Sam Featherston – författare

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.

The renewed focus on the evidential base of linguistics in general, but particularly on syntax, is in to a large degree dependent on technological developments: computers, electronic storage and transmission. These factors have enabled a revolution in the accessibility of digitally stored language, both in sampled and organized corpora and in its raw unsampled form on the internet. But this technology has also allowed a step-change in experimental methods readily available to linguists. The new arrival of such enormous quantities of data in greatly increased detail has made information accessible which could previously not even have been dreamed of. This volume is a selection of research reports from linguists who are making use of this new information and trying to integrate the new insights into their analyses and theoretical assumptions.

The contributions to The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics. Volume 1: Process reveal why the data-driven approach makes for a research environment which is fast-moving and democratic: technological change has made the sources of linguistic data readily accessible. These contributions show the methods both professional and student linguists are using to gather more evidence more easily than before.

The second volume of the two-volume set The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics focuses on the linguistic outcomes of empirical linguistics. The contributions present some of the insights that linguists can gain by applying the new methods: progress within language study is accelerated by the new evidence since language systems are more precisely captured. Readers will enjoy the fresh perspective on linguistic questions made possible by the evidence-based approach.

The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.

This volume presents new and cutting-edge research on the question of how we parse, interpret and understand language in more complex discourse settings. The challenge is to find empirical evidence on how information structure and semantic processing are related. Comprehensible answers are provided by showing how syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics interact and how they influence semantic processing and interpretation. The analysis of core information structural concepts that contribute to processing such as focus and contrast, the specific discourse status of referents that add to the common ground, context dependency and markedness as well as prosodic prominence and givenness marking has added new and convincing evidence to the research of information structure and semantic processing.