Janina Radó will give an invited talk at the workshop on “Quantifier Scope: Syntactic, Semantic, and Experimental Approaches” that is taking place June 12 & 13, 2014 in Bayonne, France. The title of Janina’s talk is: “What do German quantifiers tell us about semantic theories?´´
Language Change
by Assif Am-David, Frankfurt a.M.
One of the most intriguing and widely studied topics in linguistics is the nature of language change. It is a well-known fact that natural languages of all types keep changing constantly. Language change can be studied from several angles: One can reconstruct extinct languages, classify languages to language families, recognise trends in lexical and grammatical changes and draw historical conclusions from language change. However, perhaps the most prominent question regarding language change is why it happens in the first place. Continue reading Language Change
Graduate School “Nominal Modification”
Application closed!
Starting October 1, 2014, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, offers full funding for 12 graduate students who aim for a PhD in the domain of nominal modification. These 12 PhD positions will be part of the newly approved graduate program “Nominal Modification“, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
Application for the program is open till June 30.
Find more information on the program and the application requirements on the graduate school’s website.
Quantifiers in Frame Semantics
Laura Kallmeyer and Frank Richter have a new paper out which investigates how Frame Semantics and type-logical semantics can be combined. It will be presented this summer at Formal Grammar 19 in Tübingen. A draft version is already available.
Resources on english-linguistics.de
We are happy to announce that the following resources are hosted on www.english-linguistics.de:
- The wiki for Lexical Resource Semantics (created 2012) containing:
- Teaching material for semantics
- The homepage of the project Distributional Idiosyncrasies (German: Distributionsidiosynkrasien), project A5 of the SFB 441, Tübingen, 2002-2009. The following resources have been developed in this project and have been ported to our server:
- The Collection of Distributionally Idiosyncratic Items (originally created in and hosted by the SFB 441, Tübingen; last update: 2009)
- The Bound Words Bibliography (originally created in the SFB 441, Tübingen; last update: 2009)
- The Polarity Items Bibliography (originally created in the SFB 441, Tübingen; last update: 2009)
We will try to update the resources.
We hope that these resources are useful for your work – they certainly have been for ours.
Manfred Sailer, Frank Richter.
Honorifics: Types, Data, and Importance for Linguistic Theory
by Assif Am David, Frankfurt a.M.
Honorifics are a linguistic encoding of social relations in a discourse. Therefore, they are closely related to pragmatic and sociolinguistic phenomena. On the other hand, unlike the latter, they are often highly grammaticalised and require not only pragmatic, but also formal consistency.
Honorifics can be divided into three different axis depending on whose honour (or disrespect) is expressed by the utterance. Comrie first introduced the different axes honorifics can refer to: Continue reading Honorifics: Types, Data, and Importance for Linguistic Theory
Animal communication
by Assif Am David, Frankfurt a.M.
It is commonly assumed in linguistics that language is a phenomenon unique to humans. It is normally associated with the Great Leap Forward, an anthropological revolution which took place about 50,000 years ago and gave rise to the behavioural modernity. Language is considered a core factor in this revolution which resulted in a more complex, abstract thought and in larger intricate social organization, possibly by allowing social constructivism, which is a conventional postulation of abstract social entities.
The study of language in animals, often referred to as biolinguistics, attempts to refute this idea. Continue reading Animal communication
Chuck Fillmore honored by the ACL
Chuck Fillmore has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Chuck Fillmore (1929-2014) has been one of the most influential linguistists in the last 50 years. His work centers around syntax and lexical semantics. He is one of the founders of Construction Grammar and has developed the theoretical basis of frame semantics. Continue reading Chuck Fillmore honored by the ACL
Welcome on this site!
This site came into existence in the summer term 2012. It will host and document research and teaching activities in formal, empirical, and computational linguistics, with a special focus on English linguistics.
Please read our mission statement, which we will keep updated as the interests of the participating researchers change.
What can you expect to find on this site?
- Pointers to research resources, in particular those developped by the participating researchers.
- Teaching material such as pod casts on linguistic topics and other material, created for courses or within courses taught by the participating researchers.
- Notes on events relating to linguistics or languages, such as the English Language Day (23 April), the International Mother Language Day (21 February), and similar.