The authors show how to construct tools for language analysis in research and teaching using the
Awk, the Bourne-shell, and sed under UNIX. Applications include the following:
searches for
words, phrases, grammatical patterns and phonemic patterns in text;
statistical evaluation
of texts in regard to such searches;
transformation of phonetic, phonemic or typographic
transcriptions;
comparison of texts in various respects;
lexical-etymological analysis;
concordance;
assistance in translating text;
assistance in learning languages;
assistance in teaching
languages;
and text processing and formatting.
This latter includes the generation of on-line
dictionaries for the Internet from files that were generated with what-you-see-is-what-you-get
editors representing only the linear structure of the dictionary (i.e., the book).
All of the
above can be achieved with particularly simple and short code. In that regard, they illustrate
how sed and awk can be combined in the pipe mechanism of UNIX to create very powerful
processing devices.
Their notes include a short introduction to programming the Bourne-shell
and rather short, but complete descriptions of sed and awk customized in regard to language
analysis.
