The languages that humans have created throughout our continuous evolution have become vast and complicated over time. It is quite fascinating the think that at one point we communicated through grunts and body motions, yet know we have thousands upon thousands of words that form the basis of our communication with each other. To make things more difficult, for each of those thousands of words, we also have hundreds of languages that represent those words differently. One can not help but ponder about the history and formation of linguistics and how language will change in the future.
Svenja Adolphs discusses the growing field of analyzing and understanding electronic texts which are increasing rapidly in our booming technological age in her book, . She discusses how computers and software allow for the rapid analysis of different texts from all around the world, and how we can use this analysis to gain knowledge about the structure of language through textual analysis. She says:
“Language description refers to the process of exploring corpus data with the aim of developing a better understanding of language in use,while an application refers to the deployment of language analysis tools with the aim of producing an output that has relevance outside of linguistics”
In my opinion, the most interesting aspect of the first three chapters of Svenja’s book was her ability to relate the benefits of electronic textual analysis to our modern day society. Without the ability of computers to quickly scan data and output results after looking at this information, we would never be able to analyze texts in the detailed way we can now. Due to our super fast computer technology that is continuously growing, we are able to analyze electronic texts in terms of sentence length, word length, number of different words in a text, punctuation frequency, word phrase frequency, and the list goes on. It is our job to be able to create hypothesis from this data in order to better understand the way in which different people around the world relate their thoughts in electronic documents. Svenja talks about language theory saying:
“This key difference in the kind of data that forms the basis for language theory marks two different approaches:empiricism and rationalism.Put simply,rationalist approaches to language are concerned with the way in which the mind processes language,while empiricist approaches are based on the observation of naturally occurring data”
While reading Svenja’s interesting outlook on electronic texts,and being the science nerd that I am, I couldn’t help but to relate her main message to applications in scientific research and development. Before the rise of computer technology and electronic or online texts, scientific data was collected and described in the writings of textbooks. Lucky for us science nerds, the revolution in technology has allowed for the compilation of an almost seemingly endless amount of articles and texts. For me, this is exciting in regard to the accessibility and swiftness in finding whatever information that you want to know. Relating it to Svenja’s ideas, these electronic texts can also be analyzed to better understand and interpret scientific writing and how it is generally structured. To display the enormous amount of information that is waiting to be processed, one can go to Highwire website created by Stanford University which claims to have Earth’s largest free full-text online science archive with 2,297,585 free full-text articles as of February 1, 2013.
This incredible amount of information, all compiled into and accessible on one online site truly display the how research on electronic texts is going to be a continuously growing field as more and more texts get published digitally. It is exciting to think about how much our society and species has transformed from the grunts and motions of the early Neanderthals, to the advanced online civilization we are today.
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