Approaches To Language Data Theory And Explanation

The study of language has changed substantially in the last decades. In particular, the development of new technologies has allowed the emergence of new experimental techniques which complement more traditional approaches to data in linguistics (like informal reports of native speakers’ judgments, surveys, corpus studies, or fieldwork). This move is an enriching feature of contemporary linguistics, allowing for a better understanding of a phenomenon as complex as natural language, where all sorts of factors (internal and external to the individual) interact (Chomsky 2005). This has generated some sort of divergence not only in research approaches, but also in the phenomena studied, with an increasing specialization between subfields and accounts. At the same time, it has also led to subfield isolation and methodological a priori, with some researchers even claiming that theoretical linguistics has little to offer to cognitive science (see for instance Edelman & Christiansen 2003). We believe that this view of linguistics (and cognitive science as a whole) is misguided, and that the complementarity of different approaches to such a multidimensional phenomenon as language should be highlighted for convergence and further development of its scientific study (see also Jackendoff 1988, 2007; Phillips & Lasnik 2003; den Dikken, Bernstein, Tortora & Zanuttini 2007; Sprouse, Schütze & Almeida 2013; Phillips 2013).

Cognitive linguistics has an honourable tradition of paying respect to naturally occurring language data and there have been fruitful interactions between corpus data and aspects of linguistic structure and meaning. More recently, dialect data and sociolinguistic data collection methods/theoretical concepts have started to generate interest. There has also been an increase in several kinds of experimental work. However, not all linguistic data is simply naturally occurring or derived from experiments with statistically robust samples of speakers. Other traditions, especially the generative tradition, have fruitfully used introspection and questions about the grammaticality of different strings to uncover patterns which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The divide between generative and cognitive approaches to language is intimately connected to the kinds of data drawn on, and the way in which generalisations are derived from these data. The papers in this volume explore these issues through the lens of synchronic linguistic analysis, the study of language change, typological investigation and experimental study. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 36:3 (2012).

Novice and early career researchers often have difficulty with understanding how theory, data analysis and interpretation of findings “hang together” in a well-designed and theorized qualitative research investigation and with learning how to draw on such understanding to conduct rigorous data analysis and interpretation of their analytic results. Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Theory in Literacy Studies Research demonstrates how to design, conduct and analyze a well put together qualitative research project. Using their own successful studies, chapter authors spell out a problem area, research question, and theoretical framing, carefully explaining their choices and decisions. They then show in detail how they analyzed their data, and why they took this approach. Finally, they demonstrate how they interpreted the results of their analysis, to make them meaningful in research terms. Approaches include interactional sociolinguistics, microethnographic discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, iterative coding, conversation analysis, and multimediated discourse analysis, among others. This book will appeal to beginning researchers and to literacy researchers responsible for teaching qualitative literacy studies research design at undergraduate and graduate levels. Perfect for courses such as: Literacy Research Seminar | Introduction to Qualitative Research | Advanced Research Methods | Studying New Literacies and Media | Research Perspectives in Literacy | Discourse Analysis | Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis | Sociolinguistic Analysis | Classroom Language Research

The mental representation of language cannot be directly observed but must be inferred and modelled from its effects at second hand. Linguists have traditionally responded to this in two ways, either going for a fairly data-light approach and valuing theoretical creativity, or pursuing just those goals for which data is available and trusting to data-driven descriptive work. More recently, advances in technology and experimental techniques have made data gathering easier and more accessible, so that a theoretically informed but empirically based approach is rapidly growing in popularity. This synthesis permits linguists to combine the intellectual hypothesis generation of the theoreticians with the ability to deliver hard answers of the empiricist. This volume is a collection of papers in this direction, using mostly experiment methods to yield insights into syntactic and semantic structures, language processing, and acquisition. Papers report corpus data, neurological investigations, child language studies, and fieldwork from minority languages.

This thorough revision and update of the popular second edition contains everything the student needs to know about the psychology of language: how we understand, produce, and store language.

This volume explores how linguistic theories inform the ways in which languages are described. Theories, as representations of linguistic categories, guide the field linguist to look for various phenomena without presupposing their necessary existence and provide the tools to account for various sets of data across different languages. A goal of linguistic description is to represent the full range of language structures for any given language. The chapters in this book cover various sub-disciplines of linguistics including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and anthropological linguistics, drawing upon theoretical approaches such as prosodic Phonology, Enhancement theory, Distributed Morphology, Minimalist syntax, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Kinship theory. The languages described in this book include Australian languages (Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan), Romance languages as well as English. This volume will be of interest to researchers in both descriptive and theoretical linguistics.

This book reconsiders the classic topics of linguistic analysis and reflects on universal aspects of language from a typological and comparative perspective. The aim is to show the crucial interactions which occur at the different levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax and pragmatics), illustrating their various roles in the structural organization of the sentence and exploring how interface relations contribute to yield interpretation in typologically different languages. The structural analysis is set within the Generative framework of grammar, though theoretical tenets are the outcome, rather than the starting point, of a study based on the observation of data. As the basic intent is to show different phenomena across a wide range of languages, a 'semi-guided' method has been adopted in order to facilitate comprehension and assist the reader in the identification of language universals. For every topic, the discussion of previous literature is followed by cross-linguistic evidence so that theory can be checked against data and the relevant generalizations drawn. Ultimately, this approach reveals that grammar is based on a very limited number of universal principles, which operate yielding different effects at the different levels of the grammar. It implies that a real understanding of the language-system can only be derived from a comparative analysis in which the notion of interface plays a crucial role. The seven chapters in the volume deal with categories and functions, argument structure, syntactic functions, the structure of noun phrases, adverbial modification, information structure and illocutive force. Throughout, the observation of data from 74 languages is a crucial element in the formulation and understanding of theoretical tenets. This book is highly recommended for researchers and students interested in formal analysis from a typological, comparative perspective.

A comprehensive guide to the conceptual, mathematical, and implementational aspects of analyzing electrical brain signals, including data from MEG, EEG, and LFP recordings. This book offers a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of analyzing electrical brain signals. It explains the conceptual, mathematical, and implementational (via Matlab programming) aspects of time-, time-frequency- and synchronization-based analyses of magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), and local field potential (LFP) recordings from humans and nonhuman animals. It is the only book on the topic that covers both the theoretical background and the implementation in language that can be understood by readers without extensive formal training in mathematics, including cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and psychologists. Readers who go through the book chapter by chapter and implement the examples in Matlab will develop an understanding of why and how analyses are performed, how to interpret results, what the methodological issues are, and how to perform single-subject-level and group-level analyses. Researchers who are familiar with using automated programs to perform advanced analyses will learn what happens when they click the “analyze now” button. The book provides sample data and downloadable Matlab code. Each of the 38 chapters covers one analysis topic, and these topics progress from simple to advanced. Most chapters conclude with exercises that further develop the material covered in the chapter. Many of the methods presented (including convolution, the Fourier transform, and Euler's formula) are fundamental and form the groundwork for other advanced data analysis methods. Readers who master the methods in the book will be well prepared to learn other approaches.

This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interactions between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis offers an indispensable guide for everyone researching any aspect of language including those in linguistics, comparative philology, cognitive science, developmental philology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, computational science, and artificial intelligence. This second edition has been updated to include seven new chapters looking at linguistic units in language acquisition, conversation analysis, neurolinguistics, experimental phonetics, phonological analysis, experimental semantics, and distributional typology.

This volume presents nine of today's grammatical theories with a view to comparing their starting points and their methods. The particular features and properties of each theory are discussed in this book, as well as the major conceptual differences and methodological obstacles each has overcome and has yet to overcome. The parallel structure of the papers makes for easy comparison and cross-reference. This systematic and thorough introduction to the recent history of the discipline provides a state-of-the-art report on current leading tendencies as well as a wealth of directions for future research.