The Institute

Schedule

The Institute is made up of two sessions of two weeks each, as follows:

Four-week classes: July 6-31

July 6-31 Session 1 (2-week classes): July 6-17

July 6-17 Session 2 (2-week classes): July 20-31

Theme

Linguistic Theory in a World of Big Data

This theme serves to highlight a growing interest within the field of linguistics to test theory with increasingly larger data sets, such as data from extensive linguistic fieldwork and documentation, data from crowd-sourcing over the web, and corpus data from archival recordings and/or written sources.

It captures several areas of emerging disciplinary interests such as the breakdown of a longstanding fundamental distinction between the categorical, discrete nature of linguistic competence and usage-based gradient variation.

With increased scholarly attention being directed toward the gradient characteristics of both linguistic knowledge and use and toward the probabilistic properties that language knowledge and use may exhibit, some of the necessary groundwork is in place for moving towards a unifying theoretical approach.