Frank Richter was invited for a talk at Laura Kallmeyer’s computational linguistics group at Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf on January 30, 2020. Frank’s presentation on Idiom Modification, based on work with Berit Gehrke and Sascha Bargmann, was investigating corpus data with a particular kind of modified idiom which displays its usual idiomatic reading but also a literal interpretation of that part of it that is targeted by modification. A classical example of this kind of construction is Ernst’s (1981) In spite of the treatment the other refugees received from the rescue party in the desert, he bit his thirst-swollen tongue and kept to himself. Here the modifier thirst-swollen does not belong to the idiomatic expression in which it is embedded (to bite one’s tongue), and it triggers a literal interpretation of the noun tongue, which at the same time belongs to the idiomatic expression. Ernst called these peculiar cases of idiom modification conjunction modification. Corpus studies reveal that the phenomenon is more widespread than one might expect, and the data are clearly a lot of fun.
Monthly Archives: February 2020
4th REEL Day, Feb. 15
The 4th student conference on “REsearch in English Linguistics” (REEL-Day) took place February 15 at Goethe Univesity. It is a continuation of a teaching cooperation between the Department of English Linguistics, Mainz, and IEAS/Linguistics, Frankfurt, which started last year. This year, Ulrike Schneider (Mainz) and Manfred Sailer (Frankfurt) taught parallel project-oriented courses on the overreaching topic of Language in Politics.
Naomi Truan (Leipzig) opened the conference with an invited talk on Continue reading 4th REEL Day, Feb. 15
Studentische Hilfskraft gesucht!
Note: The position has been filled!
In der Arbeitsgruppe „Syntax-Semantik-Schnittstelle“ (Sailer) der Englischen Sprachwissenschaft ist zum 1.4.2020 eine studentische Hilfskraftstellen zu besetzen.
20 Stunden im Monat, 1.4.2020-30.9.2020
Die gesuchte Hilfskraft soll die Arbeitsgruppe technisch und inhaltlich unterstützen. Das beinhaltet Scan-Aufträge, Computerbetreuung (Mac), Unterstützung bei LaTex-Projekten, Aktualisierung des Internetauftritts (www.english-linguistics.de), Continue reading Studentische Hilfskraft gesucht!