Empirical insights for experimental grammar from sociophonology (4/4)

Jane Stuart-Smith (Glasgow University)
Scaling up the language enterprise

The final seminar will focus on some issues entailed by working with large-scale spoken language datasets as the basis for testing and exploring commonly-held theoretical linguistic assumptions. For example, we tend to assume that a language like English is monolithic, but is this true? Is there one or more than one English/es? Is variability across English dialects greater than across English and other languages? The evidence for this rests on the use of Machine Learning techniques (e.g. regression, classification, data reduction) as applied to differing kinds of language corpora.