Geoffrey Sampson

List of John Benjamins publications for which Geoffrey Sampson plays a role.

Book series

Articles

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
Sampson, Geoffrey 2018 From phonemic spelling to distinctive spellingUnderstanding 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
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
Sampson, Geoffrey 2013 A counterexample to homophony avoidanceDiachronica 30:4, pp. 579–591 | Article
Sampson, Geoffrey 2013 The empirical trend: Ten years onInternational 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
Sampson, Geoffrey 2011 A two-way exchange between syntax and corporaPerspectives 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
Sampson, Geoffrey 2007 Minds in Uniform: How generative linguistics regiments culture and why it shouldn'tDialogue and Culture, Grein, Marion and Edda Weigand (eds.), pp. 3–25 | 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
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
Sampson, Geoffrey 1977 Reply to GrahamStudies in Language 1:1, pp. 137–138 | Miscellaneous
Sampson, Geoffrey 1975 16 On the Need for a Phonological BaseEssays on the Sound Pattern of English, Goyvaerts, Didier L. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), pp. 439–474 | Article