LinA-Lab
Welcome to the Laboratory for Empirical Research on Language in Action (LinA-Lab)
The Laboratory for Empirical Research on Language in Action (LinA-Lab) is a service designed to offer support to students wishing to conduct assignments, term papers or indeed BA/MA theses in English Linguistics. Our aim is to provide help with language data collection procedures for empirical research, including questionnaires, interviews, experiments and corpus-linguistic techniques.
The following resources are available at LinA-Lab:
- Two Windows computers (of course, you can also bring your own laptop, if you wish)
- A large range of language corpora
- Corpus analysis software
- Recording equipment (e.g. for recording roleplays or naturally-occurring data)
- Transcription software
- Statistics software
- User guides and various reference books
There are many methods of data collection in Linguistics. Here we distinguish between:
- Corpus linguistic methods, i.e. the use of large, ready-made digital collections of naturally occurring language, known as language corpora, for linguistic analysis using specially designed software. For useful information and materials click here
Field and laboratory methods, i.e. field methods being methods used to collect naturally-occurring data; laboratory methods being methods designed to collect language data using interviews, simulations, roleplays, questionnaires, etc. Further information can be found here.