Data questionnaires

One of the most commonly used methods in modern theoretical linguistics is data collection using questionnaires. In order to investigate certain linguistic phenomena and test theoretical hypotheses, linguists create linguistic contexts with different constructions, often in minimal pairs, and ask native speakers to make grammaticality judgements, i.e. to judge how acceptable the different expressions sound to them as native speakers. Since these contexts are artificially constructed by linguists, they can be modelled very accurately to answer precise research questions and are therefore very helpful in theoretical linguistics.