语言学与数字人文:来自方言测量学者的观察——黄河副研究员访谈

Linguistics and Digital Humanities:Observations from Dialectometry Scholars:Interview with Associate Researcher Huang He

当前的数字人文宣称重视语言学研究,但其关注焦点实际上却片面局限于计算语言学等领域,缺乏对语言学学科发展现状的全面理解。文章是对语言学,尤其是方言测量学领域的活跃学者——复旦大学现代语言学研究院黄河博士所作的访谈,目的在于疏通语言学与数字人文的关系。黄河博士认为,“数字人文”应指数字技术辅助下的人文研究,而语言学是一个复杂的学科群,既有偏向人文的领域,如文献语言学;也有偏向自然科学的领域,如神经语言学;还有偏向社会科学性质的领域,如地理语言学。计量方法在后两者中的应用已然十分普遍,这可能也是语言学界较少强调“数字人文”这一概念的原因之一。“数字人文”这一标签在一定历史时期内是有意义的,但其覆盖范围会逐渐缩小,亦不具备构成独立学科的基本条件。此外,黄河博士还以方言测量学为例,指出该领域现阶段计量研究存在的部分问题及一项好的计量研究须具备的要素,其见解对各领域的数字人文研究都深具启示。

Currently,digital humanities claims to prioritize linguistic research,but its focus is actually limited to fields such as computational linguistics,lacking a comprehensive understanding of the current development of the lin-guistics as a discipline.The article is an interview with Dr.Huang He from the Institute of Modem Languages and Lin-guistics,Fudan University,an active scholar in the field of linguistics,especially dialectometry.The purpose is to clarify the relationship between linguistics and digital humanities.Dr.Huang believes that"digital humanities"should refer to humanities research assisted by digital technology,while linguistics is a complex group of disciplines,with fields that lean towards the humanities,such as literary linguistics;fields that lean towards the natural sciences,such as neurolin-guistics;and those with a nature of social sciences,such as geolinguistics.The application of quantitative methods in the latter two is already widespread,which might be one of the reasons why the concept of"digital humanities"is less em-phasized in linguistics.The label"digital humanities"is meaningful during a certain historical period,but its scope will gradually narrow,and it does not meet the basic requirements to constitute an independent discipline.Furthermore,using dialectometry as an example,Dr.Huang points out some problems in current quantitative research in this field and the essential elements that a good quantitative study should have,providing insights for digital humanities research in various fields.