University of Tübingen

Collaborative Research Centre (Sonderforschungsbereich) 441

Linguistic Data Structures:
On the Relation between Data and Theory in Linguistics

Director: Prof. Dr. Marga Reis Phone +49/7071/29-76741 Fax +49/7071/29-5321 mer <[at]> uni-tuebingen.de Coordinator: Philipp Obrist Tel. +49/7071/29-74290 Fax +49/7071/29-5830 philipp.obrist <[at]> uni-tuebingen.de

Secretariat: Beate Starke SFB 441, University of Tübingen Nauklerstr. 35 / 2.03 72074 Tübingen Germany Phone +49/7071/29-77151 Fax +49/7071/29-5830 beate.starke <[at]> uni-tuebingen.de Office hours: Mon - Fri, 1 pm - 4 pm

The principal concerns of the collaborative research centre 441 (established in 1999, closed in 2008) have been the empirical data structures which feed into linguistic theory building. The main focus has been on two important developments of the last decades:

On the one hand, the technical development during the last years has opened up new vistas in processing large amounts of linguistic data, which can complement introspective data. On the other hand, data types that serve as a basis for linguistic theories have been multiplying continuously. New experimental data types concerning grammaticality judgements, first or second language acquisition, speech disorders or speech processing represent only a few linguistically interesting and useful types.

This increase in the amount of data as well as in data types has led to a number of exciting new challenges. The resulting theoretical, methodological, empirical and practical questions have been systematically addressed by the projects.

The research program of the collaborative research centre 441 encompassed three areas: One group of projects focusses on methodological issues, another group is concerned with certain linguistic phenomena, and a third group providing a link between the first two areas. The collaborative research centre has integrated a number of perspectives, chiefly theoretical linguistics, descriptive linguistics and computational linguistic approaches.

Grant proposal, general part (36 pages, German) as .pdf