The Justice

Media Credit: Max Breitstein Matza Geoff Nunberg, NPR contirbutor on linguistics, discusses technology's impact on modern language.

CORRECTION APPENDED SEE BOTTOM

Geoff Nunberg, Ph.D, a philologist at the School of Information at Berkeley in California, discussed the new technology surrounding how philologists work with words in order to confront the evolution of words throughout history in a speech last Friday.

Nunberg suggested that philology, the study of language as used in literature, is a dying art, taken over in the 1930s by a more psychological and individualist perspective.

As an archeological philologist, someone who studies words and their cultural significance, Nunberg focused on what one can learn about a culture by looking at its history with regard to its particular lexicon. Nunberg asked the question, "[Are] there, in fact, things that can only by learn about a culture through its … lexicon?"

Throughout the lecture, he spoke about how shifts in the lexicon occurred throughout time, and he discussed their significance in shaping reality.

For example, the word illiterate has been around since the 1550s, but the word literary only appeared in the English lexicon in the 1880s. The emergence of the word was necessary because without a word for literacy, the society cannot appreciate the significance of the word.

Nunberg mainly spoke of furthering the field of philology through new databases that can, in theory, make researching a less monumental task.

When philologists try to prove speech patterns or hypothesize about where a word came from, they can more easily confirm or disprove these hypotheses with the help of two databases: the Constructive Corpus and the Occurant Corpus.

He said the Constructive Corpus consists of databases created by linguists to investigate linguistic regularities, as well as to test hypotheses.

An example of this is the Brown Corpus, which has been a very important tool for linguistic research, according to Nunberg.

He further explained that these databases compile large libraries of books and literature and search them for specific words. The Occurant Corpus, he said, is not just for linguists but also for anyone doing research; JSTOR and Google, as well as other search engines, are examples of this category.

Nunberg explained that although these databases are helpful, they are far from perfect. Occurant Corpora are not designed for linguists, as the databases do not take into account the kinds of information that linguists are looking for, as they rarely trace words throughout history.

Nunberg explained Google hit counts are notorious for being inaccurate, yet the number of times a word comes up is a crucial piece of information for linguists.

He said that with both types of corpora, it is hard to know if the word is in the proper context because linguists and philologists are required to sift through every hit to make sure it is used in the context they are looking for.

Nunberg explained that this is difficult because words can have multiple definitions but linguists may be tracing a specific definition.

Also, word chronology is very important in philological studies. The Oxford English Dictionary states the earliest date of origin for a word, however, these dates are usually not accurate, according to Nunberg.

The OED does this often so that linguists actively try to find more recent "antedates" for words, Nunberg explained.

When asked if he believed if these databases were helpful to philologists and linguists, Nunberg said that "for linguists, these databases help to test hypotheses," but for literary and historic linguists, these databases make it hard to obtain reliable information.

Because the databases are flawed it would be hard to gather good data, he explained.

Carly Greenberg '11, who attended the lecture, said, "Although a few parts were muddled ... it came together in a nice package."

Correction: This article originally misspelled the name of a search engine. The search engine is JSTOR, not JSTORE.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools