Computational and Quantitative Studies

Professor M.A.K. Halliday is Professor Emeritus, University of Sydney. Jonathan J. Webster is Acting Head, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, and Associate Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong.

• Part One: Machine translation: the early years; Editor's Introduction; 1 The linguistic basis of a mechanical thesaurus, and its application to English preposition classification; 2 Linguistics and machine translation; Part Two: Probabilistic grammar and the corpus; Editor's Introduction; 3 Towards probabilistic interpretations; 4 Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar; 5 Language as system and language as instance: the corpus as a theoretical construct; 6 [with Z L James] A quantitative study of polarity and primary tense in the English Finite clause; 7 Quantitative studies and probabilities in grammar; 8 The spoken language corpus. Part Three: Towards 'intelligent computing' (computing with Meaning); Editor's Introduction; 9 On language in relation to fuzzy logic and intelligent computing; 10 Fuzzy grammatics: a systemic functional approach to fuzziness in neutral language; 11 Computing meaning: some reflections on past experience and present prospects; Appendix: Systems of the English clause: a trial grammar for the PENMAN text generation project. [Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California].

"'This is a deeply impressive book by a prominent linguist. As always, Professor Halliday's contributions are pervasively readable and stimulating.' Jan Svartvik Emeritus Professor, Lund University, Sweden '...a major enterprise comparable to a grand retrospective of the paintings of some prominent artist of a distinctive school.' Roy Harris, Times Literary Supplement"