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Quantitative linguistics deals with language learning, language change, and application as well as structure of natural languages. QL investigates languages using statistical methods; its most demanding objective is the formulation of language laws and, ultimately, of a general theory of language in the sense of a set of interrelated languages ...
Pages in category "Linguistic theories and hypotheses" The following 36 pages are in this category, out of 36 total. This list may not reflect recent changes .
Statistical language acquisition, a branch of developmental psycholinguistics, studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive, produce, comprehend, and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects (phonological, syntactic, lexical, morphological, semantic) through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input.
A spectrogram of a male speaker saying the phrase "nineteenth century". There is no clear demarcation where one word ends and the next begins. It is a well-established finding that, unlike written language, spoken language does not have any clear boundaries between words; spoken language is a continuous stream of sound rather than individual words with silences between them. [2]
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis branches out into two theories: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism is viewed as the stronger form – because language is viewed as a complete barrier, a person is stuck with the perspective that the language enforces – while linguistic relativity is perceived as a weaker form of the theory because language is discussed as a ...
Statistical methods have been used for the purpose of quantitative analysis in comparative linguistics for more than a century. During the 1950s, the Swadesh list emerged: a standardised set of lexical concepts found in most languages, as words or phrases, that allow two or more languages to be compared and contrasted empirically.
The distributional hypothesis in linguistics is derived from the semantic theory of language usage, i.e. words that are used and occur in the same contexts tend to purport similar meanings. [2] The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth in the 1950s. [3]
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in linguistics states that the grammatical structure of a mother language influences the way we perceive the world. The hypothesis has been largely abandoned by linguists as it has found very limited experimental support, at least in its strong form, linguistic determinism.