Featherston Sam, Winkler Susanne (Editors). The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics. Volume 1: Process

Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. — xiv, 265 pages. — (Studies in Generative Grammar). — ISBN: 978-3-11-021338-6.The volumes of The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics: Process and Product contain the proceedings of this most recent conference. In the call for papers we announced that, while work from all branches of linguistics were welcome, there would be a special session on experimental methods in syntax and semantics, since these are the areas of linguistics where the paradigm shift towards a more empirical but nevertheless theoretically informed research model is most apparent (and perhaps most necessary). This specification had perhaps more effect than it was intended to; the vast majority of abstracts received would have been immediately appropriate for this ‘special session’. There was therefore no separate session with this thematic focus, rather the entire conference was strongly orientated in this direction. It would appear that there is a wider feeling among linguists that this field is seeing innovation and is therefore interesting.Linguistic choices vs. probabilities – how much and what can linguistic theory explain?
How to provide exactly one interpretation for every sentence, or what eye movements reveal about quantifier scope
A scale for measuring well-formedness: Why syntax needs boiling and freezing points
The thin line between facts and fiction
Annotating genericity: How do humans decide? (A case study in ontology extraction)
Canonicity in argument realization and verb semantic deficits in Alzheimer’s disease
Automated collection and analysis of phonological data
Semantic evidence and syntactic theory
Automated support for evidence retrieval in documents with nonstandard orthography
Scaling issues in the measurement of linguistic acceptability
Conjoint analysis in linguistics – Multi-factorial analysis of Slavonic possessive adjectives