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Speaker: Prof. Stefan Th. Gries

Prof. Stefan Th. Gries | On the interface of corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics

Guest Lecture
For many years, corpus linguistics (the study of language based on ideally large databases of naturally-occurring language) on the one hand and theoretical and/or psycholinguistics on the other have existed side by side, with relatively little contact and mutual influence. Over the last 15-20 or so years, this has changed considerable: theoretical analyses as well as psycholinguistic, or more generally cognitively-inspired, studies now regularly use corpus data; particularly corpus frequencies are often used to, for instance, explain (aspects of) phenomena such language acquisition, processing, and change, or to merely control experimental stimuli with regard to their frequencies in psycholinguistic experimentation. In the first part of this talk, I will first discuss a few aspects in which I believe corpus data have more to offer to researchers who wish to establish a connection between corpus data and psycholinguistic or cognitive mechanisms; in the second part, I will discuss a case study from learner corpus research on _that_-complementation that showcases (i) recently-developed quantitative approaches in corpus linguistics in general as well as (ii) the application of one of several information-theoretic predictors in corpus-based studies of linguistic alternations. [more]
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