Information about Unsolved Problems In Linguistics
This article discusses currently unsolved problems in linguistics.
Some of the issues below are commonly recognized as problems per se, i.e., it is general agreement that the solution is unknown. Others may be described as controversies, i.e., while there is no common agreement about the answer, there are established schools of thought that believe they have a correct answer.
Some of the issues below are commonly recognized as problems per se, i.e., it is general agreement that the solution is unknown. Others may be described as controversies, i.e., while there is no common agreement about the answer, there are established schools of thought that believe they have a correct answer.
Languages
- Origin of language is the major unsolved problem, despite centuries of interest in the topic.
- Unclassified languages (languages whose genetic affiliation has not been established, mostly due to lack of reliable data)
- Special case: Languages isolate
- Gradient well-formedness[1], referring to intermediate linguistic phenomena falling between complete well-formedness and complete ill-formedness.
Psycholinguistics
- Language emergence:
- Emergence of grammar[2]
- Language acquisition:
- Controversy: infant language acquisition / first language acquisition. How are infants able to learn language? One line of debate is between two points of view: that of psychological nativism, i.e., the language ability is somehow "hardwired" in the human brain, and that of the "tabula rasa" or Blank Slate, i.e., language is acquired due to brain's interaction with environment. Another formulation of this controversy is "Nature versus nurture".
- Is the human ability to use syntax based on innate mental structures or is syntactic speech the function of intelligence and interaction with other humans? The question is tightly related with the two major problems: language emergence and language acquisition.
- The language acquisition device: How localized is language in the brain? Is there a particular area in the brain responsible for the development of language abilities, or is language not localized in the brain, or is it only partially localized?
- What fundamental reasons explain why ultimate attainment in second language acquisition is typically some way short of the native speaker's ability, with learners varying widely in performance?
- Animals and language: How much language (e.g. syntax) can animals be taught to use?
- An overall issue: Can we design ethical psycholinguistic experiments to answer the questions above?
Translation
- Is there an objective gauge for the quality of translation?[3]
- Machine translation, despite successes, is a source of a large number of unsolved problems
- Pronoun resolution, Anaphora (linguistics) [4]
- Nominal compound analysis [5]
References
1. ^ Gradient Well-Formedness in Optimality Theory (rtf file):- "Virtually every generative linguist has had the following experience: a given linguistic entity (sentence, novel word, pronunciation) is presented to a native speaker and judged to be neither fully well-formed nor fully unacceptable. In such instances, consultants often say things like "I guess I could say that," "It's all right but not perfect," "It's pretty bad but not completely out," and the like"
2. ^ "Simulated Evolution of Language: a Review of the Field", Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 5, no. 2
3. ^ Robert Spence, "A Functional Approach to Translation Studies. New systemic linguistic challenges in empirically informed didactics", 2004, ISBN 3-89825-777-0, thesis. A pdf file
4. ^ Jeffrey C. Reynar, "Topic Segmentation: Algorithms and Applications" (1998), Ph.D thesis, citation.
5. ^ Pierre Isabelle, "Another Look at Nominal Compounds", In Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pdf)
List resourcesA list of unsolved problems may refer to several conjectures or open problems in various fields. The problems are listed below:- General
- Unsolved problems in linguistics
- Unsolved problems in economics
- Unsolved problems in mathematics
..... Click the link for more information.For the journal, see .Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
..... Click the link for more information.controversy or dispute is a matter of opinion over which parties actively disagree, argue, or debate. Controversies can range in size from private disputes between two individuals to large-scale disagreements between societies.
..... Click the link for more information.For the journal, see .Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
..... Click the link for more information.Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. Part of this endeavor involves the search for and explanation of linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common.
..... Click the link for more information.Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning 'sound, voice') is the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), and their production, audition and perception, while phonology, which
..... Click the link for more information.For the journal, see .Phonology (Greek φωνή (phōnē), voice, sound + λόγος (lógos), word, speech, subject of discussion), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a
..... Click the link for more information.For other uses, see Morphology.Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.
..... Click the link for more information.In computer science, SYNTAX is a system used to generate lexical and syntactic analyzers (parsers) (both deterministic and non-deterministic) for all kind of context-free grammars
..... Click the link for more information.
..... Click the link for more information.Lexical semantics is a subfield of linguistics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky, 1995). Words may either be taken to denote things in the world, or concepts, depending on the particular approach to lexical semantics.
..... Click the link for more information.Statistical Semantics is the study of "how the statistical patterns of human word usage can be used to figure out what people mean, at least to a level sufficient for information access" (Furnas, 2006).
..... Click the link for more information.Structural semantics deals with relationships between the meanings of terms within a sentence, and how meaning can be composed from smaller elements.See also
- Principle of compositionality
- Ferdinand de Saussure
..... Click the link for more information.Prototype Theory is a mode of graded categorization in Cognitive Science, where some members of a category are more central than others. For example, when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more frequently cited than, say, stool.
..... Click the link for more information.Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
..... Click the link for more information.Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
..... Click the link for more information.For the academic journal, see .
Language acquisition is the process by which the language capability develops in a human. First language acquisition concerns the development of language in children, while second language acquisition focuses on
..... Click the link for more information.Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language.
..... Click the link for more information.Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.
..... Click the link for more information.Linguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes (on both small and large scales) to the interpretation of sociocultural
..... Click the link for more information.Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different,
..... Click the link for more information.In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general.
..... Click the link for more information.Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics.
..... Click the link for more information.Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past) by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic
..... Click the link for more information.Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:- to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
..... Click the link for more information.Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or by genetic descent.
..... Click the link for more information.Etymology is the study of the history of words - when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.
In languages with a long written history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to
..... Click the link for more information.Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in . For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all belong in a particular situation.
..... Click the link for more information.In linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used. These rules can cover such topics as standards for spelling and grammar or syntax; or rules for what is deemed socially or politically correct.
..... Click the link for more information.Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language and has been of scholarly interest throughout recorded history. Contemporary linguistics is the result of a continuous European intellectual tradition originating in ancient Greece that was later
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