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→
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→
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.
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 …”→
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.
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.
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.”
