As in 2013, this autumn school emerges from the excellence center (Laboratoire d'Excellence) "Empirical Foundations of Linguistics" (in paricular Stand 2 "Experimental Grammar", Strand 4 "Language processing from a lifespan analysis", Strand 6 "Linguistic ressources" and Strand 7 "Experimental Methods in Linguistics"). It is co-sponsored by the Labex EFL and the CNRS.

The courses will be treat new methodologies wit respect to quantitative research on large corpora, experimental research on first and second languages, as well as new quantitative approaches in morphology, syntax and semantics. 

The availability of large digital corpora for a variety of languages, some of which annotated, has changed the ways corpus studies are realized in modern linguistics. Most linguistic theories agree nowadays on the need to test their hypotheses by sophisticated corpus studies as wall as by applying experimental methods (reading time, eye movements, EEG ...) for tasks of language comprehension and production.

The courses at this autumn school will give doctoral students, teachers and researchers theoretical and hands-on experience with these new technologies, including applications to questions traditionally dealt with in formal linguistics. These essential skills are not systematically taught in linguistics and will thus complement undergraduate and graduate programs.

Programme préliminaire 

Benoît Crabbé & Loic Liegeois (Université Paris Diderot & CNRS): Hands-on corpus analyses : The seminar will focus on tools for qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis. Through practical examples we will present a few query tools for annotated corpora such as Tregex, TigerSearch and IMS Corpus Workbench (CWB). The quantitative data analysis will be illustrated by practical exercises with the R language environment.

Christophe Pallier : Neuro-linguistics: Cerebral correlates of syntactic and semantic
representations : After having relied for a long time on the analysis of the deficits caused by brain lesions, neurolinguistics experienced a second youth with the birth, about a quarter of a century ago, of various methods of brain imaging (PET, fMRI, EEG, MEG). Notably, many studies have examined brain activity while volonteers understand words or sentences. In these two lectures, I will explain the nature of  data obtained through neuroimaging method, then an overview of recent work using fMRI that dealt with syntactic and semantic processes and representations.

Barbara Hemforth & Heather Burnett (CNRS, Paris Diderot):  Crosslinguistic research in experimental linguistics : While there still is a strong bias for work on English (about 80 % of published work) in psycholinguistics and in experimental linguistics, research on a larger variety of languages is becoming more and more prominent. This kind of research has very specific demands at the interface of formal and experimental linguistics that will be discussed in our course. 

Pia Rama (CNRS, Paris Descartes): Bilingualism and language acquisition: new methods and results : In two lectures, we will discuss language representation in the brain of bilingual children. We will be questioning the existence of a single semantic system common to both languages or of two distinct systems for each language. The experimental methods central to the studies presented here will be behavioral (eye-tracking) and the electrophysiological (evoked potentials) techniques.

A. Abeillé (LLF, Paris Diderot) & Philip Miller (Paris Diderot): Empirical studies on  elliptical constructions : Elliptical constructions (VP ellipsis, gapping, sluicing, RNR) have been much studied in syntactic and semantic theories. However, their empirical properties are far from being known especially from a cross linguistic perspective. We will focus on recent work that aim at a more solid empirical basis, based on corpus studies and experiments.

Olivier Bonami LLF, Paris Diderot): Quantitative approaches to morphology : In this course, we will discuss  the relative complexity of the flexional systems across languages and the predictability of different forms of a paradigm (eg verbal conjugation) using information theory and in particular the notion of entropy.

• analyse de corpus
• linguistique expérimentale
• acquisition des langues
• méthodologie expérimentale
• Morphologie
• syntaxe
• Sémantique
• pragmatique

• Anne Abeillé (Univ Paris Diderot FR)
• Saveria Colonna (Structures formelles du langage Paris FR)
• Barbara Hemforth (CNRS, Univ Paris Diderot FR)
• Shravan Vasishth (Univ Postdam NL)
• Jeffrey Runner (Univ Rochester US)
• Christophe Scheepers (Univ. Glasgow UK)

• Heather Burnett
• Doriane Gras
• Alexandre Roulois (CNRS)
• Loic Liegeois
• Viviane Makougni (Univ Paris Diderot FR)
• Yair Haendler (Labex EFL Paris FR)