Class Exercise on Using Online Tools in Syntactic Research

Class Exercise

Inversion Seminar

March 10, 2026

Class Exercise on Using Online Tools in Syntactic Research

In the first half of the class, I will present some data that I have gathered from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) on quotative inversion. In the second half of the class (starting from around 10:30am), we will do the following exercise.

Objective: Using the internet, online corpora and chatbots have become important methodologies in syntactic research. The exercise below explores various aspects of these methodologies, using the topics discussed in the seminar as a test case.

Instructions: Choose some property of quotative inversion (or another inversion construction in English) that you would like to investigate. For example, you could study the transitivity constraint, or the distribution of particles, or any other property that interests you. Then choose one of the projects below (or design your own project). Take about 20-30 minutes to carry out the project in class. You can work in small groups, if you prefer. When you finish, we will have mini-presentations (around 5 minutes each) of the results. After class, please send me a very short summary of what you discovered, including the data that you obtained. I will put these summaries in a Google Drive folder. 

Possible Projects:

1. Use COCA (https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/, or one of the other English corpora) to investigate some property of quotative inversion (or another inversion construction). Can the corpus be used to find interesting new data? Can it be used to give accurate statistical information? What challenges does the corpus pose? What benefits does it bring? What prompts did you use?

2. Use Google (or another search engine) to investigate some property of quotative inversion (or another inversion construction). Can the search engine be used to find interesting new data? Can it be used to give accurate statistical information? What challenges does the search engine pose? What benefits does it bring? What prompts did you use?

3. Use a chatbot (such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini) to investigate some property of quotative inversion (or another inversion construction). Can the chatbot be used to find interesting new data? Can it be used to give accurate statistical information? What challenges does the chatbot pose? What benefits does it bring? What prompts did you use?

4. Compare two of the corpora on english-corpora.org for their use in syntactic research. What are the pros and cons of each corpus for syntactic research?

5. Compare two different search engines (e.g., Google versus Bing or others) for their use in syntactic research. What are the pros and cons of each search engine for syntactic research?

6. Compare two different chatbots for their use in syntactic research. What are the pros and cons of each chatbot for syntactic research?

7. Compare two of the three methodologies above (corpora, search engines, chatbots). What are the pros and cons of each method for syntactic research?