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To join the recent debate on data problem in linguistics, this collection of papers provides complex dual purpose analyses at the interface of semantics and pragmatics (including historical, lexical, formal and experimental pragmatics). Based on several current theories and various types of data taken from a number of languages, it discusses object theoretical issues of referentiality, scalar implicatures, implicit arguments, grammaticalization, co-construction and syntactic alternation in their mutual connections to metatheoretical questions concerning the relationship between data and theory.
It is widely believed that inconsistency is one of the greatest sins a scholar can commit. This issue is especially relevant in linguistics due to the rich diversity of data types, exceptions to the rules, counterexamples to the hypotheses, and background assumptions which constantly come into conflict with methodological principles. Bringing together ideas from linguistics and philosophy of science, this groundbreaking book seeks to answer the following questions: which kinds of inconsistency arise in linguistic theorising? Under which conditions can inconsistencies be tolerated? And how can inconsistencies be resolved? It is the first study to develop a novel metatheoretical framework that accounts for the emergence and the resolution of inconsistency in linguistic theorising, and to reveal the strategies of inconsistency resolution in theoretical linguistics. Supported by detailed case studies, the findings of this metatheoretical analysis can be applied to improve the effectiveness of the working linguist's problem-solving activity.
The book focuses on the question of how and to what extent cognitive semantic approaches can contribute to the new field of the cognitive science of science. The argumentation is based on a series of instructive case studies which are intended to test the prospects and limits of the metascientific application of both holistic and modular cognitive semantics. The case studies show that, while cognitive semantic research is able to solve problems which have traditionally been the domain of the philosophy of science, it also encounters serious limits. The prospects and the limits thus revealed suggest new research topics which in future can be tackled by cognitive semantic approaches to the cognitive science of science.
The question of what types of data and evidence can be used is one of the most important topics in linguistics. This book is the first to comprehensively present the methodological problems associated with linguistic data and evidence. Its originality is twofold. First, the authors' approach accounts for a series of unexplained characteristics of linguistic theorising: the uncertainty and diversity of data, the role of evidence in the evaluation of hypotheses, the problem solving strategies as well as the emergence and resolution of inconsistencies. Second, the findings are obtained by the application of a new model of plausible argumentation which is also of relevance from a general argumentation theoretical point of view. All concepts and theses are systematically introduced and illustrated by a number of examples from different linguistic theories, and a detailed case-study section shows how the proposed model can be applied to specific linguistic problems.
This book examines a challenging problem at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and the psychology of language: the interpretation of gradient judgments of sentence acceptability in relation to theories of grammatical knowledge. Acceptability judgments constitute the primary source of data on which such theories have been built, despite being susceptible to various extra-grammatical factors. Through a review of experimental and corpus-based research on a variety of syntactic phenomena and an in-depth examination of two case studies, Elaine J. Francis argues for two main positions. The first is that converging evidence from online comprehension tasks, elicited production tasks, and co...
The evaluation of linguistic theories depends heavily on what kind of data can be regarded as evidence either for or against their hypotheses. The question of what data types linguistic theories use, and which of these types are acknowledged as evidence, is accordingly one of the most fundamental and most widely discussed problems of contemporary linguistics. The aim of this volume is to shed fresh light on this problem by presenting the first findings of a research project. Part I consists of state-of-the-art studies critically analysing current views on the topic. Part II includes case studies which highlight how the conclusions of the state-of-the-art studies may motivate novel and sophis...
Although the past decades have seen a great diversity of approaches to the history of generative linguistics, there has been no systematic analysis of the state of the art. The aim of the book is to fill this gap. Part I provides an unbiased, balanced and impartial overview of numerous approaches to the history of generative linguistics. In addition, it evaluates the approaches thus discussed against a set of evaluation criteria. Part II demonstrates in a case study the workability of a model of plausible argumentation that goes beyond the limits of current historiographical approaches. Due to the comprehensive analysis of the state of the art, the book may be useful for graduate and undergraduate students. However, since it is also intended to enrich the historiography of linguistics in a novel way, the book may also attract the attention of both linguists interested in the history of science, and historians of science interested in linguistics.
This book is the first systematic analysis of the emergence of, and the resolution strategies for, inconsistency in linguistic theorizing.
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