The Fruits Of Empirical Linguistics Process

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

The contributions to The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics. Volume 1: Process reveal why the data-driven approach makes for a research environment which is fast-moving and democratic: technological change has made the sources of linguistic data readily accessible. These contributions show the methods both professional and student linguists are using to gather more evidence more easily than before.

This volume presents new and cutting-edge research on the question of how we parse, interpret and understand language in more complex discourse settings. The challenge is to find empirical evidence on how information structure and semantic processing are related. Comprehensible answers are provided by showing how syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics interact and how they influence semantic processing and interpretation. The analysis of core information structural concepts that contribute to processing such as focus and contrast, the specific discourse status of referents that add to the common ground, context dependency and markedness as well as prosodic prominence and givenness marking has added new and convincing evidence to the research of information structure and semantic processing.

Throughout much of the history of linguistics, grammaticality judgments - intuitions about the well-formedness of sentences - have constituted most of the empirical base against which theoretical hypothesis have been tested. Although such judgments often rest on subtle intuitions, there is no systematic methodology for eliciting them, and their apparent instability and unreliability have led many to conclude that they should be abandoned as a source of data. Carson T. Schütze presents here a detailed critical overview of the vast literature on the nature and utility of grammaticality judgments and other linguistic intuitions, and the ways they have been used in linguistic research. He shows how variation in the judgment process can arise from factors such as biological, cognitive, and social differences among subjects, the particular elicitation method used, and extraneous features of the materials being judged. He then assesses the status of judgments as reliable indicators of a speaker's grammar. Integrating substantive and methodological findings, Schütze proposes a model in which grammaticality judgments result from interaction of linguistic competence with general cognitive processes. He argues that this model provides the underpinning for empirical arguments to show that once extragrammatical variance is factored out, universal grammar succumbs to a simpler, more elegant analysis than judgment data initially lead us to expect. Finally, Schütze offers numerous practical suggestions on how to collect better and more useful data. The result is a work of vital importance that will be required reading for linguists, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers of language alike.

This book examines the evidential status and use of linguistic intuitions, a topic that has seen increased interest in recent years. Linguists use native speakers' intuitions - such as whether or not an utterance sounds acceptable - as evidence for theories about language, but this approach is not uncontroversial. The two parts of this volume draw on the most recent work in both philosophy and linguistics to explore the two major issues at the heart of the debate. Chapters in the first part address the 'justification question', critically analysing and evaluating the theoretical rationale for the evidential use of linguistic intuitions. The second part discusses recent developments in the domain of experimental syntax, focusing on the question of whether gathering intuitions experimentally is epistemically and methodologically superior to the informal methods that have traditionally been used. The volume provides valuable insights into whether and how linguistic intuitions can be used in theorizing about language, and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

The book specifies a corpus architecture, including annotation and querying techniques, and its implementation. The corpus architecture is developed for empirical studies of translations, and beyond those for the study of texts which are inter-lingually comparable, particularly texts of similar registers. The compiled corpus, CroCo, is a resource for research and is, with some copyright restrictions, accessible to other research projects. Most of the research was undertaken as part of a DFG-Project into linguistic properties of translations. Fundamentally, this research project was a corpus-based investigation into the language pair English-German. The long-term goal is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and beyond this to language comparison and language contact more generally with the language pair English - German as our object languages. This goal implies a thorough interest in possible specific properties of translations, and beyond this in an empirical translation theory. The methodology developed is not restricted to the traditional exclusively system-based comparison of earlier days, where real-text excerpts or constructed examples are used as mere illustrations of assumptions and claims, but instead implements an empirical research strategy involving structured data (the sub-corpora and their relationships to each other, annotated and aligned on various theoretically motivated levels of representation), the formation of hypotheses and their operationalizations, statistics on the data, critical examinations of their significance, and interpretation against the background of system-based comparisons and other independent sources of explanation for the phenomena observed. Further applications of the resource developed in computational linguistics are outlined and evaluated.