Big Team Science for language science: opportunities and challenges

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Abstract
The present paper advocates for incorporating Big Team Science practices into the language sciences. Big Team Science is a promising mode of collaborative research in which top-down coordination directs efforts by a large number of researchers from different institutions towards a common scientific goal. The redistribution of resources and division of labor enabled by Big Team Science may enable researchers to increase methodological rigor, systematically explore claims across a wider sample of languages, and to diversify both the languages studied and the researchers engaged. However, implementing Big Team Science practices is not without challenges, some of which are unique to the language sciences. We suggest strategies and best practices for adapting to these challenges, including theoretical and methodological pluralism, variation in conditions among data collection sites, and navigating a trade-off between maximizing methodological rigor and ability to engage with the most inclusive, typologically broad language samples.
Funding Information
  • The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship
  • the European Research Council (ERC-ADG-835263)
  • The Laboratory of Excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics programme (ANR-10-LABX-0083)
  • Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (and CW 10/1-1 (project ID 502013782))
  • Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FU791/9-1)
  • The Research Council of Norway (350026)