Defining Language

A local grammar of definition sentences

Geoff Barnbrook | University of Birmingham

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027222817 (Eur) | EUR 105.00

ISBN 9781588112989 (USA) | USD 158.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027296177 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

Definition is a basic activity of language, of particular importance to linguists because of its use of language to describe itself. Beyond this inherent significance as a crucial element of language study, definitions also provide a rich potential source of the information needed for Natural Language Processing systems. This book describes an investigation of the subset of general language used in definition sentences and the development of a taxonomy of definition types, a grammar of definition sentences and parsing software which can extract their functional components. The work is based on definition sentences used in one of the dictionaries from the Cobuild range, and the book includes a brief history of the development of monolingual English dictionaries, an assessment of the concepts of sublanguages and local grammars and a full exploration of the results of the analysis and of the present and future applications of the taxonomy, grammar and parser.

[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 11] 2002. xvi, 281 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.11

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | p. vii

Brief description | p. ix

1. Language, definitions and dictionaries | pp. 1–13

2. Monolingual English dictionaries | pp. 15–57

3. Grammars, parsers, sublanguages and local grammars | pp. 59–95

4. Methodology | pp. 97–133

5. The definition type taxonomy | pp. 135–160

6. The definition language grammar and its parser | pp. 161–212

7. Evaluation and applications | pp. 213–252

Appendix 1 | pp. 253–256

Appendix 2 | pp. 257–262

Appendix 3

Simon Krek | pp. 263–267

Definitions index | pp. 273–277

Names index | p. 278

Terms index | pp. 279–280

“I benefited a great deal from reading this book, as it has forced me to think about possible dimensions of the analysis of language independent of the more traditional ones of syntax and semantics.”

Stefano Bertolo on Linguist List Vol-14-196, 2003

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