters to Language
Letters to Language Seth Cable and Geoffrey Sampson Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted. Helen’s name was Kaachkoo.aakw (not ‘Káachku.aakw’), and Dick’s name was Xwaayeenák (not…
Economic growth and linguistic theory
This ‘short shot’ article draws attention to an unresolved contradiction between fundamental assumptions of modern linguistics and economics. Endogenous growth theory has become the consensus explanation of the phenomenon of long-term economic growth. This theory makes an assumption that is not seen as controversial by economists, namely, that the supply of new, unanticipated ideas is limited only by the level of resources committed to idea gener…
One man’s norm is another’s metaphor: Patrick Hanks: Lexical analysis. Norms and exploitations
Patrick Hanks sees linguistic approaches to word meaning as divided between two unattractive extremes. Generative theories, such as were pioneered by Katz and Fodor (1963) and pursued recently e.g. by Wierzbicka (1996), attempt to capture meanings with an apparatus of quasi-mathematical rules and universal semantic primitives which is unequal to reflecting the messy realities revealed by empirical corpus studies. On the other hand, the doctrine o…
A counterexample to homophony avoidance
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The empirical trend: Ten years on
Linguistic science of the past half-century has often been distorted through neglect of normal scientific standards of empirical falsifiability. An earlier paper in this journal used a quantitative literature survey to examine how far in practice the newer trend towards use by linguists of corpora and other empirical data sources had progressed. The result was ambiguous: a trend towards greater empiricism had occurred since about 1970, but around…
Letters to Language
Letters to Language Geoffrey Sampson and Jan Terje Faarlund Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted. Response to a review September 30, 2010 To the Editor: Jan Terje Faarlund’s revi…
Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable
This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some languages are at a later stage of evolution than others. It also appears to be an inevitable outcome of o…
Quantifying the shift towards empirical methods
In recent decades there has been a trend towards greater use of empirical data, for instance corpus data, within linguistics. I analyse a sample of linguistics articles from the past half-century in order to establish a detailed profile for this trend. Based on consistent criteria for classifying papers as evidence-based, intuition-based, or neutral, the resulting profile shows that the trend (i) is real, but (ii) is strikingly weaker in general …
Exploring the richness of the stimulus
The common-sense layman's assumption would be that the structure of the languages which people grow up speaking reflects the properties of the language-samples they hear. There is no good reason to dispute that. Pullum and Scholz see their own discussion as open to the criticism that their examples are drawn from genres which are untypical of the speech encountered by young children. Accordingly, I examine the evidence of a four-million-word samp…
English for the Computer: The Susanne Corpus and Analytic Scheme
Computer processing of natural language is a burgeoning field, but until now there has been no agreement on a standardized classification of the diverse structural elements that occur in real-life language material. This book attempts to define a Linnaean taxonomy for the English language: an annotation scheme, the SUSANNE scheme, which yields a labelled constituency structure for any string of English, comprehensively identifying all of its surf…
A Proposal for Improving the Measurement of Parse Accuracy
Widespread dissatisfaction has been expressed with the measure of parse accuracy used in the Parseval programme, based on the location of constituent boundaries. Scores on the Parseval metric are perceived as poorly correlated with intuitive judgments of goodness of parse; the metric applies only to a restricted range of grammar formalisms; and it is seen as divorced from applications of NLP technology. The present paper defines an alternative me…
Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate
Reply to Longa
In response to an invitation by the editors of Linguistics, I should like to comment on Victor Longa's review (this issue) of my Educating Eve (Sampson 1997)
John Woldemar Cowan, The complete Lojban language . Fairfax, VA: The Logical Language Group, Inc., 1997. Pp. x+608
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English for the Computer: The Susanne Corpus and Analytic Scheme
Depth in English grammar
Corpus data are used to investigate Yngve's claim that English usage avoids grammatical structures in which the number of left branches between any word and the root node of a sentence exceeds some fixed limit. The data do display a marked bias against left-branching, but the pattern of word-depths does not conform to Yngve's concept of a sharp limit. The bias could alternatively reflect a statistical invariance in the incidence of left-branching…
Chinese script and the diversity of writing systems
J. DeFrancis (1989) affirme que tous les systemes d'ecriture se fondent sur un principe phonetique. L'ecriture chinoise, souvent citee comme exception, est selon lui essentiellement un systeme phonographique syllabique. Le present article montre que cette hypothese confond diachronie et synchronie. Il se peut qu'une ecriture soit phonographique a sa creation, mais l'evolution de l'ecriture et du langage parle engendre une disparition de cette bas…
Florian Coulmas, The writing systems of the world. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Pp. ix + 302
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The Computational Analysis of English: A Corpus-Based Approach
That strange realm called theory
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE, rev. ed. by Jonathan Culler Iíhaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. 157pp., $23.50 ($5.95 paper) IN SEARCH OF SEMIOTICS by David Sless Totawa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1986. 170pp., $28.50
Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction
An examination, through a series of detailed case studies, of the different ways in which the world’s cultures have made spoken language visible and permanent
The Computational Analysis of English: A Corpus-Based Approach
specifically on the difficulty of recognizing learning versus language difficulties, that is, how to identify a nonnative-speaking child's need for special education services. They propose a model that administrators can employ that minimizes bias. In a similar vein, the next chapter, by Jeffery Braden and Sandra Fradd, suggests ways that administrators can anticipate difficulties and intervene before such referrals are necessary. William Tikunof…
The single mother condition
I propose a modification of the notion ‘phrase-marker’, to permit nodes to branch upwards as well as downwards. The change for which I argue both simplifies linguistic theory and renders it more empirically adequate
Quantifying the shift towards empirical methods
In recent decades there has been a trend towards greater use of empirical data, for instance corpus data, within linguistics. I analyse a sample of linguistics articles from the past half-century in order to establish a detailed profile for this trend. Based on consistent criteria for classifying papers as evidence-based, intuition-based, or neutral, the resulting profile shows that the trend (i) is real, but (ii) is strikingly weaker in general …
A myth about centre-embedding
Linguistic universals as evidence for empiricism
I. Noam Chomsky turned the previously rather specialized discipline of linguistics into a subject of considerable general philosophical interest by his argument that the discovery of universal properties of natural language requires us to adopt a ‘nativist’ or ‘rationalist’ view of human mind – a view according to which ‘our systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct’ (Chomsky, 1976: 7). (I shal…
What was transformational grammar
One fact needs one explanation
On the Need for a Phonological Base
Pre-Chomskyan linguistics recognized that the phonological systems of natural languages tend to form symmetrical patterns; this insight could be incorporated into generative phonology via a phonological base component, but is not adequately expressed by MS rules. A phonological base would also solve some difficulties in the theory of systematic phonetics. Current lack of interest in phonological patterning has resulted from the increased attentio…
The empirical trend: Ten years on
Linguistic science of the past half-century has often been distorted through neglect of normal scientific standards of empirical falsifiability. An earlier paper in this journal used a quantitative literature survey to examine how far in practice the newer trend towards use by linguists of corpora and other empirical data sources had progressed. The result was ambiguous: a trend towards greater empiricism had occurred since about 1970, but around…
Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructures of Cognition
1. Very rarely, a book is published which not only advances our knowledge of a particular topic, but fundamentally recasts our methods of investigating and thinking about large tracts of the map of learning. Linguists remember 1957 as the publication year of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic structures-a book whose ostensible subjects were the structure of English grammatical rules and the goals of grammatical description, but which can be seen with hinds…
Theory Choice in a Two-level Science
Is There a Universal Phonetic Alphabet
Many ‘physical phonetic ‘ variables are continuous, so physically there is an infinitely large range of possible sounds. The generative phonologists, unlike Bloomfield, believe in a universal level of ’systematic phonetics’, where only a fixed finite number of distinct values are possible for each phonetic variable, and hence there is only a finite set of possible segments. To justify this hypothesis it would be necessary (a) to show that facts f…
Popperian Language-Acquisition Undefeated
The irrelevance of transformational omnipotence
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A Note on Wang's 'Phonological Features of Tone
Hanoi dorsal finals
Hanoi Vietnamese, although not apparently genetically related to Chinese, is a language phonologically of the Chinese type; in the terminology of Hockett (1955, 60-1, 129), Hanoi Vietnamese phonology constitutes a system without interludes, with syllable juncture, and with tones as ICs of syllables. Hanoi phonology is in fact rather close to the phonology of Middle Chinese (Karlgren's 'Ancient Chinese', cf. Pulleyblank, 1962, 64), the source, via…
English for the Computer: The Susanne Corpus and Analytic Scheme
Computer processing of natural language is a burgeoning field, but until now there has been no agreement on a standardized classification of the diverse structural elements that occur in real-life language material. This book attempts to define a Linnaean taxonomy for the English language: an annotation scheme, the SUSANNE scheme, which yields a labelled constituency structure for any string of English, comprehensively identifying all of its surf…
Depth in English grammar
Corpus data are used to investigate Yngve's claim that English usage avoids grammatical structures in which the number of left branches between any word and the root node of a sentence exceeds some fixed limit. The data do display a marked bias against left-branching, but the pattern of word-depths does not conform to Yngve's concept of a sharp limit. The bias could alternatively reflect a statistical invariance in the incidence of left-branching…
Chinese script and the diversity of writing systems
J. DeFrancis (1989) affirme que tous les systemes d'ecriture se fondent sur un principe phonetique. L'ecriture chinoise, souvent citee comme exception, est selon lui essentiellement un systeme phonographique syllabique. Le present article montre que cette hypothese confond diachronie et synchronie. Il se peut qu'une ecriture soit phonographique a sa creation, mais l'evolution de l'ecriture et du langage parle engendre une disparition de cette bas…
The Transformational-Generative Paradigm and Modern Linguistic Theory
A proposal for constraining deletion
There 1 , there 2
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A Note on Wang's 'Phonological Features of Tone
Hanoi dorsal finals
Hanoi Vietnamese, although not apparently genetically related to Chinese, is a language phonologically of the Chinese type; in the terminology of Hockett (1955, 60-1, 129), Hanoi Vietnamese phonology constitutes a system without interludes, with syllable juncture, and with tones as ICs of syllables. Hanoi phonology is in fact rather close to the phonology of Middle Chinese (Karlgren's 'Ancient Chinese', cf. Pulleyblank, 1962, 64), the source, via…
On the Need for a Phonological Base
Pre-Chomskyan linguistics recognized that the phonological systems of natural languages tend to form symmetrical patterns; this insight could be incorporated into generative phonology via a phonological base component, but is not adequately expressed by MS rules. A phonological base would also solve some difficulties in the theory of systematic phonetics. Current lack of interest in phonological patterning has resulted from the increased attentio…
Can language be explained functionally
Natural Language and the Paradox of the Liar
A proposal for constraining deletion
There 1 , there 2
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The Concept ‘Semantic Representation’
The irrelevance of transformational omnipotence
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A Note on Broadbent's Defence of Empirical Psychology
Is There a Universal Phonetic Alphabet
Many ‘physical phonetic ‘ variables are continuous, so physically there is an infinitely large range of possible sounds. The generative phonologists, unlike Bloomfield, believe in a universal level of ’systematic phonetics’, where only a fixed finite number of distinct values are possible for each phonetic variable, and hence there is only a finite set of possible segments. To justify this hypothesis it would be necessary (a) to show that facts f…
The single mother condition
I propose a modification of the notion ‘phrase-marker’, to permit nodes to branch upwards as well as downwards. The change for which I argue both simplifies linguistic theory and renders it more empirically adequate
Theory Choice in a Two-level Science
One fact needs one explanation
The Simplicity of Linguistic Theories
The Transformational-Generative Paradigm and Modern Linguistic Theory
Reply to Graham
Linguistic universals as evidence for empiricism
I. Noam Chomsky turned the previously rather specialized discipline of linguistics into a subject of considerable general philosophical interest by his argument that the discovery of universal properties of natural language requires us to adopt a ‘nativist’ or ‘rationalist’ view of human mind – a view according to which ‘our systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct’ (Chomsky, 1976: 7). (I shal…
A Dilemma Defended
Comment on d'Agostino
Basic problems in methodology and linguistics
The indivisibility of words
Many contemporary linguists hold that an adequate description of a natural language must represent many of its vocabulary items as syntactically and/or semantically complex. A sentence containing the word kill , for instance, will on this view be assigned a ‘deep syntactic structure’ or ‘semantic representation’ in which kill is represented by a portion or portions of tree-structure, the lowest nodes of which are labelled with ‘semantic primitive…
What was transformational grammar
On David Miller, “Socialism and the Market” (Vol. 5, No. 4, November 1977)
Popperian Language-Acquisition Undefeated
Philosophy (48 works) · Linguistics (41 works) · Computer Science (32 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (11 works) · Mathematics (11 works)