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91 THE DATA OF LINGUISTICS
Possible benefits of this type of data include:
• It allows for efficient data collection.
• It allows the linguist to focus on important details.
• It allows multiple approaches to similar data.
• It allows access to speakers’ intuitions.
Possible disadvantages of this type of data include:
• Speakers’ introspection and therefore responses may not always be
reliable or consistent.
• Reasons for speaker’s reactions may be irrelevant. In one recently
reported case (Hay et al. 2006) the accent of the person who greeted
the speakers when they arrived influenced their reactions.
Experimentation
Precisely what counts as experimentation in linguistics is not clearly delimited:
it may very well include elicitation, and may even include introspection. On the
other hand, it certainly includes the very elaborate experiments set up by many
psycholinguists and people working within the field of experimental or laboratory
phonology (Ohala & Jaeger 1986; Pierrehumbert et al. 2000). Prototypical
experimental approaches to linguistic questions (a) are aimed at answering very
specific questions, (b) involve the collection of controlled and balanced data, and
(c) involve statistical treatments to draw conclusions. This notably says nothing
about the origins of data, which may be elicited, the result of recording natural
interactions, derived from dictionaries or word-lists, or from corpora, etc.
Possible benefits of this type of data include:
• Experiments seem to get to the heart of how real people use language;
this is a God’s-Truth approach to linguistics.
• Even limited experiments can make a genuine contribution to theory.
• Formulating a good experiment demands considerable thought about
the issues to be tackled.
Possible disadvantages of this type of data include:
• Experiments can, and frequently do, contradict each other.
• Linguistic data which will allow the author to distinguish between two
competing hypotheses may not exist.
• Progress is slow, since each experiment is closely controlled to answer
a specific question.