The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax

Experimental syntax is an area that is rapidly growing as linguistic research becomes increasingly focused on replicable language data, in both fieldwork and laboratory environments. The first of its kind, this handbook provides an in-depth overview of current issues and trends in this field, with contributions from leading international scholars. It pays special attention to sentence acceptability experiments, outlining current best practices in conducting tests, and pointing out promising new avenues for future research. Separate sections review research results from the past 20 years, covering specific syntactic phenomena and language types. The handbook also outlines other common psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods for studying syntax, comparing and contrasting them with acceptability experiments, and giving useful perspectives on the interplay between theoretical and experimental linguistics. Providing an up-to-date reference on this exciting field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics interested in using experimental methods to conduct syntactic research.

BLC mini-series: New statistical approaches and research practices for bilingualism research

The past decade has witnessed some dramatic methodological changes in the wider disciplines of psycholinguistics, psychology, and experimental linguistics. One such set of changes comprises the development of open and transparent research practices, which have increasingly been adopted in response to concerns that empirical results often fail to replicate and may not generalise across samples and experimental conditions (Gibson & Fedorenko, 2013; Maxwell, Lau, & Howard, 2015; McElreath & Smaldino, 2015; Yarkoni, 2020). Another important set of changes concerns the use of sophisticated statistical techniques, such as mixed-effects models (Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008) and Bayesian analyses (Vasishth, Nicenboim, Beckman, Li & Kong, 2018), which can provide much more information about magnitudes of effects and sources of variation than the more traditional statistical approaches.

Preregistration in experimental linguistics: applications, challenges, and limitations

The current publication system neither incentivizes publishing null results nor direct replication attempts, which biases the scientific record toward novel findings that appear to support presented hypotheses (referred to as “publication bias”). Moreover, flexibility in data collection, measurement, and analysis (referred to as “researcher degrees of freedom”) can lead to overconfident beliefs in the robustness of a statistical relationship. One way to systematically decrease publication bias and researcher degrees of freedom is preregistration. A preregistration is a time-stamped document that specifies how data is to be collected, measured, and analyzed prior to data collection. While preregistration is a powerful tool to reduce bias, it comes with certain challenges and limitations which have to be evaluated for each scientific discipline individually. This paper discusses the application, challenges and limitations of preregistration for experimental linguistic research.

3. Not as 'Foreign' as You Think

Chapter 3 deploys methods from historical and experimental linguistics to examine how speakers of one language manage to understand people speaking another (related) language, identifying strategies they use to create meaning in response to the ‘other language’ – and strategies with which they create barriers to understanding in order to preserve a distinctive identity.

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax–semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

From experiment results to a constraint hierarchy with the ‘Rank Centrality’ algorithm

Rank Centrality (RC; Negahban, Oh, & Shah 2017) is a rank-aggregation algorithm that computes a total ranking of elements from noisy pairwise ranking information. I test RC as an alternative to incremental error-driven learning algorithms such as GLA-MaxEnt (Boersma & Hayes 2001; Jäger 2007) for modeling a constraint hierarchy on the basis of two-alternative forced-choice experiment results. For the case study examined here, RC agrees well with GLA-MaxEnt on the ordering of the constraints, but differs somewhat on the distance between constraints; in particular, RC assigns more extreme (low) positions to constraints at the bottom of the hierarchy than GLA-MaxEnt does. Overall, these initial results are promising, and RC merits further investigation as a constraint-ranking method in experimental linguistics.

From experiment results to a constraint hierarchy with the ‘Rank Centrality’ algorithm

Rank Centrality (RC; Negahban, Oh, & Shah 2017) is a rank-aggregation algorithm that computes a total ranking of elements from noisy pairwise ranking information. I test RC as an alternative to incremental error-driven learning algorithms such as GLA-MaxEnt (Boersma & Hayes 2001; Jäger 2007) for modeling a constraint hierarchy on the basis of two-alternative forced-choice experiment results. For the case study examined here, RC agrees well with GLA-MaxEnt on the ordering of the constraints, but differs somewhat on the distance between constraints; in particular, RC assigns more extreme (low) positions to constraints at the bottom of the hierarchy than GLA-MaxEnt does. Overall, these initial results are promising, and RC merits further investigation as a constraint-ranking method in experimental linguistics.

КСЕНОНИМЫ-ИНТЕРПРЕТАТИВЫ В СЕТЕВОМ ДИСКУРСЕ РУССКОЯЗЫЧНОЙ ДИАСПОРЫ КИТАЯ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ КСЕНОНИМА ЧАБУДО)

Введение. Данное исследование посвящено изучению особого типа русского сетевого диаспорального дискурса – дискурса русскоязычной диаспоры Китая как репрезентанта русской лингвокультуры, ориентированной в область китайской культуры. Наряду с ксенонимами-реалиями в данном дискурсе выделяются ксенонимы-интерпретативы. Если ксенонимы-реалии являются знаками безэквивалентных, исходно этноспецифичных явлений и понятий иноязычной действительности, то ксенонимы-интерпретативы имеют полноценные лексические соответствия в языке-реципиенте, не отмечены этнокультурной маркированностью в матричном языке и служат восприятию, пониманию и интерпретации иностранной языковой и социокультурной реальности диаспоральным сообществом. Материал и методы. Материалом исследования являются более 1000 текстов сетевой коммуникации русскоязычного диаспорального сообщества Китая, включающие ксеноним-интерпретатив чабудо. Вместе с методологическим инструментарием интерлингвокультурологии, дериватологии и лексической семантики используются приемы контекстологического и дискурс-анализа, а также корпусной и экспериментальной лингвистики. Результаты и обсуждение. Анализ данных онлайн-корпуса китайского языка и результатов пилотажного эксперимента, направленного на выявление показаний языкового сознания китайских студентов, показывает, что китайское наречие 差不多 chabuduo является типичным частотным словом в повседневном китайском словоупотреблении и не наделяется особой лингвокультурной значимостью как этноспецифичное понятие. Будучи эталонным средством выражения универсальной семантической категории аппроксимации, оно имеет прямые соответствия в русском языке: примерно, приблизительно, почти. Однако в ходе вхождения в сетевой русскоязычный диаспоральный дискурс и адаптации в нем наречие чабудо в функции ксенонима-интерпретатива претерпевает целый ряд морфолого-синтаксических и лексико-семантических трансформаций. Главными в этом ряду выступают способствующая концептуализации признаковых параметров субстантивация наречия, расширение спектра синтаксических позиций лексемы, включение ее в разнообразные словообразовательные и семантические деривационные модификации. Заключение. На уровне гипертекста дискурса ксеноним-интерпретатив наделяется особым этноспецифичным значением, происходит интенсивный рост частотности его употребления, внедрение ксенонима в структуру квазипрецедентных высказываний и иные формы лингвокреативных практик сетевого диаспорального сообщества.Introduction. This article is devoted to studying a special type of network of the Russian Diaspora discourse is the discourse of the Russian-speaking Diaspora of China as a representative of the Russian linguistic culture, which is focused in the area of Chinese culture. Along with xenonyms-realities, xenonyms-interpretatives are distinguished in this discourse. If xenonyms-realities are signs of non-equivalent, initially ethnospecific phenomena and concepts of foreign-language reality, then xenonyms-interpretatives have full-fledged lexical correspondences in the recipient language, are not marked by ethno-cultural marking in the matrix language and serve the perception, understanding and interpretation of foreign language and socio-cultural reality by the Diaspora community. Material and methods. The material of the research is more than 1000 texts of network communication of the Russian-speaking Diaspora community of China, including the xenonym-interpretative chabudou. Along with the methodological tools of interlinguoculturology, derivatology and lexical semantics, the methods of contextual and discourse analysis, as well as corpus and experimental linguistics are used. Results and discussion. The analysis of data from the Online Chinese corpus and the results of a pilot experiment aimed at identifying indications of the language consciousness of Chinese students shows that the Chinese adverb 差不多 chabuduo is a typical frequency word in everyday Chinese word usage and is not endowed with special linguistic and cultural significance as an ethnospecific concept. As a reference means of expressing the universal semantic category of approximation, it has direct equivalent in the Russian language: примерно (about), приблизительно (approximately), почти (almost). However, in the course of entering into the network Russian-speaking diasporal discourse and adapting in it to the function of the xenonym-interpretative adverb chabudou undergoes a number of morphological-syntactic and lexical-semantic transformations during its entry into the network Russian-speaking diasporal discourse and adaptation in it. The main ones in this series are the substantiation of the adverb that contributes to the conceptualization of the characteristic parameters, the expansion of the range of syntactic positions of the lexeme, its inclusion in a variety of word-forming and semantic derivative modifications. Conclusion. At the level of the hypertext of discourse xenonym-interpretative is endowed with a special ethnospecific meaning, there is an intensive increase in the frequency of its use, the introduction of the xenonym into the structure of quasi-precedent statements and other forms of linguocreative practices of the network Diaspora community.