Looking forward: Linguistic theory and methods

William Labov's festschrift is titled Towards a Social Science of Language (Guy et al. 1996), while Noam Chomsky's book of interviews is The Science of Language (Chomsky 2012) . Linguistics has long been preening itself for scientific status, and in this chapter we examine some ways the field continues to pursue a scientific understanding of humanity's most enigmatic gift. As we will show below, the use of computational methods and large datasets are currently driving advances in linguistics, providing more accurate (or at least reproducible) evidence on our major theoretical questions. Much of the credit for progress lies with increasing connections to other disciplines. We here advocate for a linguistics that is richly connected with computer science, psychology, neuroscience and biology.