Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Grammatical model developed by Salomaa (1969) and Suppes (1972) to describe social, regional, diachronic and situative variants in natural languages. On the basis of statistical hypotheses that are strongly supported by empirical evidence, every linguistic rule is assigned a degree of probability that predicts its occurrence within the framework of a ‘relational grammar’ which encompasses one of each variant. The development of such grammars, arranged according to probabilities, has proved to be a useful instrument for describing the processes of language change and language acquisition.
References
Salomaa, A. 1969. Probabilistic and weighted grammars. IC 15. 529–44.
Sankoff, D. (ed.) 1978.
Linguistic variation: models and methods. New York.
Suppes, P. 1972. Probabilistic grammars for natural languages. Synthese 22. 95–116. (Repr. in D. Davidson and G.Harman (eds), Semantics of natural language. Dordrecht. 741–62.)
variational linguistics
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