The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging (https://calc.hypotheses.org/), offers tutorials and discussion notes on computer-assisted approaches to the history and diversity of languages. A substantial part of its content is contributed as part of the ERC Starting…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: El lenguaje no puede entenderse al margen de la evolución. No basta sólo con explicar el surgimiento evolutivo de una “capacidad de lenguaje”, sino que también hay que explicar la evolución del lenguaje en sí, el lenguaje en acto y no en potencia. En suma, no sólo se trata de averiguar si nuestros ancestros hablaban, pues hoy c…[Read more]

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) nasce ad Asheville, North Carolina. Mentre studia drammaturgia ad Harvard scrive per il teatro, ma il successo arriva con il romanzo autobiografico ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ (1929), seguito da ‘Of Time and the River’ (1935) e dai postumi ‘The Web and the Rock’ (1939) e ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ (1940). ‘Passage to England: A…[Read more]

Lecture, given at the Fifth Pavia International Summer School for Indo-European Linguistics (Università di Pavia, 2022-09-05/09)

Focusing on rural white communities in the early twentieth century, this article examines how disability, queerness, and economic estrangement were intertwined in American eugenic assessments of the “unfit.” In doing so, it attends to the knotty relations of power by which such communities were simultaneously adjudged deviant and bestowed with the…[Read more]

Text Analysis is a broad term that covers many approaches and technologies. Those initially stemming from the academic sphere have come to enter the commercial, and today there is a wide interplay between the two. A further dichotomy is that between natural language and computational approaches. Over time, approaches have come to draw upon each…[Read more]

The huge proliferation of textual (and other data) in digital and organisational sources has led to new techniques of text analysis. The potential thereby unleashed may be underpinned by further theoretical
developments to the theory of Discourse Stream Analysis (DSA) as presented here. These include the notion of change in the discourse stream…[Read more]

The Connections between ancient approaches to rhetoric, as found in Plato and Aristotle, the prime ancient theorists of rhetoric, and modern linguistic approaches to register and genre theory, as in Hallidayan linguistics, show continuity of thought across the centuries. They also suggest that there may be such things as universal rhetorical…[Read more]

A review of evidence for foot structure from early Middle English.

The Note Azzurre (Blue Notes), arguably the most representative work of the Scapigliato Carlo Dossi, have always
been the focus of attention of scholars and enthusiasts. A few notes, however, have been studied little or not at
all: these fragments revolve around extremely modern matters and obsessions, such as the impact of technology
on…[Read more]

Abstract of my full article published on disability and masculinity in the Global South.

Subject of this article is the Gagauz language, spoken by about 200,000 speakers, mainly in
the Republic of Moldova and the Ukraine. Linguistically, it is very close to Turkish but shows
several special features that have developed under the influence of Slavic languages. The
linguistic features of the Gagauz language will be examined and are…[Read more]

Compounding and derivation are frequent in many language families. As a consequence, words in different languages are often only partially cognate, sharing only a few but not all morphemes. While partial cognates do not constitute a problem for the phonological reconstruction of individual morphemes, they are problematic when it comes to…[Read more]

In discussions of the history of American Sign Language (ASL), a village sign language—Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL)—has been identified as a possible contributor to ASL and to its differentiation from French Sign Language (LSF; cf. Groce 1985: 73-74, Lane et al 2011: 76, Poole Nash 2015: 611). On this account, MVSL contributed to ASL t…[Read more]

Young children are thought to play a unique role in the emergence and evolution of language. In research on language acquisition by a deaf child of late learners of ASL as well as in research on the emergence of new signed languages, young children have shown the ability to impose systematicity on relatively less systematic linguistic input…[Read more]

For a long time, metaphors have played an important role in depicting language history. In this study, we contrast early metaphors on language history, such as the family tree or the wave model, with recent metaphors that were popularized after the quantitative turn, such as forests of trees or phylogenetic networks. Speculating about metaphors…[Read more]

Spanish Abstract: En su teoría sobre la interacción estratégica, Erving Goffman muestra cómo las dinámicas de control de la información y de la infiltración de informantes en las líneas enemigas no son únicamente una cuestión de espionaje internacional o de servicios secretos. La vida cotidiana, tal como nos la desvela el análisis de Goffman, e…[Read more]

Politikwissenschaftler und Sozialphilosoph Karsten Schubert beleuchtet den Zusammenhang von Sexualität und schwuler Politik und fragt, welche Art von Politik in welcher Situation der HIV-Pandemie begünstigt beziehungsweise verhindert wurde. Dazu erläutert er zwei Thesen

Compounding and derivation are frequent in many language families. As a consequence, words in different languages are often only partially cognate, sharing only a few but not all morphemes. While partial
cognates do not constitute a problem for the phonological reconstruction of individual morphemes, they
are problematic when it comes to…[Read more]