The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

Corpus linguistics is one of the fastest-growing methodologies in contemporary linguistics. In a conversational format, this article answers a few questions that corpus linguists regularly face from linguists who have not used corpus-based methods so far. It discusses some of the central assumptions (‘formal distributional differences reflect functional differences’), notions (corpora, representativity and balancedness, markup and annotation), and methods of corpus linguistics (frequency lists, concordances, collocations), and discusses a few ways in which the discipline still needs to mature. At a recent LSA meeting … [with an obvious bow to Frederick Newmeyer] Question: So, I hear you’re a corpus linguist. Interesting, I get to see more and more

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2009.00149.x

What is Corpus Linguistics

Time in language.

Functional syntax : anaphora, discourse and empathy

In the middle voice.

Understanding English-German contrasts

Advances in computer-assisted linguistic research have been greatly influential in reshaping linguistic research. With the increasing availability of interconnected datasets created and curated by researchers, more and more interwoven questions can now be investigated. Such advances, however, are bringing high requirements in terms of rigorousness for preparing and curating datasets. Here we present CLICS, a Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS). CLICS tackles interconnected interdisciplinary research questions about the colexification of words across semantic categories in the world's languages, and show-cases best practices for preparing data for cross-linguistic research. This is done by addressing shortcomings of an earlier version of the database, CLICS2, and by supplying an updated version with CLICS3, which massively increases the size and scope of the project. We provide tools and guidelines for this purpose and discuss insights resulting from organizing student tasks for database updates.

/pdf/the-database-of-cross-linguistic-colexifications-25bmcdj974.pdf

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, reproducible analysis of cross-linguistic polysemies.

Human impersonal pronouns like French on and German man are regarded as pronouns that are used to fill an argument position with a variable ranging over human referents without establishing a referential link to an entity from the universe of discourse. Such pronouns are highly context-dependent and variable in their distributional and semantic properties. Following up on work done by Anna Siewierska, we aim to capture this variability by using the semantic map methodology. We propose a mathematical (graph-theoretic) definition of ‘connectvity maps’ in general and devise a map for human impersonal pronouns or, more generally speaking, the ‘impersonalization’ of argument positions. The map is intended as a hypothesis about possible patterns of polysemy in the domain of investigation, and is tested on the basis of a small sample of European languages.

Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages

Scalar additive operators, such as Engl. even , Fr. meme, Germ. sogar , Sp. aun , and so forth, vary crosslinguistically in terms of their distributional behavior, in particular with respect to semantic and pragmatic properties of the sentential environment (scale-reversing vs. scale-preserving, negative vs. nonnegative). This article proposes a semantic framework for the crosslinguistic analysis of scalar additive operators and a typology based on that framework. Five major types of operators are distinguished and the distribution of these types in forty European languages is surveyed. The synchronic patterns found in the languages of the sample are interpreted in the light of historical developments in the domain of investigation, and implications for the division of labor between lexical meaning and sentential context are discussed.

Volker Gast

Papers

Understanding English-German contrasts

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, reproducible analysis of cross-linguistic polysemies.

Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages

Scalar Additive Operators in the Languages of Europe

Impersonal uses of the second person singular: A pragmatic analysis of generalization and empathy effects