The research project ‘Conversion in English: The interaction of generic knowledge, contextual information, and syntactic constructions’ headed by Prof. Dr. Gert Webelhuth (research assistant: Dr. Heike Baeskow) will be supported for a further year, till April 2023.

The aim of this project is to develop a usage-based model for English conversion which efficiently describes this highly dynamic yet non-arbitrary process. The focus of the analyses is on (1) the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors which determine the non-overt shift from one (conceptual) category to another, (2) the way non-derived denominal verbs acquire their argument structures, (3) the interaction of context-free and context-dependent interpretations, and (4) the identification of communicative-pragmatic functions of conversion. The main database comprises 507 innovative converted verbs from the Oxford English Dictionary. Continue reading Research project supported by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung extended by one year →

DALC (Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact) is an open, informal, non-institutionalized special interest group, started by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza-Pust, and Manfred Sailer, early 2022 at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt a.M.

DALC brings together researchers with various areas of specialization interested in the investigation of the dynamics of asymmetric language contact. Typically, Continue reading Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact →

After a forced hiatus of three years a regular visitor is back at Goethe Universität: Gerald Penn will stay in Frankfurt for six weeks this summer. He will be working with us on the grammar implementation platform we use extensively in teaching and in research, the TRALE system. Our goal is to improve the usability of our interactive server architecture for displaying grammars and syntactic as well as semantic analyses of sentences for students. We are also planning  to extend the sub-module for type-logical semantic analysis of English expressions. This work focuses on obtaining more readable output of semantic representations for non-experts, and to reach a state of the system that allows us to connect logical inference engines and model builders to TRALE. Along the way, many practical aspects of the software stack needed in day-to-day work with a sizeable grammar implementation platform with users around the world will be addressed, such as a new git repository for TRALE, a bug tracking site, and extended debugging tools.