Starting in Saarbrücken: Information density, complexity and cross-linguistic variation

It’s October already and I have just received my appointment as a guest professor in the SFB (special research unit) on Information density in Saarbrücken. I will teach a class on “Cross-linguistic variation in structural complexity” and I’m excited to learn more about information density and possible applications of existing hypotheses and tools to typological comparison.

MelaTAMP Workshop in Port Vila

We held a small workshop at the University of the South Pacific yesterday, on Emalus Campus in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The purpose was to introduce and discuss the storyboards we have developed as part of the MelaTAMP project.

We thank Robert Early and Meriani Situ for their organisation and local support, and we’re happy that our audience extended far beyond our few project members and collaborators.

Towards an ontology of modal flavours

modal flavours wordleI’m still feeling warm and fuzzy from the wonderful workshop we had last week at the DGfS conference about modal flavours. The idea for this workshop had formed last year during the SIAS summer institute on the investigation of linguistic meaning, together with Ryan Bochnak and Anne Mucha. We were very happy to win Aynat Rubinstein as our invited speaker and get some excellent submissions from various subfields of linguistics. We gave an overview of background motivations and common themes of the talks in our introduction.

Franz Boas Award

Congratulations go to my esteemed colleague Sonja Riesberg who received the first Franz Boas Award for her work in the collection and archiving of data for the CELD corpus! The award is meant to promote collections of archived materials as academic publications and generate awareness and recognition for this type of scholarly output.

Sonja Riesberg receives first DELAMAN Franz Boas Award