1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910160693103321

Autore

Sobel Dava <1947->

Titolo

Glass Universe, The: Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars

Pubbl/distr/stampa

HarperCollins UK

ISBN

0-00-818189-6

Disciplina

520.922

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Musica

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Sommario/riassunto

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR'A peerless intellectual biography. The Glass Universe shines and twinkles as brightly as the stars themselves' The Economist#1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel returns with a captivating, little-known true story of women in scienceIn the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or "human computers," to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the women turned to studying images of the stars captured on glass photographic plates, making extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what the stars were made of, divided them into meaningful categories for further research, and even found a way to measure distances across space by starlight .Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries,and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of a group of remarkable women whose vital contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.



2.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910765730203321

Autore

Müller Stefan <1968-, >

Titolo

Grammatical theory : from transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches / / Stefan Müller

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin : , : Language Science Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

3-946234-40-2

3-946234-29-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (2 volumes in 1 [xx, [808] pages) : illustrations; digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Open Access e-Books

Knowledge Unlatched

Textbooks in language sciences ; ; 1

Disciplina

415.01

Soggetti

Generative grammar

Government (Grammar)

Grammar, Comparative and general - Syntax

Linguistics

Computational linguistics

Language acquisition

Language and languages - Study and teaching

Germanic languages - Syntax

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Sommario/riassunto

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are



explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010.