Nina Hyams (born 1952) is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles. [1]
Hyams received her PhD in linguistics in 1983 from Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with a dissertation entitled, The acquisition of parameterized grammars. [2] It was published by Springer in 1986, [3] and it remains a widely cited and influential classic. [4]
Her primary research area since her dissertation is grammatical development in first language acquisition. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] She is particularly noted for her research into the acquisition of null subjects. [11] [12] [13]
In 2020 she was inducted as a Fellow in the Linguistic Society of America. [14] [15]
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.
In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970 reformulating the ideas of Zellig Harris (1951), and further developed by Ray Jackendoff, along the lines of the theory of generative grammar put forth in the 1950s by Chomsky. It attempts to capture the structure of phrasal categories with a single uniform structure called the X-bar schema, basing itself on the assumption that any phrase in natural language is an XP that is headed by a given syntactic category X. It played a significant role in resolving issues that phrase structure rules had, representative of which is the proliferation of grammatical rules, which is against the thesis of generative grammar.
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists, tend to share certain working assumptions such as the competence–performance distinction and the notion that some domain-specific aspects of grammar are partly innate in humans. These assumptions are rejected in non-generative approaches such as usage-based models of language. Generative linguistics includes work in core areas such as syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, with additional extensions to topics including biolinguistics and music cognition.
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.
In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages characterized by a flat phrase structure, which allows syntactically discontinuous expressions, and a relatively free word order.
Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax from semantics.
Lydia White is a Canadian linguist and educator in the area of second language acquisition (SLA). She is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at McGill University.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax, semantics (meaning), morphology, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics. Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics and psycholinguistics bridge many of these divisions.
The main purpose of theories of second-language acquisition (SLA) is to shed light on how people who already know one language learn a second language. The field of second-language acquisition involves various contributions, such as linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and education. These multiple fields in second-language acquisition can be grouped as four major research strands: (a) linguistic dimensions of SLA, (b) cognitive dimensions of SLA, (c) socio-cultural dimensions of SLA, and (d) instructional dimensions of SLA. While the orientation of each research strand is distinct, they are in common in that they can guide us to find helpful condition to facilitate successful language learning. Acknowledging the contributions of each perspective and the interdisciplinarity between each field, more and more second language researchers are now trying to have a bigger lens on examining the complexities of second language acquisition.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
In linguistics, the term formalism is used in a variety of meanings which relate to formal linguistics in different ways. In common usage, it is merely synonymous with a grammatical model or a syntactic model: a method for analyzing sentence structures. Such formalisms include different methodologies of generative grammar which are especially designed to produce grammatically correct strings of words; or the likes of Functional Discourse Grammar which builds on predicate logic.
In linguistics, transformational syntax is a derivational approach to syntax that developed from the extended standard theory of generative grammar originally proposed by Noam Chomsky in his books Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. It emerged from a need to improve on approaches to grammar in structural linguistics.
The pro-drop parameter, or null subject parameter, is the parameter that determines whether or not a language is pro-drop. A positive setting of the parameter allows an empty pro-element to be identified by its governor, which is the case in pro-drop languages.
Diane Lillo-Martin is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. She is currently the Director of the university's Cognitive Sciences Program as well as its Coordinator of American Sign Language Studies. She spent 12 years as Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut.
David William Lightfoot is an American linguist who served both as assistant director, of the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences from 2005 to 2009, and as the President of the Linguistic Society of America from 2010 to 2011. As of 2024, he is Emeritus Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. He is the founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. Lightfoot is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). He is also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Lightfoot has been a Guest Professor of linguistics at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) since 2016.
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