Collaborative Proposal: Using the Web as a Corpus for Empirical Linguistic Research

该项目将开发工具，使人们能够从万维网上检索自然出现的句子的词汇内容和句法结构的基础上，为语言学家提供一个直接的，容易获得的原始语言数据源。 作为这些工具的说明性应用，PI将调查词汇语义/句法界面上的特定语言假设。 在高层次上，计划中的工作是迈向语言学研究新范式的重要一步。 而不是完全依赖于内省的数据所产生的语言学家谁是试图证明一个特定的假设，网络使语言学研究将借鉴的方法和工具开发的PI提供自然发生的数据，理论可以休息。 关于具体的语言问题，我们的目标是提供一个解释的规则和约束，支配三个及物性交替（中间，不明确，未指定对象删除），和PI期望数据提供他们的工具，以阐明能力和性能之间的“灰色”区域，也就是说，语言行为，似乎落在规则支配的行为之外。 虽然自然发生的数据在生成句法中没有得到很大的重视，但文本语料库的使用在更大的语言学事业中有着传统。 万维网是自然文本世界中的一个爆炸性的新现象，它是一种基本上尚未开发的资源，体现了语言的丰富和动态特性，提供了无与伦比的规模和多样性的数据资源

This project will develop tools that make it possible to retrieve naturally occurring sentences from the World Wide Web on the basis of lexical content and syntactic structure, providing linguists with an immediate, easily accessible source of raw linguistic data. The PIs will investigate specific linguistic hypotheses at the lexical semantics/syntax interface as an illustrative application of these tools. At a high level, the planned work constitutes an important step toward a new paradigm for linguistic research. Rather than relying entirely on introspective data generated by the linguist who is trying to (dis)prove a particular hypothesis, Web-enabled linguistics research will draw on the methodology and the tools developed by the PIs to supply naturally occurring data on which theories can rest. With regard to specific linguistic questions, the goal is to provide an explanation of the rules and constraints that govern three transitivity alternations (Middle, Unaccusative, Unspecified Object Deletion), and the PIs expect data made available by their tools to shed light on the "grey" area between competence and performance, that is, the linguistic behavior that seems to fall outside of rule-governed behavior. Although naturally occurring data are not accorded great emphasis in generative syntax, the use of text corpora has a tradition in the greater linguistic enterprise. An explosive new phenomenon in the world of naturally occurring text, the World Wide Web is an essentially untapped resource that embodies the rich and dynamic nature of language, presenting a data resource of unparalleled size and diversity