Research Design Exercise 1

The goal is to design production (and/or perception?) experiments on (some aspect of) the general topic of "intrusive stops" in English. In keeping with the theme of the course, you should focus on corpus-based methods rather than projects that depend on recording new material. We will evolve a research plan based on everyone's ideas, and explore some of the steps involved in carrying it out.      

For background, check out the articles linked in "Tense Tents" -- and spend a few minutes looking for other relevant material, e.g. via keyword and citation searches on Google Scholar. Also keep in mind what we learned in Assignment 1.

Your plan should answer two key questions:

1. What are you going to do?
2. Why are you going to do it?

In fact, you should start by thinking about "why" -- which might be a hypothesis to test, an idea to promote, a descriptive question to answer. Or perhaps all of those.

Then the "what" question should address

1. the choice of dataset;
2. the methods for selecting subsets to measure or otherwise evaluate;
3. and the planned measurements or other evaluations (e.g. presence or absence of specified features).

You should try to verify that the plan is a practical one by trying a few examples, even if (for example) you need to use human analysis in place of a planned automated process.

The best ideas are those that engage important issues, and are easy to carry out.