Linguistic Databases (Center for the Study of Language and Information Publication Lecture Notes, 77) (Volume 77)

Linguistic Databases explores the increasing use of databases in linguistics. The enormous potential in linguistic data - billions of utterances and messages daily - has been difficult to exploit. Many linguists have had to concentrate on introspective data with its inevitable blinders toward frequency, variation, and naturalness. Applications of linguistics have been handicapped. This volume explores the potential advantages of database applications to linguistics. Included in this volume are reports on database activities in phonetics, phonology, lexicography and syntax, comparative grammar, second-language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, and language pathology. The book presents the specialized problems of multi-media (especially audio) and multi-lingual texts, including those in exotic writing systems. Implemented solutions are also discussed. The opportunities to use existing, minimally structured text repositories are presented.