Linguistics 229B: Laboratory Syntax

MW 3:30--5:00 in Meyer Library 184

teaching/LabSyntax2006



[
Instructors | TAs | General Information | Schedule | Readings | Students ]


Instructors

(Back to top of page)

General Information

This course is part of the L229A,B,C Laboratory Syntax sequence. We will focus on issues involved in making the study of WH-Constructions more empirical. More generally, we will talk about the elicitation of acceptability judgments and their relation to linguistic theory. On the empirical side, we ask what influences these judgements? On the theoretical side, we review accounts of what these judgments say about grammar. The course will be part seminar and part laboratory.

Goal

The goal is to provide you with the necessary background to conduct well-controlled studies of acceptability (and to analyze their results). Although acceptability judgments have been one of the primary linguistic research methodologies (probably still the dominant methodology), they have received alarmingly little methodological attention. It took over 30 years (Schütze, 1996) for the first systematic assessment of this methodology for linguistic research to be published. In addition to a variety of extra-linguistic and task-related factors (which we will discuss in class), acceptability judgments have been shown to correlate (among other things) with frequency of occurrence and with complexity of the material.

In this class we will focus on task-related effects, design-related effects, and processing/complexity-related effects. We will introduce magnitude estimation and (if there is interest) reading time studies as ways to investigate the relation between linguistic complexity (or other factor) and acceptability judgments.

Expectation

Each class will have short obligatory readings (and some optional ones). The second half of this class (starting in the middle of February) will have weekly assignments that will help you to develop your own experiment. At the end of the class, you should be able to run a small experiment yourself, on which you should hand in a short written report (not more than 5 pages), if possible with some preliminary results and their analysis. You will find that many small, easy experiments haven't been conducted by anyone yet and that there are many interesting questions that haven't been answered, or else have only received preliminary answers (e.g. What is the effect of different instructions on acceptability judgments? How precisely does/do additional material/words influence acceptability judgments? Is there a relation between the number of violations of a grammatical constraint and the relative badness of an example? What's the effect of repetition on the perceived relative goodness of an example? Can we tease apart complexity and grammar effects?).

As Schütze already concluded: if we want to use acceptability judgments as a research tool (whether elicited from so-called naive informants or from our friendly officemate), we should understand what we are measuring and how it is influenced by other factors.

Details

(Back to top of page)

Students



(Back to top of page)