nLab
linguistics

Idea

Linguistics is the (scientific) study of natural human language. See a reasonably good page at Wikipedia.

Formal Linguistics

Linguists may deploy formal methods to understand grammatical strings of words, and to allow compositional theories of meaning based on the meanings of the subparts of sentences.

• Montague grammar
• context free grammar
• categorial grammar
• pregroup grammar
• monad (in linguistics)
• categorical compositional distributional semantics
• dependent type theoretic methods in natural language semantics

Related Concepts

• syntax, semantics, semantics of a programming language
• lambda calculus, type theory
• context-free grammar
• monad (in computer science)
• continuation-passing style
• linear logic, modal logic
• mathematical linguistics
• transcendental grammar

Literature

Linguistics per se

• diverse materials and corpora can be found at extensive web site The Linguist List
• Wikipedia linguistics, philology, phonetics, morphology (linguistics), syntax, semantics, pragmatics, semiotics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics
• LaTeX for linguists
• F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale
• André Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale, (Engl. transl.: Elements of General Linguistics)
• Adrian Akmajian, Richard A. Demers, Ann K. Farmer, Robert M. Harnish, Linguistics, an introduction to language and communication
• John Lyons, Semantics; Linguistics semantics
• Bernard Comrie, Language universals and linguistic typology, syntax and morphology, 1981, 1989
• Peter Ladefoged, Keith Johnson, A course in phonetics
• Steven Pinker, The language instinct, 1994
• Winfred P. Lehmann, Historical linguistics: an introduction
• George Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things, 1987
• Ronald Langacker, Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 1, 1987, vol. 2, 1991
• Pieter A. M. Seuren, The logic of language, vol. II of Language from within; (vol. I: Language in cognition) Oxford University Press 2010
• David Mumford, Grammar isn’t merely part of language, 2016 blog

Category theory and linguistics

• Joachim Lambek, Pregroups and natural language processing, The Mathematical Intelligencer 28 (2006), 41–48 pdf
• Bob Coecke, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Stephen Clark, Mathematical foundations for a compositional distributional model of meaning, in the Lambek Festschrift, special issue of Linguistic Analysis, 2010 arxiv/1003.4394

category: foundations, philosophy