Using
Computers
in
Linguistics:
A Practical Guide

Chapter 1

The Nature of Linguistic Data and the Requirements of a Computing Environment for Linguistic Research

Gary F. Simons
Summer Institute of Linguistics

Online Appendix: Summary

Summary

Multilingual Computing

Text Encoding

Databases

Requirements for a Computing Environment

The following are the six requirements for a linguistic computing environment that the paper develops. The first five follow directly from the nature of linguistic data. The sixth arises from the need of linguists to prepare their data for presentation to others.

(1) The data are multilingual, so the computing environment must be able to keep track of what language each datum is in, and then display and process it accordingly.

(2) The data in text unfold sequentially, so the computing environment must be able to represent the text in proper sequence.

(3) The data are hierarchically structured, so the computing environment must be able to build hierarchical structures of arbitrary depth.

(4) The data are multidimensional, so the computing environment must be able to attach many kinds of analysis and interpretation to a single datum.

(5) The data are highly integrated, so the computing environment must be able to store and follow associative links between related pieces of data.

(6) While doing all of the above to model the information structure of the data correctly, the computing environment must be able to present conventionally formatted displays of the data.