[Corpora-List] Call for participation: Corpus and Cognition Colloquium at CL2007

[Gaëtanelle Gilquin]

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

CORPUS AND COGNITION COLLOQUIUM:
The relation between natural and experimental language data

Colloquium held in conjunction with Corpus Linguistics 2007
The University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
July 27, 2007
http://www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/conference2007
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BACKGROUND

While the usefulness of corpora for the description of language cannot be
denied, it must also be recognised that they are not the only sources for
language data. Corpora show how people use language in authentic
environments, or what is likely to occur in language, but they do not make
it possible to answer questions having to do with, say, grammaticality or
language processing, or how, if at all, language is structured in the
mind. Hence the suggestion, made by several researchers (e.g. Kennedy
1998), to combine corpus data with other types of linguistic evidence.

One particularly interesting combination is that between corpus analyses
and experimental techniques (elicitation, lexical decision, magnitude
estimation, eye movement research, reaction time measures, etc.). While
the former make it possible to study “properties of the linguistic output
of language users” (Sandra 1995: 592), the latter give access to
“properties of the mental processes and structures underlying language
production and comprehension” (ibid.), such as cognitive salience or
readability. Bringing together the two approaches, therefore, offers a
more holistic view of language.

Depending on the phenomenon investigated and the types of data used (e.g.
speech vs. writing, sentence production vs. self-paced reading), one may
find that the natural and experimental language data converge (cf. Gries
et al. 2005) or, on the contrary, that they produce different results (cf.
Roland & Jurafsky 2002). We believe that, by examining such relations more
closely, we will learn more about the specificities of each type of data
and will thus be able to make informed choices about how the two can
fruitfully be combined, in domains such as descriptive linguistics,
sociolinguistics or foreign language teaching.


COLLOQUIUM SCHEDULE

Friday, 27 July 2007, from 13.30 to 17.45

13.30: Iain McGee, “Teachers’ lexical intuitions versus corpus data:
Differences, similarities and explanations”

14.00: Dawn Nordquist, “Collocations in elicitation and corpora:
Predictable divergence”

14.30: Daniela Marzo, Verena Rube, Birgit Umbreit, “Salience and frequency
of meanings: Comparison of corpus and experimental data on polysemy”

15.00: Stefanie Wulff, “Combining corpus and experimental data to capture
idiomaticity”

15.30: coffee break

15.45: Damir Cavar and Dunja Brozovic Roncevic, “Grammaticality judgments
and language usage data: A case study on Croatian clitic placement”

16.15: Marco Baroni, Emiliano Guevara and Vito Pirrelli, “Generating
well-formed compounds: A corpus-based model tested against
psycholinguistic evidence”

16.45: Gert De Sutter, “Integration of on- and offline linguistic evidence
for capturing the cognitive-functional motivations of syntactic variation”

17.15: Gaetanelle Gilquin and Terry Shortall, “Reconciling corpus data and
elicitation data in FLT”


COLLOQUIUM ORGANISERS

Gaetanelle Gilquin (FNRS – University of Louvain)
Terry Shortall (The University of Birmingham)


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Gaëtanelle Gilquin
Postdoctoral Researcher FNRS
Centre for English Corpus Linguistics
Université catholique de Louvain
Collège Erasme
Place Blaise Pascal 1
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium