From Data to Evidence in English Language Research draws on diverse digital data sources alongside more traditional linguistic corpora to offer new insights into the ways in which they can be used to extend and re-evaluate research questions in English linguistics. This is achieved, for example, by increasing data size, adding multi-layered contextual analyses, applying methods from adjacent fields, and adapting existing data sets to new uses. Making innovative contributions to digital linguistics, the chapters in the volume apply a combination of methods to the increasing amount of digital data available to researchers to show how this data – both established and newly available - can be utilized, enriched and rethought to provide new evidence for developments in the English language.

The first book to comprehensively present the methodological problems associated with linguistic data and evidence.

The question of what types of data and evidence can be used is one of the most important topics in linguistics. This book is the first to comprehensively present the methodological problems associated with linguistic data and evidence. Its originality is twofold. First, the authors' approach accounts for a series of unexplained characteristics of linguistic theorising: the uncertainty and diversity of data, the role of evidence in the evaluation of hypotheses, the problem solving strategies as well as the emergence and resolution of inconsistencies. Second, the findings are obtained by the application of a new model of plausible argumentation which is also of relevance from a general argumentation theoretical point of view. All concepts and theses are systematically introduced and illustrated by a number of examples from different linguistic theories, and a detailed case-study section shows how the proposed model can be applied to specific linguistic problems.

Review text: "A volume which has indeed presented a rich picture of the role of linguistic evidence in the contemporary, especially generative, study of language."Gerard Steen in: Functions of Language 1/2007.

The renaissance of corpus linguistics and promising developments in experimental linguistic techniques in recent years have led to a remarkable revival of interest in issues of the empirical base of linguistic theory in general, and the status of different kinds of linguistic evidence in particular. Consensus is growing (a) that even so-called primary data (from introspection as well as authentic language production) are inherently complex performance data only indirectly reflecting the subject of linguistic theory, (b) that for an appropriate foundation of linguistic theories evidence from different sources such as introspective data, corpus data, data from (psycho-)linguistic experiments, historical and diachronic data, typological data, neurolinguistic data and language learning data are not only welcome but also often necessary. It is in particular by contrasting evidence from different sources with respect to particular research questions that we may gain a deeper understanding of the status and quality of the individual types of linguistic evidence on the one hand, and of their mutual relationship and respective weight on the other. The present volume is a collection of (selected) papers presented at the conference on 'Linguistic Evidence' in Tübingen 2004, which was explicitly devoted to the above issues. All of them address these issues in relation to specific linguistic research problems, thereby helping to establish a better understanding of the nature of linguistic evidence in particularly insightful ways.

This volume further elaborates the empirical tradition of Columbia School (CS) Linguistics by offering diverse empirical analyses for a wide variety of languages. These studies open a much needed debate advocating the necessity of the independent validation of linguistic hypotheses. This research exemplifies how such a validation should be conducted by determining which forms underlie the analyses and extracting those observations that are considered to be objective. The volume consists of two parts: a section on synchronic and diachronic grammatical problems and a section on Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB), the Columbia School version of phonology, applied to evolutionary, developmental and clinical issues and the phonotactics of the selected lexicon of a literary text. It provides a wealth of useful empirical data and in-depth and sophisticated qualitative and quantitative analyses of a broad range of languages from diverse families: French, Spanish, Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Polish, Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew.

What counts as evidence in linguistics? This question is addressed by the contributions to the present volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Studies in Language 28:3 (2004). Focusing on the innateness debate, what is illustrated is how formal and functional approaches to linguistics have different perspectives on linguistic evidence. While special emphasis is paid to the status of typological evidence and universals for the construction of Universal Grammar (UG), this volume also highlights more general issues such as the roles of (non)-standard language and historical evidence. To address the overall topic, the following three guiding questions are raised: What type of evidence can be used for innateness claims (or UG)?; What is the content of such innate features (or UG)?; and, How can UG be used as a theory guiding empirical research? A combination of articles and peer commentaries yields a lively discussion between leading representatives of formal and functional approaches.