For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that                  language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become                  increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to                  sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty.                  Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views                  knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set                  of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas                  categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic                  phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground.                  Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far                  with a probabilistic perspective.This book presents a comprehensive introduction to                  probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of                  probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language                  acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It                  also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic                  grammars.

Probabilistic Linguistics (Bradford Books) PDF

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