All posts by Manfred

Manfred Sailer Institut für England- und Amerikastudien (Section English Linguistics) Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main Grüneburgplatz 1 D-60629 Frankfurt am Main Germany Homepage: http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~sailer/ Tel.: +49 - (0)69 - 798 32526 Fax: +49 - (0)69 - 798 32509 E-Mail: sailer "at" em "dot" uni-frankfurt "dot" de
IEAS news, Publications

Asadpour publishes cross-linguistic corpus study

Hiwa Asadpour (IEAS and JSPS International Fellow at University of Tokyo) has just published a paper in the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory on “Parts of speech and the placement of Targets in the corpus of languages in northwestern Iran.”

This study applies a corpus-based quantitative approach to the word order typology and linguistic theories about word order in several genetically unrelated language varieties in northwestern Iran. Continue reading Asadpour publishes cross-linguistic corpus study →

Conferences, IEAS news

Asadpour et al. at HPSG 2022

Hiwa Asadpour, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer sketch an analysis of English and Sōrānī Kurdish non-wh relatives in their talk at HPSG 2022 (July 29-31, 2022) on “Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use.” In both languages, there is variation between bare relatives and relatives introduced by a function word, that and ka respectively. The authors discuss some aspects of social meaning that is attached to the choice between the bare and the non-bare variant. Continue reading Asadpour et al. at HPSG 2022 →

IEAS news

Research project supported by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung extended by one year

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 →

IEAS news

Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact

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 →

Conferences, IEAS news

DGfS 2023 workshop on “Coexistence, competition, and change …”

Next year’s annual meeting of the German Linguistics Society, DGfS 2023 (Cologne, March 8-10), will host a workshop on Coexistence, competition, and change: Structural borrowing and the dynamics of asymmetric language contact, organized by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza-Pust, and Manfred Sailer. The workshop is part of the activities of the  informal special interest group  Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact  (DALC) that Carolina, Hiwa, and  Manfred have recently started. The workshop aims at bringing together various lines of research in the investigation of the dynamics of asymmetric language contact Continue reading DGfS 2023 workshop on “Coexistence, competition, and change …” →

IEAS news, Publications, Typology

Asadpour co-edits volume on language contact

A new volume on Word Order Variation has been published in the series Studia Typologica [STTYP] (De Gruyter Mouton) by Hiwa Asadpour in collaboration with Thomas Jügel. The focus region is the Iranic-Semitic-Turkic contact area, where many languages are described as verb-final, ‘Targets’ (Goals, Recipients, etc.) tend to appear in the immediate postverbal position, a pattern violating the alleged ‘basic word order’. The volume will be available from August 1 on.

Investigating empirical material, the present volume examines the idea of its contact-induced origin by combining various languages Continue reading Asadpour co-edits volume on language contact →

Conferences, IEAS news

Sailer & Smith with a poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 2022

Manfred Sailer & Suzanne Smith will present a poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 2022, Prague, 14.-16.9.2022, with the title “In ages is not an NPI, which explains its distribution.”

This research is based on Suzanne’s BA thesis, in which she extracted detailed corpus profiles for the negative polarity items (NPIs) in a milion/thousand/… years and contrasted them with the Continue reading Sailer & Smith with a poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 2022 →

Conferences, IEAS news, Studying linguistics, Typology

ETPOLL 2022

Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Low-Resource Languages (ETPOLL2022) – Passive and relative clause structures

Host Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Website: https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/etpoll22/home/

Dates: 16-Jun-2022 – 20-Jun-2022
Location: Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

During the course of the workshop, we will discuss various empirical and theoretical approaches in the study of low-resource languages, with a particular focus on passive and relative clause structures. Our topics are relevant for researchers in the fields of linguistic typology, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, empirical linguistics, and applied linguistics.

The languages which will be covered in this workshop include: Arabic, Armenian, Azeri Turkic, Balochi, Domari, Japanese, Kurdish, Neo-Aramaic, Persian, Romeyka, Turkish  Continue reading ETPOLL 2022 →