Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives

✍ Scribed by Stephan Kepser (editor); Marga Reis (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 589
• Series: Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG]; 85
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The renaissance of corpus linguistics and promising developments in experimental linguistic techniques in recent years have led to a remarkable revival of interest in issues of the empirical base of linguistic theory in general, and the status of different kinds of linguistic evidence in particular. Consensus is growing (a) that even so-called primary data (from introspection as well as authentic language production) are inherently complex performance data only indirectly reflecting the subject of linguistic theory, (b) that for an appropriate foundation of linguistic theories evidence from different sources such as introspective data, corpus data, data from (psycho-)linguistic experiments, historical and diachronic data, typological data, neurolinguistic data and language learning data are not only welcome but also often necessary. It is in particular by contrasting evidence from different sources with respect to particular research questions that we may gain a deeper understanding of the status and quality of the individual types of linguistic evidence on the one hand, and of their mutual relationship and respective weight on the other.

The present volume is a collection of (selected) papers presented at the conference on 'Linguistic Evidence' in Tübingen 2004, which was explicitly devoted to the above issues. All of them address these issues in relation to specific linguistic research problems, thereby helping to establish a better understanding of the nature of linguistic evidence in particularly insightful ways.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Contents
Evidence in Linguistics
Gradedness and Consistency in Grammaticality Judgments
Null Subjects and Verb Placement in Old High German
Beauty and the Beast: What Running a Broad-Coverage Precision Grammar over the BNC Taught Us about the Grammar — and the Corpus
Seemingly Indefinite Definites
Animacy as a Driving Cue in Change and Acquisition in Brazilian Portuguese
Aspectual Coercion and On-line Processing: The Case of Iteration
Why Do Children Fail to Understand Weak Epistemic Terms? An Experimental Study
Processing Negative Polarity Items: When Negation Comes Through the Backdoor
Linguistic Constraints on the Acquisition of Epistemic Modal Verbs
The Decathlon Model of Empirical Syntax
Examining the Constraints on the Benefactive Alternation by Using the World Wide Web as a Corpus
A Quantitative Corpus Study of German Word Order Variation
Which Statistics Reflect Semantics? Rethinking Synonymy and Word Similarity
Language Production Errors as Evidence for Language Production Processes – The Frankfurt Corpora
A Multi-Evidence Study of European and Brazilian Portuguese wh-Questions
The Relationship between Grammaticality Ratings and Corpus Frequencies: A Case Study into Word Order Variability in the Midfield of German Clauses
The Emergence of Productive Non-Medical -itis: Corpus Evidence and Qualitative Analysis
Experimental Data vs. Diachronic Typological Data: Two Types of Evidence for Linguistic Relativity
Reflexives and Pronouns in Picture Noun Phrases: Using Eye Movements as a Source of Linguistic Evidence
The Plural is Semantically Unmarked
Coherence – an Experimental Approach
Thinking About What We Are Asking Speakers to Do
A Prosodic Factor for the Decline of Topicalisation in English
On the Syntax of DP Coordination: Combining Evidence from Reading-Time Studies and Agrammatic Comprehension
Lexical Statistics and Lexical Processing: Semantic Density, Information Complexity, Sex, and Irregularity in Dutch
The Double Competence Hypothesis On Diachronic Evidence
Backmatter