Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 11h-13h, B7/1058 Seminari A
Methodological challenges in studying language variation and change: combining fieldwork and empirical studies to overcome the observer’s paradox
Karolina Broś
Neurolinguistics Lab / Multingualism Research Hub / Institute of Applied Linguistics
University of Warsaw
In this interactive talk, I will discuss different approaches to studying language variation and change based on the example of Spanish. I will go from fieldwork data collection and corpus analysis, through experimental paradigms to self-recordings, showing that the way in which data is accessed affects the results of the study. In the context of the notion of the observer’s paradox, this means that if we want to study ‘real’ language as used by real speakers, we need to make extra effort to record authentic speech and compare different speakers and modalities if possible. The implications of the studies discussed in this talk have broader applications and can be transferred to other types of linguistic research encompassing phonetics and phonology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics.
