Blurb:

Machine, or machine-aided, linguistic discovery is a discipline concerned with the automated solving of (substantial parts) of important linguistic problems. In this chapter, I introduce some preliminary notions, using as illustrations four famous discoveries from the history of linguistics, viz. Saussure’s discovery of the concept of “linguistic system”, Jones’s discovery of Indo-European, Greenberg’s implicational universals, and Verner’s law. I define linguistic discovery and look at objects and types of linguistic discovery, then discuss the major factors for discovery: intuition, chance, and problem solving. Previous attempts at automating the (linguistic) discovery process are briefly reviewed, and the central notion of “task of linguistic discovery” is introduced.