As if to prove it to her students, the chair of UCSB's Linguistics Department regularly encourages a hands-on approach to completing assignments.
Students can produce a new scientific finding simply by looking at available data.
Her own research involves, among other things, how people choose words in discourse. She is in the process of producing a grammar for spoken Indonesian, which varies greatly from standard Indonesian. In the case of Indonesia, it's the fourth-most populated country in the world and yet there are no good descriptions of the informal, everyday language spoken there.