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Distributionalism
Distributionalism was a general theory of language and a discovery procedure for establishing elements and structures of language based on observed usage. It can be seen as an elaboration of structuralism but takes a more computational approach. Originally mostly applied to understanding phonological processes and phonotactics, distributional methods were also applied to work on lexical semantics and provide the basis for the distributional hypothesis for meaning. Current computational approaches to learn the semantics of words from text in the form of word embeddings using machine learning are based on distributional theory. Origins Distributionalism can be said to have originated in the work of structuralist linguist Leonard Bloomfield and was more clearly formalised by Zellig S. Harris. This theory emerged in the United States in the 1950s, as a variant of structuralism, which was the mainstream linguistic theory at the time, and dominated American linguistics for some time. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism. His influential textbook ''Language'', published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family. Bloomfield's approach to linguistics was characterized by its emphasis on the scientific basis of linguistics and emphasis on formal procedures for the analysis of linguistic data. The influence of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 1960s as the theory of generative grammar developed by Noam Chomsky came to predominate. Early life and education Bloomfield was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 1, 1887 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |