Our courses: Experimental linguistics

Experimental linguistics is a broad definition which includes any controlled experiment on linguistic data. Although this includes e.g. various experimental sociolinguistics, here we narrow the scope of the course to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiment. Lately, such approaches as psycholinguistic experiment become relevant for the study of minority languages, where experiments start to be carried out in the field in such traditionally descriptive areas as grammatical semantics or syntax. This follows from a tendency for partial ‘interdisciplinarization’ of some fields of the study of linguistic diversity. A good example is the study of relativization which, if not shifted, at least expanded from the domains of the study of universals or formal syntax towards functional cognitive explanation (processing complexity) and further, logically, to psycholinguistic experiment. The course offered in the programme will be different from the common approach to teaching experimental linguistics in that it will focus on case studies not so much of English but of a wider range of languages. In a sense, while providing the necessary general background to experimental methods in linguistics, in what concerns empirical basis this will be an introduction to the experimental study of language diversity.