Why You Need the Text-Tech Team as Your Linguists

You need Text-Tech because we specialize in the study of language as people actually use it, and we have the computer training and experience to make that work for you.

Many linguists study how language ought to be, for example by trying to define rules of grammar. We, however, have studied language how people actually use it. We are experts in how smaller communities develop and maintain special language habits. We are experts in the collection and analysis of very large quantities of text, so that we can find special language characteristics when we compare particular examples or collections of text against more general collections. Our experience in these areas is broad, especially in American English, so we already have a fund of knowledge to go along with our technical skills. Yes, we can tell you about the rules of grammar. But our special value is our ability to understand the subtle patterns of what people actually do with language, as opposed to what the grammar book or dictionary says that people ought to say or write.

What makes this kind of work possible is our experience with computer tools. We have been among the foremost developers of different kinds of computer tools for working with text and language. We know about text bases. We know about maintenance of large-scale text and language resources. We know how to process text information so that it can most readily be handled by computer. We have extensive experience with various kinds of language representation on computers. We can talk to IT staff on their own terms and cooperate with them to make textual and computer resources work together: we know about integration.

The special combination of our experience with real language and our computer skills is unique. You need us as your linguists because we can actually do the work with real language that you need to do.

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