E303 Part II The Context of Language Research Different research questions Different methodologies Dr. Ghurmallah Alghamdi

The choice of research methods depends on what we want to investigate. The method will decide the sort of questions to ask. Corpus linguistics ,for instance, may concentrate on examining and revealing the relationship between grammar and lexis . Functional grammarians might look at reasons for grammar choices in certain contexts.

Those researching grammar for teaching purposes may concentrate on areas that foreign students find difficult. Formulating general and specific hypothesis Observation (Texts written about science seem to be more difficult than texts written about history.) This is a general hypothesis. Next step is to find evidence for this claim.

However, we will need to specify what we mean by more difficult However, we will need to specify what we mean by more difficult. Does it have more long and dense noun phrases? Incremental research 1. Review of the literature (examining and evaluating previous studies related to the research question)

Corpus linguistics Not all research into language and grammar starts by testing a hypothesis. Research may focus on description ,counts or classifications of phenomena Findings may explain why we use language in this way.

Functional grammar A third theory may focus on the development of theory and models to describe and account for how language works. Transformational-generative grammar 1. Developed by Chomsky 2. He distinguished between competence and performance

Competence being the speaker/hearer knowledge of the language. Performance being the actual use of language by that speaker. A speaker may use his intuition to assess the correctness of a particular structure of the language .

Researching language variation Master’s corpus study suggested that the texts he examined are indicative of science writing. He later examined the writing of scientists for scientists. So he tried to compare structures written for non-specialists with those written for specialist researchers.

The 11 articles he examined looked at them in terms of : FIELD STATUS OF CLAUSE,MAIN SUBORDINATE CLASSIFICTION OF EACH SUBJECT,INIMATE ,ABSTRACT OR INANIMATE. CLASSIFICATIONS OF VERBS.

He stored all these in a computer. His analysis was manual He mainly compared frequencies, active ,passive verbs. See pp 23-24 of book 4. Francis and Kramer functional analysis. This study is also a comparison of scientific texts. Both texts are from the field of neuroscientists

The aim of the study was to identify the different lexico-grammatical patterns used in both texts.

Designing a research project A clearly –documented research design : Encourages objectivity on the part of the researcher by making assumptions explicit Ensures replicability ,allowing other researchers to verify or build on the work in a follow up study. A conventional course in research would tell you on methods of collecting data :QUESTIONNAIRE,EXPERIMENTS,OBSERVATION

Continuation of previous Questionnaires allow a researcher to focus on a range of questions in a systematic way . Two research methodologies can be used to do research on grammar. 1.Case study that allows the researcher to focus on a specific data 2. Doing comparative or correlational study