Feels nostalgic to sit through a Research Methodolgy class after years!! Though its not been a long time, just four years back (monsoon 2005), my first introduction to the world of Linguistic research, brought me the remembrance of Prof Pramod Pandey teaching us Bacon, Chomsky, meaning of words like 'scientific research', 'method', all the 'isms'. But at that point of time, we took it as just another coursework, more than understanding the core of it, what we were interested in was good grades, how to grab an easy text for book review or how to aviod topics related to empirical issues so that in seminar, faculty or other students can harash minimally!! Today, I am finding the real meaning of those terms, while writing my synopsis also did not pay much attention to it. Research was like putting together the review of the RPs and texts, pick one theory and try to fit your data into it. In fact, it happened without any attention to method (in the real sense of the term, because I did have a section on methodology in my synopsis, mostly use of native speaker intuition, thanks to Generative Syntax)!!
After working through day and night for the last two weeks, I realize how research & methods are connected, logically. How important is conceptual clarity and more importantly, your visualization. Now I know why could not even write a single line back at home. In two weeks, have discovered so many undefined aspects of my language, still not in a position to say that focused work has started, everyday hyposthesis is changing, surfing through more RPs (now Chinese stuff got over, lets see what Bangla has to offer!).
Todays class was very enlightning because what Prof Dayal was trying to clear the basic differences between scientific research and humanities research, the former being more of applied in nature. Humannities research in a sense is also like scientific because in terms of understanding its trying to give a different perspective, a different view. This striked me most because I was at a loss how to connect my theoretical linguistic analysis with the NLP perspective. I am not adopting a standard computational grammar formalism... so how to prove the usefulness or applicability or implementable side of my research. The acquisition of human language is credited to the notion of UG and this innate capacity of human beings also explains how children learn language(s) without any instruction. Because what we have a mental lexicon, inflected with all the principles, structures and what we need is just an exposure to stimulus. The principles of language are already there, just the parameters are to trigered on or off. Thats why, a child exposed to a multiligual enviornment can learn them all without any effort or mistake. Can this assumption be true of computers too??? Can an exhaustive design of lexicon and a finite set of principles and some rules for setting parameters on or off with respect to principle and the given language, bring an analogy???
Again questions!!!?? seems the list is endless.........
After working through day and night for the last two weeks, I realize how research & methods are connected, logically. How important is conceptual clarity and more importantly, your visualization. Now I know why could not even write a single line back at home. In two weeks, have discovered so many undefined aspects of my language, still not in a position to say that focused work has started, everyday hyposthesis is changing, surfing through more RPs (now Chinese stuff got over, lets see what Bangla has to offer!).
Todays class was very enlightning because what Prof Dayal was trying to clear the basic differences between scientific research and humanities research, the former being more of applied in nature. Humannities research in a sense is also like scientific because in terms of understanding its trying to give a different perspective, a different view. This striked me most because I was at a loss how to connect my theoretical linguistic analysis with the NLP perspective. I am not adopting a standard computational grammar formalism... so how to prove the usefulness or applicability or implementable side of my research. The acquisition of human language is credited to the notion of UG and this innate capacity of human beings also explains how children learn language(s) without any instruction. Because what we have a mental lexicon, inflected with all the principles, structures and what we need is just an exposure to stimulus. The principles of language are already there, just the parameters are to trigered on or off. Thats why, a child exposed to a multiligual enviornment can learn them all without any effort or mistake. Can this assumption be true of computers too??? Can an exhaustive design of lexicon and a finite set of principles and some rules for setting parameters on or off with respect to principle and the given language, bring an analogy???
Again questions!!!?? seems the list is endless.........
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