There was an interesting small workshop in Torun in April on Measuring Linguistic Complexity. When the call came out, I had just finished a preliminary overview on the previous literature on the topic and was ready to get cracking, so I got together with Vera Demberg to test our hypothesis that focussing on POS tags rather than the token-level annotations would give us more reliable results on syntactic flexibility. Our results are in the proceedings.
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Grammaticalisation and information density
My work in the Collaborative Research Unit on information density (ID) in Saarbrücken has made me think about the relation between grammaticalisation and ID. In an invited talk to Saarbrücken in April, I explored some of my ideas on this topic. You can find the slides here.
Poster at Linguistic Evidence in Tübingen
The Linguistic Evidence conference in Tübingen this year is long over and I’m sad I couldn’t be there, but our poster was well represented by my two co-authors, Manfred Krifka and Ana Krajinović. Click here to download the PDF.
Perspectives on Low-Resource Languages and Language Varieties
My colleague Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and I, with generous support from Elke Teich, organised a workshop last week. We invited researchers from a variety of backgrounds, spanning language documentation, typology, language acquisition, computational linguistics and historical linguistics. We were very happy with the inspiring talks and vibrant discussions about challenges and solutions, which I am sure will continue beyond the small event we had.
Last talk of 2017, at the MPI for the Science of Human History
2017 was a year full of talks, so don’t be surprised if you won’t see me on the circuit as much during 2018. The last talk of that year was at the MPI in Jena, where I talked about some of the things you’ll see if you compare languages based on corpus data that you’re likely to miss if you look at grammatical descriptions. I had some incredibly inspiring conversations and hope to visit more often (maybe even in 2018).
Multi-verb constructions — is there a continuum?
I’m excited about the upcoming workshop on Multi-verb constructions at ZAS Berlin. I’m going to use the opportunity to present some of my latest thoughts on the topic and lobby for systematic typological comparison. See my slides here.
The syntax-morphology trade-off
Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Language Science Colloquium at Universität des Saarlandes, about recent research on the syntax-morphology trade-off and further perspectives for text-based typology. Download the slides here.
Bibtex bibliographies selected by keywords, with customised keyword separators
This is a very specialised problem, but since I just found the solution, I wanted to briefly document this for myself. I usually use natbib, but for the preparation of reading lists, sorted by topic, I wanted to try biblatex. Creating a list of references selected by a keyword is not a problem at all.
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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.
Upcoming workshop: Data management and corpus creation
I’m looking forward to this week’s CLARIN-D workshop on data management and corpus creation in Hamburg. As a member of F-AG 3, I’ll be attending with a short talk and am curious to learn more about current practices and experiences.