Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restrict…[Read more]

„Geiht“ mit h und „Blatt, goot, oolt“ mit t? Im Gegensatz zum Hochdeutschen ist das Niederdeutsche bis heute keine normierte Schriftsprache. Wie kann es aber sein, dass offensichtlich falsche Schreibweisen (z. B. das falsche Dehnungs-h im Wort „geiht“) seit Jahren als maßgebend und verbindlich für einen großen Teil des niederdeutsche…[Read more]

The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging, 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 Grant “Computer-Assisted Language C…[Read more]

PhD dissertation in Saami linguistics, University of Oulu, Finland, 2009.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restricted…[Read more]

Der computergestützte Sprachvergleich (Wu et al. 2020) hat zum Ziel, Sprachvielfalt und Sprachgeschichte mit Hilfe einer Mischung aus computerbasierten und nicht-automatischen aber formalen Methoden zu untersuchen und dadurch grundlegende Fragen zur Entwicklung spezifischer Sprachfamilien (Sagart et al. 2019) oder zur Typologie von Sprachvielfalt…[Read more]

Un esquema utilizado en mis clases de Comentario de Textos Literarios Ingleses para explicar las diversas dimensiones o parámetros de análisis funcional del discurso: la relación entre interlocutores o ‘tenor’, el canal comunicativo, medio o ‘modo’, y la función interactivo-comunicativa o ‘dominio’. ___…[Read more]

Master Thesis from 1991 (!) on the Turkish of 2nd generation migrants from Turkey in Germany, the influence of German as well as the restricted use of Turkish and the development of the mother tongue outside the actual language area.

This paper presents a dialectometric analysis of Scottish Gaelic morphology, with a focus on the noun phrase, using previously unpublished data from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. Fifty-five morphological features were extracted across 201 survey points, and the data subjected to a variety of analyses, including cluster analysis, regression,…[Read more]

This is a critique of the logicist theory of truth and facts set forth in the final section of John R. Searle’s book ‘The Construction of Social Reality’ (1995). Searle’s logicist account, much in the line of his theory of speech acts, is contrasted to a pragmaticist and interactionalist perspective on truth, facts, and discourse. Keywords:…[Read more]

Review of A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages by R. D. Fulk, 2018.

The field of Chinese Historical Phonology is traditionally dealing with a large number of complex and diverse types of data. While the data diversity can be conveniently dealt with in qualitative approaches, computational possibilities that have arisen during the past two decades offer new possibilities and new challenges for the field. In the…[Read more]

English abstract: A proposal to roughly classify acts of discourse into three broad categories, according to their stance vis à vis the broader cultural conversation in which they occur or to which they belong. An act of discourse (a move in a conversation, a published text, etc.) may either fully partake of the accepted conventions of the…[Read more]

from
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LITERARY THEORY, CRITICISM AND PHILOLOGY
http://bit.ly/abibliog
Spanish abstract: En su ‘Teoría de los sentimientos morales’ habla Adam Smith de cómo en la comunicación pública el espectador virtual que emana de nuestro discurso puede no coincidir con los receptores reales de dicho discurso. Y ve Smith en esa no coi…[Read more]

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form’s linguistic and frequency distribution in second l…[Read more]

Line 1122 of Beowulf represents a problem where the findings of metrics, historical phonology, and the reading of the manuscript are in conflict with one another. I revive and adapt Tolkien’s proposal to emend lāðbite līċes līġ ealle forswealg to lāðbite līġes līċ eall forswealg “the cruel bite of fire swallowed up the entire bodies”. This…[Read more]

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

This is a brief summary of my research results in the field of historical-comparative linguistics and on the subject of language reconstruction. The main focus is on the scientific examination of proto-languages. In this paper, I want to pursue the question about the possibility of a genetic relationship between Proto-Indo-European and…[Read more]

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2019, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

Workshop presentation about reconstruction of sounds preserved only in marginal daughter languages attested later than the earliest daughters