Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each activity by whether it is primarily DESCRIPTIVE research or an APPLICATION of linguistics.
Groups: Descriptive research · Application
- Building a speech recogniser for a call centre
- Attributing a disputed statement to an author
- Comparing verb systems across a language family
- Designing a reading test for eight-year-olds
- Measuring how quickly listeners resolve an ambiguous word
Hints
- One column answers a question about language; the other uses an answer to do a job.
- Forensic and educational work are applications by definition.
Show the answer
Descriptive research: Comparing verb systems across a language family, Measuring how quickly listeners resolve an ambiguous word
Application: Building a speech recogniser for a call centre, Attributing a disputed statement to an author, Designing a reading test for eight-year-olds
Why
The boundary is porous in the useful direction: applications generate data that changes the description. Speech recognition is the clearest case, the failure of hand-written phonological rules to scale was itself a finding about how much of pronunciation is statistical.
Practise The Branches and What They Are For
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