Competence & Performance

Competence & Performance
語言能力與語言表現

Spring 2006 Tuesday 10:15-13:00 文學院413

SEE CHANGES IN SCHEDULE (as of May 10, 2006)!

James Myers (麥傑)
Office: 文學院247
Tel: 31506
Email: Lngmyers at the usual place
Web: http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/
Office hours: Monday 3-5 pm, or by appointment

Readings

Cowart, Wayne. 1997. Experimental syntax. London: Sage Publications.
Papers and selections from other books (see list below).

Goal

This class addresses the competence-performance distinction from both theoretical and practical perspectives. On the theoretical side, we ask questions such as: Does the distinction make sense? Can we maintain it even though competence is shaped by performance? Is there any way to extract "pure competence" from performance data? On the practical side, we study how to improve the use of the two traditional linguistic data sources, native-speaker judgments and corpora, in the study of grammar. Hopefully students will continue to apply the lessons we learn in their own future research.

Evaluation

20% participation
30% discussion leading
20% exercises
30% term paper (due 6/20/2006)

In this class, we'll mainly be reading and discussing things. This means that your participation is important. Don't be shy! If you have a question in class, ask it. If you have an idea, tell us. Try out the "Socratic style," not just the "Confucian style"!

A huge amount has been written about the competence-performance distinction and related issues, but we can't read it all. So every week, there will be one main reading (or pair of short main readings), and I'll lead the main discussion. But most weeks there will also be a supplementary reading (marked with "[ ]" in the schedule). In those weeks, a student (or group of students) will be responsible for reporting on the supplementary reading, and explaining how it relates to the main reading. Everybody should bring a copy of the supplementary reading, in case the discussion leader wants us to look at something.

In this class you will also be learning new skills that will help improve your linguistic research: a little bit of experimental design, a little of bit of corpus analysis, and a little bit of statistics. That's what the exercises are about. We won't have many of them.

The final requirement is a term paper reporting an empirical investigation of grammar (syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology) using the methods taught in this class. The paper topic must be chosen by 5/16. There will be informal presentations on 6/13, the last class. The term paper is due one week later, on 6/20.

Schedule - NOTE CHANGES! (there may still be more changes along the way)

Readings should be done prior to class.
* marks when something is due relating to your paper.
[ ] mark supplementary readings.

Week	Topic	Readings
2/14	Competence vs. performance?
2/21	Linguistics: The status quo and beyond	Myers (2006a) ch. 1
2/28	*** * * NO CLASS [228] * * ***
3/7	Performance in syntax	Hawkins (1999) [Weinberg (1999)]
3/14	Performance in phonology	Blevins (2004) ch. 9 [Blevins (2004) ch. 6]
3/21	Generative linguistics as cognitive psychology	Myers (2006a) ch. 2 [Botha (1989) sec. 2.5]
3/28	Searching for grammar in judgment data	Snyder (2000), McDaniel & Cowart (1999), Myers & Tsay (2005)
4/4	*** * * NO CLASS [spring break] * * ***
4/11	FOSS4 (and IACL-IsCLL) (you must attend at least part of FOSS 4/14-15, and must try to attend some of IACL-IsCLL 5/25-29)
4/18	Explaining gradience in judgments	Sorace & Keller (2005) [Boersma (2004)]
4/25	Introduction to judgment experiment methodology	Cowart (1997) chs. 1-2 [Schütze (1996) ch. 3]
5/2	Preparing judgment experiments	Cowart (1997) chs. 3-8 [Bard et al. (1996)]
5/9	Running and analyzing judgment experiments	Cowart (1997) chs. 9-12 [Labov (1996)]
*5/16	Discussion of paper topics PAPER TOPIC DUE	NO READING!
5/23	Analyzing corpus data	Lüdeling et al. (to appear), Myers (2006b)
5/30	Searching for grammar in corpora	Uffmann (in press) [Meurers (2004)]
6/6	Typology as corpus linguistics	Newmeyer (2004), and that's it!
6/13	PRESENTATIONS [last class]
6/20	TERM PAPER DUE (5 pm, in my mailbox)

Readings

Bard, E. G., Robertson, D., & Sorace, A. (1996). Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability. Language, 72 (1), 32-68.

Blevins, J. (2004). Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [selections]

Boersma, P. (2004). A stochastic OT account of paralinguistic tasks such as grammaticality and prototypicality judgments. University of Amsterdam ms. ROA-648.

Botha, R. P. (1989). Challenging Chomsky: The generative garden game. Oxford University Press. [selections]

Cowart, W. (1997). Experimental syntax: Applying objective methods to sentence judgments. London: Sage Publications.

Hawkins, J. A. (1999). Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars. Language, 75, 244-285.

Labov, W. (1996). When intuitions fail. L. McNair (Ed.) CLS 32: Papers from the Parasession on Theory and Data in Linguistics (pp. 77-105). University of Chicago.

Lüdeling, A., Evert, S., Baroni, M. (to appear). Using Web data for linguistic purposes. In M. Hundt, C. Biewer, & N. Nesselhauf (Eds.) Corpus linguistics and the Web. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

McDaniel, D., & Cowart, W. (1999). Experimental evidence for a minimalist account of English resumptive pronouns. Cognition, 70, B15-B24.

Meurers, W. D. (2004). On the use of electronic corpora for theoretical linguistics: Case studies from the syntax of German. Lingua, 115, 1619-1639.

Myers, J. (2006a). Empirical methods for rational linguists. National Chung Cheng University ms. [selections]

Myers, J. (2006b). Linguistics as cognitive psychology. Pre-conference proceedings of IACL-15/IsCLL-10, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Myers, J., & Tsay, J. (2005). The processing of phonological acceptability judgments. Proceedings of Symposium on 90-92 NSC Projects, 26-45. Taipei, Taiwan.

Newmeyer, F. (2004). Typological evidence and universal grammar. Studies in Language, 28, 527-548.

Schütze, Carson T. 1996. The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology. University of Chicago Press. [selections]

Snyder, W. (2000). An experimental investigation of syntactic satiation effects. Linguistic Inquiry, 31, 575-582.

Sorace, A., & Keller, F. (2005). Gradience in linguistic data. Lingua, 115, 1497-1524.

Uffmann, C. (in press). Epenthetic vowel quality in loanwords: Empirical and formal issues. To appear in Lingua.

Weinberg, A. (1999). A minimalist theory of human sentence processing. In S. D. Epstein & N. Hornstein (Eds.) Working minimalism (pp. 283-314). MIT Press.