Empirical
Methods in Linguistics
語言學實證方法
Fall 2009 Wednesday
9:10-12:00 文學院413
REVISED 2009/10/20
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: Monday
Goals
You all have already had experience with
linguistic data, theory, and analysis. Now we'll put this experience into
philosophical and historical context, expand the range of empirical
methodologies beyond what you may be familiar with, and practice the logic of
linguistic argumentation at a higher level.
Evaluation
30% Participation (saying interesting stuff
in the discussions)
20% Discussion leading (two leaders per week)
20% Presentation of own research (one hour; last two weeks of class)
10% Journal submission (must show editor's acknowledgment of receipt of manuscript)
20% Exercises (relating to methodologies or argumentation; not very many)
Textbook
Myers, James. In prep. Grammar and evidence: Methods in the study
of linguistic knowledge.
Discussion readings
Aronoff, Mark, and Sungeun Cho. 2001. The
semantics of -ship suffixation. Linguistic Inquiry 32 (1):167-173.
Baayen, R. Harald. 1995. Review of Analogy and
structure. Language 71:390-396.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926 [1966/1995]. A set of
postulates for the science of language. Language
2:153-164. Reprinted in E. P. Hamp, M. Joos, F. W. Householder, & R.
Austerlitz (Eds.)
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina, & Matthias
Schlesewsky. 2007. The wolf in sheep's clothing: Against a new judgement-driven
imperialism. Theoretical Linguistics
33(3): 319-333.
Botha, Rudolf P. 1982. On 'the Galilean style' of
linguistic inquiry. Lingua 58:1-50.
Campbell,
Scott. 2001. The fallacy of inductive skepticism. The Skeptic 21 (1):25-30.
Carlson,
Greg. 2003. On the notion 'showing something.' In John Moore and Maria Polinsky
(Eds.) The nature of explanation in
linguistic theory (pp. 69-82).
Chalmers, A. F. 1999. Chapters 1, 5, 7. What is this thing called science? (Third
edition) (pp. 1-18, 59-73, 87-103). Hackett.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Methodological preliminaries.
Chapter 1 of Aspects of the theory of
syntax (pp. 3-62). MIT Press.
Croft,
William. 2004. Syntactic theories and syntactic methodology: A reply to Seuren.
Journal of Linguistics 40:637-654.
Cysouw, Micheal. 2005. Quantitative methods in
typology. In R. Kohler, G. Altmann, & R. G. Piotrowski
(Eds.) Quantitative
Linguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch [Quantitative
linguistics: An international handbook] (pp. 554-578). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Derwing, Bruce L., and Roberto G. de Almeida. In
press. Non-chronometric experiments in linguistics. In David Eddington (Ed.). Experimental and quantitative linguistics.
Evans, Nicholas, and Stephen Levinson.
In press. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its
importance for cognitive science. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences.
Fasold, Ralph (1991). The quiet demise of variable
rules. American Speech 66: 3-21.
Featherston, Sam.
Featherston, Sam. 2007b. Reply. Theoretical Linguistics 33(3):401-413.
Fisher, Ronald A. 1935. The mathematics of a lady
tasting tea (originally a passage in Design
of experiments). Reprinted and retitled 1956 in: Newman, J. R. (Ed.) The world of mathematics (pp. 1512-1521).
Simon and Shuster.
Gibbs, Jr., Raymond W. 2007. Why
cognitive linguists should care more about empirical methods. Gonzalez-Marquez,
M., Mittleberg,
Hammond, Michael. 2009. Empirical methods in
phonological research.
Hoffmann, Thomas. 2006. Corpora and introspection
as corroborating evidence: The case of preposition placement in English
relative clauses. Corpus Linguistics and
Linguistic Theory 2 (2): 165-195.
Ioannidis, John P. A. 2005. Why most published
research findings are false. PLoS
Medicine 2 (8): e124.
Johnson, Keith. 2008. Syntax. Chapter 7 of Quantitative methods in linguistics (pp.
216-265).
Kennedy, Graeme. 1998. An introduction to corpus linguistics (pp. 70-85). Addison Wesley
Longman.
Kirk,
Roger E. 1995. Research strategies and the control of nuisance variables.
Chapter 1 of Experimental design:
Procedures for the behavioral sciences, third edition (pp. 1-25).
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2007. The acquisition of
syntactic categories in Chinese: Issues of bootstrapping and productivity. Chinese
Leech, Geoffrey. 2007. New resources, or just
better old ones? The Holy Grail of representativeness. In M. Hundt et al.
(Eds.) Corpus linguistics and the Web
(pp. 133-149). Rodopi.
Manning,
Christopher D., and Hinrich Schütze. 1999. Collocations. Ch. 5 in Foundations of statistical natural language processing
(pp. 151-189). MIT Press.
Mathews,
Robert C., & Barbara P. Cochran. 1998. Project Grammarama revisited:
Generativity of implicitly acquired knowledge. In Michael A. Stadler &
Peter A Frensch (Eds.) Handbook of
implicit learning (pp. 223-259).
Myers, James. 2009. The design and analysis of
small-scale syntactic judgment experiments. Lingua
119:425-444.
Neidle,
Carol, Judy Kegl, Dawn MacLaughlin, Benjamin Bahan, and Robert G. Lee. 2001.
Methodological considerations. Chapter 2 of The
syntax of American Sign Language: Functional categories and hierarchical
structure (pp. 7-25). MIT Press. [Replaced by Gibbs, Jr. 2007]
Newmeyer, Frederick. 2004. Typological evidence
and universal grammar. Studies in
Language 28: 527-548. [Replaced by Evans
and Levinson, in press]
Newmeyer, Frederick. 2009. What conversational
English tells us about the nature of grammar: A critique of Thompson's analysis
of object complements.
Pereira, Fernando. 2000. Formal grammar
and information theory: together again? Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society A 358: 1239-1253.
Samek-Lodovici,
Vieri. 2006. Optimality Theory and the Minimalist Program. Linguistics in
Sampson,
Geoffrey. 2007. Grammar without grammaticality. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3 (1):1-32. [Replaced by Shei 2004]
Samuels,
Bridget D. 2009. Introduction & A minimalist program for phonology.
Chapters 1 &
Shapin,
Steven. 1996. How was it known? In The
scientific revolution (pp. 89-117).
Shei, Chris C-C. 2004. Corpus and grammar: What it isn't. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics 30.1:
1-18.
Sprouse,
Jon. 2007. Continuous acceptability, categorical grammaticality, and experimental
syntax. Biolinguistics 1: 117-128.
Vannest, Jennifer, and Julie E. Boland. 1999.
Lexical morphology and lexical access. Brain
and Language 68:324–332.
Woods,
Anthony, Paul Fletcher, and Arthur Hughes. 1986. Why do linguists need
statistics? Chapter 1 of Statistics in
language studies (pp. 1-7).
Xu, Yi. 2006. Principles of tone research. Proceedings of
International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language,
Schedule
(there may be changes along the way)
|
Week |
Topic |
Text |
Discussion readings |
Leaders |
|
9/16 |
Welcome |
|
Aronoff
& Cho (2001) |
Myers |
|
9/23 |
The
role of methodology |
|
Shapin
(1996) |
|
|
9/30 |
Grammar |
|
Chomsky
(1965) |
|
|
10/7 |
Evidence |
|
Chalmers
(1999) |
|
|
10/14 |
Patterns
and randomness |
|
|
|
|
10/21 |
Models
and prediction |
|
Fisher
(1935) |
|
|
10/28 |
Collecting
judgment data |
|
Featherston
( |
|
|
11/4 |
Analyzing
judgment data |
|
Myers
(2009) |
|
|
11/11 |
Discuss research progress |
|
|
|
|
11/18 |
Other
types of experiments |
|
Xu (2006) |
|
|
11/25 |
Collecting
corpus data |
|
Kennedy
(1998) |
|
|
12/2 |
Analyzing
corpus data |
|
Shei (2004) |
|
|
12/9 |
Grammatical
models |
|
Pereira (2000) |
|
|
12/16 |
Grammar
grammar |
|
Cysouw
(2005) |
|
|
12/23 |
Open
discussion |
|
|
|
|
12/30 |
Presentations |
|
|
|
|
1/6 |
Presentations |
|
|
|