The
Theoretical and Empirical Basis of Linguistics
語言學的理論與實證基礎
Fall 2022
Thursday
14:10-17:00
文學院413
課碼: 1309005
Research & Writing links
Old related classes:
Theoretical and Empirical Basis of Linguistics: 2020
Foundations of Linguistic Theory: 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017
Empirical Methods in Linguistics: 2005, 2007, 2009
Methods of Linguistic Data Collection: 2016
UPDATED 2022/12/23
James Myers (麥傑)
Office: 文學院 (Humanities) Room 247
Tel: 31506
WWW: https://lngmyers.ccu.edu.tw/
Office hours: Wednesday 10 am -12 noon, or by appointment (made at least 24
hours ahead)
Goals
You have already had experience with linguistic theory and analysis. Now we’ll put this experience into philosophical and historical context, and sample some of the many and varied empirical methods underlying these theories and analyses.
Evaluation
30% Participation (saying interesting stuff in the discussions)
20% Discussion leading (one or more leaders per week)
20% Exercises (practice using various methods)
20% Presentation of your own research (like a conference talk, about 20 minutes)
10% Journal submission (editor’s receipt of manuscript; may differ from in-class presentation)
Discussion readings
Allan, K. (2004). Aristotle’s footprints in the linguist’s garden. Language Sciences, 26(4), 317-342.
Anwyl-Irvine, A. L., Massonnié, J., Flitton, A., Kirkham, N., & Evershed, J. K. (2020). Gorilla in our midst: An online behavioral experiment builder. Behavior Research Methods, 52(1), 388-407.
Awati, K. (2015). A gentle introduction to text mining using R. (Accessed 2022/8/13) https://eight2late.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/a-gentle-introduction-to-text-mining-using-r/
Barrier, Michael. & Yen-Hui Audrey Li. (2012). Noun incorporation and non-canonical objects. Proceedings of the 30th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Nathan Arnett and Ryan Bennett, 65–75. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Bloomfield, L. (1926). A set of postulates for the science of language. Language, 2(3), 153-164.
Bosch-Baliarda, M., Soler Vilageliu, O., & Orero, P. (2019). Toward a sign language-friendly questionnaire design. The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 24(4), 333-345.
Campbell, L. R. (2007). Why Sir William Jones got it all wrong, or Jones’ role in how to establish language families. In Joseba A. Lakarra & José Ignacio Hualde (Eds), Studies in Basque and historical linguistics in memory of R. L. Trask (pp. 245-264) Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chapter 1: Methodological preliminaries (pp. 3-62).
Chung, K. S. (2013). East Asian linguistics. In K. Allen (Ed.) The Oxford handbook of the history of linguistics (pp. 209-224). Oxford University Press.
Croft, W. (2017). Typology and universals. In M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller (Eds.), The handbook of linguistics (pp. 39-55). John Wiley & Sons.
de Bot, K. (2015). Moving where? A reaction to Slabakova et al.(2014). Applied Linguistics, 36(2), 261-264.
Devitt, M. (2006). Intuitions in linguistics. British Journal of Philosophy of Science, 57, 481-513.
Edmonds, Phillips., & Hirst, Graeme. (2002). Near-synonymy and lexical choice. Computational Linguistics, 28(2), 105-144.
Evans, V. (2012). Cognitive linguistics. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3(2), 129-141.
Fitch, W. T. (2018). The biology and evolution of speech: a comparative analysis. Annual Review of Linguistics, 4, 255-279.
Gerdts, Donna B. (1988). Incorporation. In The Handbook of Morphology. eds. Spencer, Andrew and Arnold M. Zwicky. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 84 – 100.
Gries, S. Th., & Berez, A. L. (2017). Linguistic annotation in/for corpus linguistics. In N. Ide and J. Pustejovsky (Eds.), Handbook of linguistic annotation (pp. 379-409). Springer.
Harris, R., & Taylor, T. J. (1997). Landmarks in linguistic thought I: The Western tradition from Socrates to Saussure (second edition). London: Routledge. Chapter 8: The Port-Royal Grammar: Arnauld and Lancelot on the rational foundations of grammar (pp. 95-109).
Hasko, V. (2012). Qualitative corpus analysis. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.) The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 4758-4764). John Wiley & Sons.
Hou, Fengyun, & Jiang, Xin. (2022). Interference effects of radical markings and stroke order animations on Chinese character learning among L2 learners. Frontiers in Psychology 13:783613.
Hsieh, Chia-Ling. (2005). Modal verbs and modal adverbs in Chinese: An investigation into the semantic source. UST Working Papers in Linguistics, 1, 31-58.
Johnson, K. (2008). Quantitative methods in linguistics. Blackwell. Selections (pp. 34-67, 70-95, 216-219, 229-247).
Le, Q. V. (2015) A tutorial on deep learning, parts 1 & 2. Google Brain ms. https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/
Lee, Chee Ha, & Kalyuga, Slava. (2011). Effectiveness of different pinyin presentation formats in learning Chinese characters: A cognitive load perspective. Language Learning, 61(4), 1099-1118.
Liu, T., Chuk, T. Y., Yeh, S. L., & Hsiao, J. H. (2016). Transfer of perceptual expertise: The case of simplified and traditional Chinese character recognition. Cognitive Science, 40(8), 1941-1968.
Locher, M. A. (2008). The rise of prescriptive grammars in the 18th century. In M. A. Locher & J. Strässler (Eds.), Standards and norms in the English language (pp. 127-147). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Manning, C. D., Clark, K., Hewitt, J., Khandelwal, U., & Levy, O. (2020). Emergent linguistic structure in artificial neural networks trained by self-supervision. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(48), 30046-30054.
Meyerhoff, M., Adachi, C., Nanbakhsh, G., & Strycharz, A. (2011). Sociolinguistic fieldwork. In Thieberger, N. (Ed.) The Oxford handbook of linguistic fieldwork (pp. 120-146). Oxford University Press.
Pater, J. (2019). Generative linguistics and neural networks at 60: Foundation, friction, and fusion. Language, 95(1), e41-e74.
Petersen, I. T., Apfelbaum, K. S., & McMurray, B. (2022). Adapting open science and pre‐registration to longitudinal research. Infant and Child Development, e2315.
Phillips, C., Gaston, P., Huang, N., & Muller, H. (2021). Theories all the way down: Remarks on “theoretical” and “experimental” linguistics. In G. Goodall (Ed.) The Cambridge handbook of experimental syntax (pp. 587-616). Cambridge University Press.
Rice, K. (2006). Ethical issues in linguistic fieldwork: An overview. Journal of Academic Ethics, 4(1), 123-155.
Rogers, J., & Révész, A. (2019). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs In J. McKinley & H. Rose (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of research methods in applied linguistics (pp. 133-143). Routledge.
Scharf, P. M. (2013). Linguistics in India. In K. Allen (Ed.) The Oxford handbook of the history of linguistics (pp. 228-256). Oxford University Press.
Vasishth, S. (2022). Some right ways to analyze (psycho)linguistic data. University of Potsdam ms. https://vasishth.github.io/ARLVasishth/
Wells, R. S. (1947). De Saussure’s system of linguistics. Word, 3(1-2), 1-31.
Wilbur, Ronnie B., Abner, Natasha., Wood, Sandra., & Koulidobrova, Helen. (2018). When BEAT is ‘exceed’: verbal comparison in American Sign Language. FEAST 1: 59-69.
Xie, Zhiguo. (2014). Strict Comparison and Weak Necessity: The Case of Epistemic Yào in Mandarin Chinese. In JSAI International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 130-143). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Yang, C., Crain, S., Berwick, R. C., Chomsky, N., & Bolhuis, J. J. (2017). The growth of language: Universal Grammar, experience, and principles of computation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 81, 103-119.
Schedule
Readings must be done prior to class. Discussion leaders should actively guide the discussion, using a handout of questions that encourage us to explore the ideas in the readings. Don’t lecture us: The more you encourage other people to express their thoughts, the better!
* Marks deadlines
|
Week |
Topic/exercises |
Readings |
Leader |
|
9/8 |
What’s “good” linguistics? |
de Bot (2014) |
Myers |
|
9/15 |
Ancient linguistics |
Allen (2004) Chung (2013) Scharf (2013) |
慈惠 Genny 婉儀 |
|
9/22 |
Early Western linguistics |
Campbell (2007) Harris & Taylor (1997) Locher (2008) |
Genny 慈惠 婉儀 |
|
9/29 |
Modern linguistics |
Bloomfield (1926) Chomsky (1965) Wells (1947) |
Genny 慈惠&舒涵 婉儀 |
|
10/6 |
Language and cognition |
Devitt (2006) Evans (2012) Phillips et al. (2021) |
慈惠 婉儀 Genny |
|
10/13 |
Universals and innateness |
Croft (2017) Fitch (2018) Yang et al. (2017) |
Genny 婉儀 慈惠 |
|
10/20 |
Linguistic fieldwork |
Bosch-Baliarda et al. (2019) Meyerhoff et al. (2011) Rice (2006) |
慈惠 婉儀 Genny |
|
10/27 |
Corpus linguistics + get corpus exercise |
Awati (2015) [for hands-on practice] Gries & Berez (2017) Hasko (2012) |
Myers 婉儀 慈惠 |
|
11/3 |
Experimental linguistics |
Anwyl-Irvine et al. (2020) Petersen et al. (2022) Rogers & Révész (2020) |
婉儀 慈惠 Genny |
|
*11/10 |
Statistics
for linguistics & get statistics exercise |
Johnson (2008) [for hands-on practice] Vasishth (2022) |
Myers Genny |
|
11/17 |
Machine translation |
Le (2015) Manning et al. (2020) Pater (2019) |
婉儀 慈惠 Genny |
|
*11/24 |
Discuss research progress |
|
|
|
*12/1 |
Your choice I |
Hsieh (2005) Xie (2014) Lee & Kalyuga (2011) |
慈惠 慈惠 婉儀 |
|
12/8 |
Your choice II |
Hou & Jiang (2022) Liu et al. (2016) Wilbur et al. (2012) |
婉儀 婉儀 Genny |
|
12/15 |
Your choice III |
Gerdts (1988) Barrie & Li (2012) Edmonds & Hirst (2002) |
Genny Genny 慈惠 |
|
*12/22 |
Presentations |
|
|
|
12/29 |
Self-study [last class] |
|
|
|
*1/6 |
Journal acknowledgment due |
|
|