CHAPTER I

Linguistics is a science about natural languages. To be more precise, it covers a whole set
of different related. General linguistics is a nucleus. It studies the general structure of various
natural languages and discovers the universal laws of functioning of natural languages. Many
concepts from general linguistics prove to be necessary for any researcher who deals with natural
languages. General linguistics is a fundamental science that was developed by many researchers
during the last two centuries, and it is largely based on the methods and results of grammarians
of older times, beginning from the classical antiquity.

Historical, or comparative, linguistics studies history of languages by their mutual

comparison, i.e., investigating the history of their similarities and differences. The second name
is explained by the fact that comparison is the main method in this branch of linguistics.
Comparative linguistics is even older than general linguistics, taking its origin from the
eighteenth century.

The twenty-first century will be the century of the total information revolution. The
development of the tools for the automatic process-ing of the natural language spoken in a
country or a whole group of countries is extremely important for the country to be competitive
both in science and technology. To develop such applications, specialists in computer science
need to have adequate tools to investigate language with a view to its automatic processing. One
of such tools is a deep knowledge of both computational linguistics and general linguistic
science.

CHAPTER II

In general linguistics, the phenomena under investigation are much more complicated and
variable from one object (i.e., language) to another than in physics. Therefore, the criteria for
accuracy of description and prediction of new facts are not so clear-cut in this field, allowing
different approaches to coexist, affect each other, compete, or merge. Because of this, linguistics
has a rich history with many different approaches that formed the basis for the current linguistic
theories.

Further research revealed great generality, mathematical elegance, and wide applicability
of generative grammars. They became used not only for description of natural languages, but
also for specification of formal languages, such as those used in mathematical logic,pattern
recognition, and programming languages. A new branch of science called mathematical
linguistics (in its narrow meaning) arose from these studies.

In the twentieth century, syntax was in the center of the linguistic research, and the
approach to syntactic issues determined the structure of any linguistic theory. There are two
major approaches to syntax: the constituency, or phrase-structure, approach, and the dependency
approach. The constituency tradition was originated by N. Chomsky with the introduction of the
context-free grammars, and the most recent development in this tradition is Head-driven Phrase
Structure Grammar theory. The dependency approach is used in the Meaning ⇔ Text Theory by
Igor Mel’čuk. Both approaches are applicable for describing linguistic phenomena in many
languages.

CHAPTER III

The amount of linguistic information necessary for spell checkers is much greater than
for hyphenation. A simple but very resourceconsuming approach operates with a list, or a
dictionary, of all valid words in a specific language. It is necessary to have also a criterion of
similarity of words, and some presuppositions about the most common typographic and spelling
errors. A deeper penetration into the correction problems requires a detailed knowledge of
morphology, since it facilitates the creation of a more compact dictionary that has a manageable
size.

Detection and correction of grammatical errors by taking into account adjacent words in
the sentence or even the whole sentence are much more difficult tasks for computational linguists
and software developers than just checking orthography. Grammar errors are those violating, for
example, the syntactic laws or the laws related to the structure of a sentence. In Spanish, one of
these laws is the agreement between a noun and an adjective in gender and grammatical number.

A short review of applied linguistic systems has shown that only very simple tasks like
hyphenation or simple spell checking can be solved on a modest linguistic basis. All the other
systems should employ relatively deep linguistic knowledge: dictionaries, morphologic and
syntactic analyzers, and in some cases deep semantic knowledge and reasoning. What is more,
nearly all of the discussed tasks, even spell checking, have to employ very deep analysis to be
solved with an accuracy approaching 100%. It was also shown that most of the language
processing tasks could be considered as special cases of the general task of language
understanding, one of the ultimate goals of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

CHAPTER IV

The first definition—“the principal means for expressing human thoughts”—touches

upon the expressive function of language. Indeed, some features of the outer world are reflected
in the human brain and are evidently processed by it, and this processing is just the human
thought. However, we do not have any real evidence that human beings directly use words of a
specific natural language in the process of thinking. Modes of thinking other than linguistic ones
are also known. For example, mathematicians with different native languages can have the same
ideas about an abstract subject, though they express these thoughts in quite different words. In
addition, there are kinds of human thoughts—like operations with musical or visual images—
that cannot be directly reduced to words.
 The main purpose of human communication is transferring some information—let us call
it Meaning —from one person to the other. However, the direct transferring of thoughts is not
possible. Thus, people have to use some special physical representation of their thoughts, let us
call it Text. Then, language is a tool to transform one of these representations to another, i.e. to
transform Meanings to words when speaking, and the words to their Meaning when listening.

The definition of language has been suggested as a transformer between the two
equivalent representations of information, the Text, i.e., the surface textual representation, and
the Meaning, i.e., the deep semantic representation. This transformation is ambiguous in both
directions: a homonymous Text corresponds to several different Meanings, and several
synonymous Texts correspond to the same Meaning. The description of the transformation
process is greatly simplified by introducing intermediate levels of information representation, of
which the main are morphologic and syntactic. At each level, some of the problems arising from
synonymy and homonymy can be solved. The general definitions of linguistic sign in Meaning
⇔ Text Theory and in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar turned out to be in essence
equivalent.

CHAPTER V

In terms of cybernetics, natural language is considered as a black box for the researcher.
A black box is a device with observable input and output but with a completely unobservable
inner structure. In the framework of this type of model, language is thought to be an imaginary
“speaking device”: the researcher asks the device some questions and records its answers. The
problem of the cybernetic modeling of natural language is more difficult than in other cases,
since there are two such boxes,the analyzing and synthesizing ones, working in opposite
directions. The analyzing block processes the utterances and the synthesizing block produces the
reactions to them.

There are still other models of interest for linguistics. They are called research models. At
input, they take texts in natural language, maybe prepared or formatted in a special manner
beforehand. As an output, they produce other texts, usually strictly formatted and representing
the contents of dictionaries, grammar tables, rules or anything similar to be used as a part of
functional models. A linguistic model is a system of data (features, types, structures, levels, etc.)
and rules, which, taken together, can exhibit a “behavior” similar to that of the human brain in
understanding and producing speech and texts. A functional linguistic model takes into account
the observed language behavior of human beings rather than the physiological activity of the
brain. This behavior is reflected in the texts or speech they produce in response to the texts or
speech they perceive.

So far, the direct modeling of the brain structures has failed, and several functional
models were proposed for the sake of computational linguistics. The modern functional models
have many features in common. They are intended to be quite formal, have a dynamic and non-
generative character, provide independence of linguistic algorithms from linguistic data, and
consider dictionaries as one of the main, inalienable parts of the model. Theoretical approaches
provide a solid basis for both holistic and reduced models of language oriented to applications.
The degree of the reduction in such a model heavily depends on the specific application.

The Strenghtness of the Book

 The material in this book is short and interesting so it's easy to understand.
 In this bok equipped with many images so that it can increase one’s reading interest.
 This book explains in great detail and is not straightforward.

Weakness of the Book

 The writing in this book is too tight and there are too many sentences in one paragraph