Blog​​​​​​ ​​​​ – Linguistics

The following course has been added to the IEAS course program. Registration is still open for it.

Linguistics and science communication: Sharing linguistic research with the world

Instructor: Manfred Sailer
Monday, 12.15-13.45,  starting 4.11.2024
Room: IG 3.201
Modules:

• L3 FW 3.1, FW 4.2
• BA ES 3.4.2 /
• BA EmpSprachw En5
• MALing LING-INT-ARC, LING-CORE-ARC B
• MA EmpSprachw MA-ES-EN-B

Course description

There is a growing interest in and a growing need for accessible and available presentation of scientific research and insights. According
to linguistic-TikToker Simon Meier-Vieracker (Dresden), linguistics is in an ideal situation for science communication: (i) Everyone uses
language and has some opinion on language and language use. This makes it easy for most people to relate to linguistic topics. (ii) There are many freely accessible tools and resources that make it possible to put interesting content together quite easily, and to empower the
audience to start their own linguistic exploration.

The aim of this class is to produce material for various science communication scenarios (such as short videos for platforms like
youtube, material for projects in a secondary school classroom, or material for information talks addressing adults).

In the course, participants will get some theoretical background on science communication. We will evaluate existing science communication material and initiatives on linguistic topics – including TED talks, Science Slam contributions, popular science books and others. We will identify possible science communication settings, as well as topics on which the course praticipants have some background from previous linguistics courses or that seem to be of interest for the intended target group.

In addition to the regular weekly meetings of the whole course from November 4 on, groups are expected to have individual meetings with the instructor to discuss their projects.

Course reading

among others:
Wagner, Laura & Cecile McKee. 2023. How to talk language science with everybody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Available
electronically at the UB)

Prerequisites

Introduction to Linguistics

To register, write an e-mail message to Manfred Sailer
(sailer@em.uni-frankfurt.de) and enroll in the course’s OLAT class and its learning group:
https://olat-ce.server.uni-frankfurt.de/olat/auth/RepositoryEntry/22786834434

The password for the Olat course is: Sailer-WiSe2425

Leistungsnachweis

Assignments, in-class presentation, term paper

In order to promote a discussion between formal and constructional approaches to grammar, Nurit Melnik & Manfred Sailer edited a special issue of the Journal of Language Modelling devoted to “Constructional approaches in formal grammar”.

The issue consists of a brief introduction and three papers – by Jamie Findlay, Frank van Eynde, and Nurit Melnik. In the introduction, Nurit & Manfred identify three key ways of understanding “constructional” and they show how each of the contributions in the issue relates to these.

Links

• Access the issue at: https://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM/issue/view/30
• Frank van Eynde’s homepage: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/english/our-staff/emeritus-professors/frankvaneynde
• Jamie Findlay’s homepage: https://jyfindlay.com/
• Nurit Melnik’s homepage: https://www.openu.ac.il/en/personalsites/nuritmelnik.aspx
• Homepage of the Journal of Language Modelling: https://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM/index

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.”

The paper examines borrowed instances of emphatic superlative ever (ES-ever) into two Germanic languages (Dutch and German) and two Romance languages (French and Spanish). Manfred & Nicolas extracted naturally occurring instances of ES-ever and modeled the data in three stages:

• Stage-1: constructional borrowing (el coolest job ever ‘the coolest job ever’),
• Stage-2: diaconstruction (la  mejor canción ever ‘the best song ever’),
• Stage-3: lexical borrowing (las portadas más photoshopeadas ever ‘the most photoshoped portals ever’).

In their formalization, they extend the HPSG approach to social meaning taken in Asadpour et al. 2022 to borrowing.

Manfred & Nicolas had presented part of this work earlier in a more informal way at the workshop on “Coexistence, Competion, and Change” at DGfS 2023. This work is also related to the initiative on the Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact (DALC).

References

Asadpour, Hiwa, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer. 2022. Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use. In Stefan Müller & Elodie Winckel (eds.), Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Online (Nagoya/Tokyo), 6–26. Frankfurt/Main: Uni-
versity Library. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2022.1)

Sailer, Manfred & Lamoure, Nicolas. 2023. Superlative ever in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish. In Stefan Müller & Elodie Winckel (eds):  Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 80–100. Frankfurt/Main: University Library. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2023.5)

Links

• HPSG 2023 conference page: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~fabiolah/hpsg23/index.html
• HPSG 2023 proceedings page: https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/issue/view/47
• Nicolas Lamoure’s page at Goethe University: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/68891709/Nicolas_Lamoure
• Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact (DALC): https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/dalc/

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 (Semitic), and Azeri Turkic (Turkic). The objective is to examine the effects of formal and semantic (in)definiteness in combination with animacy on Target word order variation to find out which one can be a triggering factor.

The paper is available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/8/4/279

Reference

Asadpour, Hiwa. 2023. A corpus analysis of the effects of
definiteness and animacy on word order variation. Languages 8(4): 279.
https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8040279

Links

• Hiwa’s homepage: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/109653793/Associate_researcher
• Link to the paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/8/4/279