Experimental Syntax (Master S3 Class)

Basic information

• Credits: 3
• Format: 2.5 hours weekly
• 2026-2027 instructors: Anne Abeillé
• 2026-2027 schedule: Wednesdays, 11:30-14:00, room 145
• Moodle page

Description

This class will show how large annotated corpora and experimental methods challenge the empirical basis of most syntactic theories. It will discuss the pros and cons of various corpus studies (spoken and written data) and experiments (rating, forced choice, reading times etc.), for various phenomena and languages. The syntax topics covered may change from one year to the other (constraints on word order, ellipsis, agreement, locality constraints, etc.)

Prerequisites

It is best to have taken a syntax class, a statistics class and/or an experimental design/corpus course.

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Read and understand a syntax paper using large language data and/or experiments.
• Design a corpus study to test a syntactic hypothesis.
• Design an experiment to test a syntactic hypothesis.