Recent scholarship in literary and linguistic studies

Abstract

The range of computer applications in literary and linguistic studies becomes increasingly broad and more complex at an astonishing rate of speed. This survey does not pretend to include notice of all works being published, which is beyond the capability of the human bibliographer; we are close to the day when enumerative bibliography must and should be done automatically. This article will examine a number of aspects of computational linguistics. Some state-of-the-art articles are followed by attention to work in grammars and conceptual semantics, syntactic analysis, parsing, morphological and phonemic analysis, dialectology, and the expected word counts and frequency lists. After a brief look at some work on systems modelling and data retrieval problems, the field of natural-language processing problems is quickly surveyed. Aids to the linguistic and literary scholar include notice of conferences, new languages and new technology, various research aids available, and reports from computing centers. A look at how some programming languages are being used is followed by a survey of guides for the beginning scholar in computational work, with special attention to input and editing problems. A glance at bibliographical articles in recent scholarship precedes commentary on recent work in Biblical studies, classical literature, and Oriental studies. Work in literary uses of computers includes computer-generated poetry, applications in preparation of dictionaries and thesauri and in lexicography and linguistic fields, in concordance-making and indexing, in editing and collation, in disputed authorship and authorship identification problems, and, of course, in the vast field of stylistics.Computational linguistics, its past and future, is the subject of a lengthy and discursive article in Linguistics by Jacob L. Mey. He points out, in his broad survey of the field during the 1960s, that the demise of machine translation roughly coincided with the 1966 ALPAC report. From that time computational linguistics (CL), which he stoutly claims is a subfield of linguistics and not of computation; has been in the ascendancy. The eighth section of the Linguistics article, in which he works towards a theory ofcL, has as its best and most interesting feature a discussion of the analogues to simulation and modelling. This article also provides an excellent three-page list of references. Mey's second article on CL, in CHum, is similar to the earlier one, but it is much more succinct and precise. In it, Mey's predictions for the 1970s are quite interesting, including his commentary on the building ofhomunculi, predicated on the theory that the computer is a man-like machine. Among his provocative questions is one of the degree of fidelity in simulation of human behavior and the best way to implement this simulation.