Experimental Linguistics

In this seminar, you will assume the stance of curious researchers: we will treat language, and the structure of language, as a field of study that is open for exploration, just like other empirical sciences. You will learn about the body of techniques that are called -the scientific method-, which allow us to investigate the world in a reliable and systematic fashion. As it will turn out, the investigation of linguistic structure uses very similar methods as the investigation of physical phenomena, psychological questions, or economical predictions. You will understand about concepts such as hypothesis formulation, falsification and Occam's Razor, and see how they can help us to generate new ideas about the principles of language. Another important footing of linguistics as an empirical science is a fundamental idea of statistical analysis. While this course cannot, of course, provide anything more than a brief introduction to this complex topic, you will gain a basic understanding of terms such as significance, correlation, and statistical testing, and you will get a first look at the statistical methods that are most important to find answers to linguistic research questions. All these methods and theoretical underpinnings will be put into context with experimental studies that have been published in different areas of linguistics. You will see that the scientific method can be useful to answer questions from any linguistic domain. Here are some examples for questions that might be investigated experimentally: • Phonology (e.g. -Do speakers of English really produce nasalized vowels before nasal consonants?-) • Morphology (e.g. -Which factors determine whether speakers of English prefer the -ify suffix over -ize?-) • Syntax (e.g. -How do speakers of English rate the acceptability of sentences in which an adjunct precedes the complement, such as The family left before Christmas the beloved but old and draughty house where they had lived for 50 years?) • Semantics (e.g. -Are antonymic pairs of adjectives perceived as opposites by all speakers of English?-) • Pragmatics (e.g. -Which factors influence whether you address somebody by Hi, Hello, or Dear in an e-mail?-) • Sociolinguistics (e.g. -Do male speakers use less complex sentences than femaile speakers?-) • ... Finally, this seminar will provide you with the opportunity to design and conduct your own empirical study of a linguistic topic of your choice, analyse and interpret the data that you have obtained, and present the results of the experiment to the other students in the class. Englisch, LA Gymnasium / Gesamt, PO 2004 Abgeschlossenes Grundstudium Universität Siegen WiSe 2011/12 Sprachwissenschaft: Deutsch, Englisch, Roman. Spr., Englisch, Master, PO 2009 Sprachwissenschaft: Deutsch, Englisch, Roman. Spr., Romanistik, Master, PO 2009 Dr. Kunter Gero