Present-day linguistics very often makes use of empirical methods and approaches to language description, investigating real-life speech and writing rather than relying on intuition and introspection. Especially quantitative approaches have been on the rise in recent decades. 

After a more general introduction to the nature of linguistic data and basics of data analysis, this course will focus on specific methodological issues such as questionnaire design and coding, or corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytic methods and tools.

Students are expected to work on their own projects.