Computation and Quantitative Studies

Expertly edited by Jonathan Webster, this sixth volume in the collected works by Michael Halliday includes his writings that span five decades, covering developments in machine translation and corpus linguistics. Throughout his career, Michael Halliday continued to address the issue of the application of linguistic scholarship to computational and quantitative studies of language. The principles and methods outlined in these papers remain as relevant today as when they were first published, continuing to point the way forward in an endeavour where success depends more on advancing our knowledge of language than machines. According to Jan Svartvik, Emeritus Professor at Lund University, Sweden:

This is a deeply impressive book by a prominent linguist. As always, Professor Halliday's contributions are pervasively readable and stimulating.

Table of contents

Part one: Machine translation: The early years
Editor's introduction
1. The linguistic basis of a mechanical thesaurus, and its application to English preposition classification
2. Linguistics and machine translation

Part two: Probabilistic grammar and the corpus
Editor's introduction
3. Towards probabilistic interpretations
4. Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar
5. Language as system and language as instance: the corpus as a theoretical construct
6. [with Z L James] A quantitative study of polarity and primary tense in the English finite clause
7. Quantitative studies and probabilities in grammar
8. The spoken language corpus

Part three: Towards "intelligent computing" (computing with Meaning)
Editor's introduction
9. On language in relation to fuzzy logic and intelligent computing
10. Fuzzy grammatics: a systemic functional approach to fuzziness in neutral language
11. Computing meaning: some reflections on past experience and present prospects


Appendix: Systems of the English clause: a trial grammar for the PENMAN text generation project. [Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California]