Can FTFs be used to perform experiments in grammar?
Yes. If you look at these notes, you will see that we can perform research into grammatical variation due to socio-linguistic variation and the interaction between two different grammatical variables. Linguistics experiments on a given corpus are ex post facto studies, or natural experiments, because it is not possible to modify or constrain data collection within the experiment. See also the section on Methodology which points to future work where entire groups of experiments can be automated.
