Bernd Kortmann - Reflecting on the quantitative turn in Linguistics

FRIAS Lunch Lecture from 11 January 2018 with Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Bernd Kortmann from the University of Freiburg

Independent of branches like Quantitative Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, linguistics has witnessed a quite remarkable quantitative turn over the last two decades. Major drivers of this development have been the design of ever more and ever larger electronic corpora, the increasing importance of psycho- and neurolinguistic experiments in exploring language processing and language variation, and the availability of ever more sophisticated statistical tools for handling large, complex linguistic data sets. Has this quantitative turn been to the detriment of qualitative methods, or even of linguistic theorizing in general?  Has linguistics reached the point of a "quantitative crisis" yet, as it has recently been proclaimed for a range of academic disciplines, or is it still a discipline characterized by a healthy equilibrium, if not mutual reinforcement, of quantitative and qualitative approaches?

More information on the FRIAS Lunch Lectures 2017/18: https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/de/mediathek/lunch-lectures/videomitschnitte-der-lunch-lecture-reihe-quantitative-vs-qualitative-methods-across-sciences