Competence & Performance
語言能力與語言表現
Fall 2010 Tuesday 9:10-12:00 文學院413
課碼: 1307561
UPDATED 2011/1/4
James Myers (麥傑)
Office: 文學院247
Tel: 31506
Email: Lngmyers at ccu dot edu dot tw
Web: http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/
Office hours: Tuesday 3-5 pm, or by appointment
Goals
No matter whether they are studying syntax, semantics, morphology, or phonology, linguists can only learn about competence (mental grammar) from performance (language use). The problem is that the two major sources of performance data, acceptability judgments and corpora, don't always match. There are (at least) three hypotheses for such mismatches: (1) Maybe one of the two data sources is less reliable than the other. (2) Judgments involve perception and comprehension, while corpora record productions; thus mismatches may reflect different psycholinguistic processes. (3) Children may have innate biases to favor certain patterns in adult speech and ignore others, so that when they become adults themselves, their judgments don't match the corpus. The purpose of this class is to explore these three hypotheses by critically examining the relevant recent literature. Students will then conduct original research to test or apply one or more of these hypotheses in syntax, semantics, morphology, or phonology.
Evaluation
10% Participation
40% Discussion leading
10% Exercises
40% Term paper (due 2011/1/14)
This class is mainly a discussion class. So class participation means you discuss: you read, think, talk, and respond to others' ideas. Every week somebody will lead the discussion on the week's reading, using a handout with well-chosen and logically organized questions to inspire us to discuss together. Don't make me do all of the work!
In order to help you prepare your own research, we will also do some basic exercises in running judgment experiments and analyzing corpus data. Don't worry; there won't be many.
By the middle of the semester (officially 11/30, but the earlier the better), you should choose a research topic. You will test a grammatical hypothesis in syntax, semantics, morphology, or phonology using a judgment experiment (or other type of experiment) and/or corpus analysis. After you choose your topic, the discussions will then turn to focus on papers that YOU choose to help with YOUR project.
On the last day of class (1/4), you'll give an ungraded conference-style presentation about your research. The paper is due a week and a half later (1/14) in my mailbox by 3 pm. The paper should be up to 20 pages, in English, with formatting like the real published papers we read. I'll grade it in the usual way (style, logic, theory).
Schedule [there may be changes along the way]
Readings should be done prior to class.
* marks when something is due relating to your paper.
{E} marks when an exercise will be assigned.
|
Week |
Topic |
Readings |
|
9/14 |
Introduction to competence and performance |
|
|
9/21 |
Traditional methods in syntax and phonology |
Myers (2010) |
|
9/28 |
Syntactic judgments {E} |
Myers (2009a) |
|
10/5 |
Syntactic corpus analysis {E} |
Gries (2009) |
|
10/12 |
Syntactic mismatches I: Data reliability |
Labov (1996) |
|
10/19 |
Syntactic mismatches II: Processing |
Desmet & Gibson (2003) |
|
10/26 |
Syntactic mismatches III: Innate biases |
Yang (2010) |
|
11/2 |
Phonology mismatches I: Overview {E} |
Myers (2009b) |
|
11/9 |
Phonology mismatches II: Processing |
Ranbom & Connine (2007) |
|
11/16 |
Phonology mismatches III: Innate biases |
Hammond (2010) |
|
11/23 |
Morphology mismatches |
Baroni et al. (2009) |
|
*11/30 |
PAPER TOPIC DUE |
|
|
12/7 |
Designing judgment experiments |
Myers (2009) |
|
12/14 |
Modules in grammar |
Atkinson et al. (2004) |
|
12/21 |
Constituency |
Kapatsinski (2009) |
|
12/28 |
Analogy vs. rules in syntax acquisition |
Lai (2008) |
|
*1/4 |
PRESENTATIONS [last class] |
|
|
*1/14 |
TERM PAPER DUE (3 pm, in my mailbox) |
|
Readings
Atkinson, J., Campbell, R., Marshall, J., Thacker, A., & Woll, B. (2004). Understanding 'not': Neuropsychological dissociations between hand and head markers of negation in BSL. Neuropsychologia, 42, 214-229.
Baroni, M., Guevara, E., & Zamparelli, R. (2009). The dual nature of deverbal nominal constructions: Evidence from acceptability ratings and corpus analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 5 (1), 27-60
Desmet, T., & Gibson, E. (2003). Disambiguation preferences and corpus frequencies in noun phrase conjunction. Journal of Memory and Language, 49 (3), 353-374.
Gries, S. T. (2009). What is corpus linguistics? Language and Linguistics Compass, 3 (5), 1225-1241.
Hammond, M. (2010). Corpus data vs. experiments in English phonotactics. In J. Myers (Ed.) In search of grammar: Experimental and corpus-based studies. Under review.
Ionin, T. (2010). The scope of indefinites: An experimental investigation. Natural Language Semantics, 18, 295-350.
Kapatsinski, V. (2009). Testing theories of linguistic constituency with configural learning: The case of the English syllable. Language, 85 (2), 248-277.
Lai, M.-H. (2008). Children's early use of degree adverbs in Mandarin BI comparative structure. National Taiwan University MA thesis.
Labov, W. (1996). When intuitions fail. Chicago Linguistics Society, 32, 77-105.
Myers, J. (2009). The design and analysis of small-scale syntactic judgment experiments. Lingua, 119, 425-444.
Myers, J. (2010). Methods in search of grammar, grammar in search of methods. In J. Myers (Ed.) In search of grammar: Experimental and corpus-based studies. Under review.
Myers, J. (2009a). Syntactic judgment experiments. Language & Linguistics Compass, 3 (1), 406-423.
Myers, J. (2009b). Automated collection and analysis of phonological data. In S. Featherston & S. Winkler (Eds.) The fruits of empirical linguistics: Volume 1: Process (pp. 151-176). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ranbom, L. J., & Connine, C. M. (2007). Lexical representation of phonological variation in spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 57 (2), 273-298.
Phillips, C. P. (2006). The real-time status of island phenomena. Language, 82 (4), 795-823.
Yang, C. (2010). Who's afraid of George Kingsley Zipf? University of Pennsylvania ms.
Yuan, B. (1999). Acquiring the unaccusative/unergative distinction in a second language: Evidence from English-speaking learners of L2 Chinese. Linguistics, 37 (2), 275-296.