Experimental Linguistics

Undergraduate catalogue

In modern linguistics it is assumed that a speaker's knowledge of syntactic structure can be accessed via introspection about whether a linguistic expression is or is not deviant. This yes/no task has always been limited in the kind of information is provides about the underlying structure of language. We will look at various more probing experimental methods that have been proposed for accessing speakers' knowledge of grammar via judgment tasks, and then try them for ourselves. In the end, we will study a small part of the grammar by using an appropriate technique in an experiment to see if we can learn something new about language.