Geoffrey Sampson
List of John Benjamins publications in which Geoffrey Sampson is involved.
Book series
ISSN 1875-1792
2019 An unaddressed phonological contradiction International Journal of Chinese Linguistics 6:2, pp. 221–237 | Article
There is general agreement on the main features of the process through which the phonology of modern standard Chinese has evolved over three millennia from that of Old Chinese. However, according to general linguistic theory, that phonological history is impossible: the theory claims that no… read more
2018 From phonemic spelling to distinctive spelling Understanding Writing Systems, Beeksma, Merijn and Martin Neef (eds.), pp. 3–25 | Article
Whether spelling is phonemic is only one factor in whether a writing system is suitable for a given language; another consideration is "lexical distinctiveness" of spelling, in two separate senses, and the importance of lexical distinctiveness grows as a writing system matures. Seen in this… read more
2016 Review of Evans (2015): The Crucible of Language: How Language and Mind Create Meaning Language and Dialogue 6:2, pp. 329–336 | Review
2013 One man’s norm is another’s metaphor: Patrick Hanks: Lexical analysis. Norms and exploitations Language and Dialogue 3:3, pp. 437–456 | Article
Patrick Hanks sees linguistic approaches to word meaning as divided between two unattractive extremes. Generative theories, such as were pioneered by Katz and Fodor (1963) and pursued recently e.g. by Wierzbicka (1996), attempt to capture meanings with an apparatus of quasi-mathematical rules and… read more
2013 A counterexample to homophony avoidance Diachronica 30:4, pp. 579–591 | Article
2013 The empirical trend: Ten years on International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18:2, pp. 281–289 | Article
Linguistic science of the past half-century has often been distorted through neglect of normal scientific standards of empirical falsifiability. An earlier paper in this journal used a quantitative literature survey to examine how far in practice the newer trend towards use by linguists of corpora… read more
2011 A two-way exchange between syntax and corpora Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics, Viana, Vander, Sonia Zyngier and Geoff Barnbrook (eds.), pp. 197–212 | Article
In his contribution, Geoffrey Sampson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom) and currently Research Fellow at the Universityof South Africa, highlights the relationship between Corpus Linguistics and Syntax. He shows how this bond has a two-way nature. In his view, the use… read more
2007 Minds in Uniform: How generative linguistics regiments culture and why it shouldn't Dialogue and Culture, Grein, Marion and Edda Weigand (eds.), pp. 3–25 | Article
2005 Quantifying the shift towards empirical methods International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10:1, pp. 15–36 | Article
In recent decades there has been a trend towards greater use of empirical data, for instance corpus data, within linguistics. I analyse a sample of linguistics articles from the past half-century in order to establish a detailed profile for this trend. Based on consistent criteria for classifying… read more
2000 A Proposal for Improving the Measurement of Parse Accuracy International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 5:1, pp. 53–68 | Article
Widespread dissatisfaction has been expressed with the measure of parse accuracy used in the Parseval programme, based on the location of constituent boundaries. Scores on the Parseval metric are perceived as poorly correlated with intuitive judgments of goodness of parse; the metric applies only… read more
1977 Reply to Graham Studies in Language 1:1, pp. 137–138 | Miscellaneous
1975 16 On the Need for a Phonological Base Essays on the Sound Pattern of English, Goyvaerts, Didier L. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), pp. 439–474 | Article