Abstract
How, one may reasonably wonder, could mathematics be applied to anything so unquantifiable as language? An analogy with, say, mathematical physics raises the puzzling question of how one could write equations which might be solved for the meaning of some French word or the correct case in German for the object of glauben. The source of such confusion is the common but incorrect idea that all mathematics deals with numbers. Virtually any paper in generative linguistics illustrate how one can make precise statements of a nonquantitative nature about language. Mathematical linguistics involves studying this sort of statement by applying mathematics. In this chapter we will see how some such applications have yielded interesting results about language.
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Peters, S. (1987). What is Mathematical Linguistics?. In: Savitch, W.J., Bach, E., Marsh, W., Safran-Naveh, G. (eds) The Formal Complexity of Natural Language. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3401-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3401-6_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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