160126 PR Wissenschaftliches Praktikum aus Theoretischer Linguistik (2024W)

Theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding regularities in language that shed light on the cognitive linguistic capacity of humans. Our methods differ depending on the type of data we have available. We will consider introspection by native speakers, designing a questionnaire to obtain written or spoken data from native speakers, and how to study theoretical linguistics questions in large corpora.
This term we have a rare opportunity to work with an actual speaker of a rare minority language and do field work from the comfort of our own classroom. You could call it "blind field-dating", if you like. We will develop a series of questionnaires and gather data from the speaker directly to check our grammatical hypothesis about this mystery language. But this is only fun if noone cheats! So by registering for this course, I am asking you to commit to using only field-work methods (e.g. interactions with the speaker) to uncover facts about the grammar of this language and to NOT use the internet or any other books or other external resources to look up information directly about the language.
By the end of the course, you will develop an understanding of how to use different kinds of data efficiently to explore theoretically informed research questions. If we do our job right, we will also learn a lot about the grammar of this mystery language.