With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analyses, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples ("corpora"). Sampson asks why the discipline lost its way in the closing decades of the twentieth century, showing how the reliance on "speaker intuitions" resulted from misunderstandings about the nature of science, reinforced by accidents of publication history. Finally, he discusses the distinction between aspects of human language which can and those which cannot be investigated scientifically.
Author Biography
Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing at the University of Sussex.
