Elements of Mathematical Linguistics

Abstract

Most of this book (the first 148 pages) is an English version of an introduction to linguistics originally published in Russian in 1969. This material has been expanded into a more standard-sized book for the English-speaking market by tacking on three articles on special topics in linguistics published elsewhere by one or both co-authors; but each of these articles is already available in English translation, and the book stands or falls by the usefulness of its first part. When Gladkij and Mel'~uk wrote their book in the late 1960s, linguistics was little known, even in the USA where most of it had been created not long before. I guess that it was a fairly remarkable achievement on their part to discover and master this exotic discipline (and, in Gladkij 's case, to make a number of original contributions to it), and then to make it known to their fellow-countrymen. However, whether it makes good sense to bring out an English version of the book in the 1980s is a different matter. I must say that I feel the answer is no, for many reasons. In the first place, linguistics has moved on since the 1960s. Gladkij and Mel'~uk's book deals ahnost exclusively with the hierarchy of types of language, defined in terms of types of grammar (unrestricted rewrite systems, context-sensitive grammars, context-free grammars, one-sided linear grammars), with a small amount on the relationship with types of automata, on decidability theorems, and a few other matters. topic of parsing and formalisms with special relevance for automatic language processing, such as the ATN are not mentioned. In 1969, one would not have expected them to be; in the 1980s, these are surely indispensable components even in an introduction to mathematical (as opposed to computat ional) linguistics. Gladkij and Mel'~uk are quite explicit about the fact that they have made no attempt to bring the book up to date: The manuscript of the Russian version of this book was completed in 1967 and we are not in a position to revise it now . . . . Even a mere list of references would be out of the question. Secondly, the book relies heavily on Russian-language examples which are lost on an English reader. Thus, early chapters largely revolve round a largish formal grammar produced by the authors in order to generate the complex range of Russian participles. It must have been a significant virtue of the original book that it demonstrated how the concepts of linguistics could be made to achieve a novel task relating specifically to the readers ' own language, but for a British or American student the result is that ideas many people find difficult at the best of times are rendered wholly opaque. And, finally, Gladkij and Mel'~uk just are not very good at writing for an unknowledgeable audience. They make their formal rules notationally much more complex and exotic-looking than they need be to a fellow mathematician, a trivial matter, but for an unconfident student very unfortunate. On page 25 they use the term monoid without, I think, ever explaining what it means (there is no index, so it is hard to check); on page 81 they use a technical term of their own which is first defined on page 122. fact is that there are now enough English-language books that do the same job as this book and do it much better.