Empirical Methods in Linguistics
Updated 10/30/2007 (see changes below)
James Myers (麥傑)
Office: 文學院247
Tel: 31506
Email: Lngmyers at ccu
Web: http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/
Office hours: Monday 3-5 pm, or by appointment
Goals
You all have already had experience with linguistic 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. National Chung Cheng University ms.
Schedule (there may be changes along the way)
Readings should be done prior to class.
| Week | Topic | Text | Discussion readings | Pgs | Leaders |
| 9/19 | Welcome |
Aronoff & Cho (2001) Vannest and Boland (1999) |
7 |
Myers | |
| 9/26 | Thinking about methodology | Ch. 1 |
Gratzer (2000) Bloomfield (1926) Chomsky (2002) Epstein & Seely (2006) Sampson (2001) Xu (1996) |
17 |
|
| 10/3 | Grammar | Ch. 2 |
Chomsky (1965) Noonan (1999) |
60 |
|
| 10/10 | NO CLASS (國慶日) | ||||
| 10/17 | Evidence | Ch. 3 |
Chalmers (1999) Penke and Rosenbach (2004) |
50 |
|
| 10/24 | Patterns and randomness | Ch. 4 |
Stewart (1997) Campbell (2001) Woods et al. (1986) Myers (2006) |
31 |
|
| 10/31 | Models and prediction | Ch. 5 |
Kirk (1995) Fisher (1935) Warner et al. (2006) Ioannidis (2005) |
25 |
|
| 11/7 | Collecting judgment data | Ch. 6 |
Labov (1996) Cowart (1997) |
29 |
|
| 11/14 | Analyzing judgment data | Ch. 7 |
Myers (2007b) Bailey & Hahn (2001) |
49 |
|
| 11/21 | Other types of experiments | Ch. 8 |
Derwing & de Almeida (2004) Phillips & Wagers (2007) |
44 |
|
| 11/28 | Collecting corpus data | Ch. 9 |
Neidle et al. (2001) Kennedy (1998) Leech (2007) |
19 |
|
| 12/5 | Discuss research progress | ||||
| 12/12 | Analyzing corpus data | Ch. 10 |
Meurers (2004) Myers (2007a) Manning & Schütze (1999) |
21 |
|
| 12/19 | Grammatical models | Ch. 11 |
Pater et al. (2007) Butler (2007) |
38 |
|
| 12/26 | Grammatical typology | Ch. 12 |
Newmeyer (2004) Wunderlich (2004a) Tomasello (2004) Wunderlich (2004b) |
22 |
|
| 1/2 | Presentations | ||||
| 1/9 | Presentations {last class} | ||||
| 1/16 | {Journal acknowledgment} |
Discussion readings
Aronoff, Mark, and Sungeun Cho. 2001. The semantics of -ship suffixation. Linguistic Inquiry 32 (1):167-173.
Bailey, Todd M., and Ulrike Hahn. 2001. Determinants of wordlikeness: Phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods? Journal of Memory and Language 44:569-591.
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.) Readings in linguistics I & II: Abridged edition (pp. 8-13). University of Chicago Press.
Butler, Christopher S. 2007. Notes towards an incremental implementation of the Role and Reference Grammar semantics-to-syntax linking algorithm for English. In M. Hannay & G. J. Steen (Eds.) Structural-functional studies in English grammar (pp. 275–307). John Benjamins.
Campbell, Scott. 2001. The fallacy of inductive skepticism. The Skeptic 21 (1):25-30.
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.
Chomsky, Noam. 2002. On nature and language (pp. 98-105). Cambridge University Press.
Cowart, Wayne. 1997. Experimental syntax: Applying objective methods to sentence judgments (chs. 3-5, pp. 39-65). Sage Publications.
Derwing, Bruce L., and Roberto G. de Almeida. 2004. Non-chronometric experiments in linguistics. University of Alberta and Concordia University ms.
Epstein, Samuel David, and T. Daniel Seely. 2006. Derivations in Minimalism (pp. 1-4). Cambridge.
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. Simon and Shuster. Reprinted 1988 by Tempus Books (pp. 1487-1495).
Gratzer, Walter. 2000. Aberrations of physics: Irving Langmuir investigates. Chapter 3 in The undergrowth of science: Delusion, self-deception, and human frailty (pp. 65-81). Oxford.
Ioannidis, John P. A. 2005. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2 (8): e124.
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). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.
Labov, William. 1996. When intuitions fail. Chicago Linguistics Society 32: 77-105.
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.
Meurers, W. Detmar. 2004. On the use of electronic corpora for theoretical linguistics: Case studies from the syntax of German. Lingua 115: 1619-1639.
Myers, James. 2006. Tone circles and chance. National Chung Cheng University ms. ROA 843-0606.
Myers, James. 2007a. Linking data to grammar in phonology: Two case studies. Concentric.
Myers, James. 2007b. The design and analysis of small-scale syntactic judgment experiments. National Chung Cheng University ms. Submitted.
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.
Newmeyer, Frederick. 2004. Typological evidence and universal grammar. Studies in Language 28: 527-548.
Noonan, Michael. 1999. Non-structuralist syntax. In M. Darnell et al. (Eds.) Functionalism and formalism in linguistics (pp. 11-31). John Benjamins.
Pater, Joe, Rajesh Bhatt, and Christopher Potts. 2007. Linguistic optimization. U. Mass. ms.
Penke, Martina, and Anette Rosenbach. 2004. What counts as evidence in linguistics? An introduction. Studies in Language, 28 (3), 480-526.
Phillips, Colin, and Matthew Wagers. 2007. Relating structure and time in linguistics and psycholinguistics. In G. Gaskell (Ed.) Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. Oxford.
Sampson, Geoffrey. 2001. Empirical linguistics. Introduction (pp. 1-6). Continuum.
Stewart, Ian. 1997. Marilyn and the goats. In The magical maze (pp. 71-102). Phoenix.
Tomasello, Michael. 2004. What kind of evidence could refute the UG hypothesis? Studies in Language 28 (3): 642-645.
Vannest, Jennifer, and Julie E. Boland. 1999. Lexical morphology and lexical access. Brain and Language 68:324–332.
Xu, Liejiong. 1996. Construction and destruction of theories by data: A case study. Chicago Linguistics Society 32:107-118.
Warner, Natasha, Erin Good, Allard Jongman and Joan Sereno. 2006. Orthographic vs. morphological incomplete neutralization effects. Journal of Phonetics 34 (2):285-293.
Woods, Anthony, Paul Fletcher, and Arthur Hughes. 1986. Why do linguists need statistics? Chapter 1 of Statistics in language studies (pp. 1-7). Cambridge University Press.
Wunderlich, Dieter. 2004a. Why assume UG? Studies in Language 28 (3): 615-641.
Wunderlich, Dieter. 2004b. Author's response: Is there any evidence that refutes the UG hypothesis? Studies in Language 28 (3): 646-647.