The first eight English NPIs have been integrated into the NPI Bank, with 10 licensers and a total number of 371 corpus examples. More English data will hopefully be available soon.
Since its official lauch on December 2, 2025, the NPI Bank has made information on roughly 250 German NPIs and about 80 Romanian NPIs available via a web interface. Continue reading NPI Bank: Now with English NPIs!→
The proceedings of this year’s HPSG conference are now available! The volume includes a contribution by Manfred Sailer & Nicolas Lamoure on “Superlative ever in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish.”
Hiwa Asadpour has published a paper on “A corpus analysis of the effects of definiteness and animacy on word order veration”. In this article deals with the analysis of word order variation regarding subjects, direct objects, and non-direct object phrases called the “Target” in the corpus of languages of northwestern Iran, viz., Armenian, Mukri Kurdish, and Northeastern Kurdish (Indo-European), Jewish Northeastern Neo-Aramaic Continue reading Asadpour on Effects of Definiteness and Animacy in Word Order Variation→
Iverina Ivanova’s dissertation is now available from the university library server.
In her dissertation, Iva investigated the structure of research articles in the field of Computational Linguistics (CL) with the goal of establishing that a set of distinctive linguistic features is associated with each section type. She analyzed the interaction between the intentional and the linguistic structure of each section type. The results from the quantitative and qualitative analysis show that each section possesses an individual profile of linguistic features which are associated with it more or less strongly. These section-feature mappings are shown to be derivable from the hypothesized intentions of each section type. Her research findings provide insights into the writing strategies that writers employ in the component sections of a research article so that the overall goal
of the article is achieved. Continue reading Ivanova “Text-type Constraints on the Choice of Linguistic Mechanisms in Research Articles: A Corpus-based Approach” published→
Sascha Bargmann’s dissertation is now available from the university library server.
In his book, Sascha develops an argument for a consequent lexical treatment of idioms, whenever such a treatment is possible. To do this, he looks at data that have not been taken into account systematically in the previous literature.
Reference
Bargmann, Sascha. 2019. Chopping up idioms: Towards a combinatorial analysis. Frankfurt a.M.: University Library.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21248/gups.73455
The proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 2021 are now available online. They contain a contribution by Manfred Sailer on “Use-conditional licensing of strong negative polarity items.” In the paper, Manfred further develops the theory of his 2021 HPSG paper that strong NPIs can be licensed by a negation at the non-at-issue semantics. The new paper looks at strong NPIs in German in verum focus constructions and in raising declaratives. Continue reading Sailer in Sinn und Bedeutung 2021 proceedings→
Gert Webelhuth’s paper on “C-command constraints in German: A corpus-based investigation” has been published ahead of print in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft.
In the paper, Gert addresses the role of c-command constraints in the grammar of three phenomena in German: relative quantifier scope, quantificational binding, and negative polarity. He presents the results of a large corpus study that demonstrate empirically that scope of one quantifier over another, quantificational binding, and Continue reading Webelhuth on c-command constraints in German→
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→
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