Empirical Methods of Linguistic Research

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Empirical Methods of Linguistic Research
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What you will learn

• How to write an empirical research paper
• How to design an experiment / a questionnaire
• How to describe frequency data (tables, graphs)
• How to analyse frequency data (statistics)
• Introduction to relevant computer software

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Linguistic data

• Collection of written texts
• Transcripts of spoken language
• Large electronic corpora
• Experiments
• Questionnaire
• Dictionaries
• Diary data (child language)
• Reference grammars (linguistic typology)
• Videos

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Language acquisition
(1) Whats dat? (2) Whos dat? (3) When do we
leave? (4) Wheres Daddy? (5) Whys dat? 1.
Which WH-word is most frequent in early child
language? 2. In which order do the WH words
occur? 3. Does input frequency determine the
order of acquisition?
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Language acquisition
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Language acquisition
Table 1. Raw frequencies
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Language acquisition
Table 2. Mean proportions
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Language acquisition
Table 3. Age of first appearance
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Language acquisition
Table 4. Correlation
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Language acquisition
Table 5. Correlation (paired)
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Corpus linguistics

• (1) a. When Peter arrived, Sally left.
• b. Sally left, when Peter arrived.
• (2) a. If you had talked to her, you would have
  heard about it.
• b. You would have heard about it, if you had
  talked to her.
• What determines the positioning of the adverbial
  clause?

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Corpus linguistics
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Corpus linguistics
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Corpus linguistics
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Corpus linguistics
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Historical linguistics

• English has lost about 200 irregular verbs since
  Old English. In a few cases, regular verbs have
  become irregular (e.g. catch caught). Today
  there are only 180 irregular verbs left.
• 1. Is there still pressure to regularize
  irregular verbs in English?
• 2. What determines the regularization of
  irregular verbs?
• 3. Why have some regular verbs become
  regularized?

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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Psycholinguistics/Cognitive Linguistics

• Complete the sentence
• (1) Das ist der Mann .
• (2) Das ist das Buch
• (3) Das ist die Stadt
• (4) Das ist jemand
• (5) Das ist derjenige

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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Historical linguistics
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Linguistic typology