Edward Kemp, although best known as a park superintendent and as a designer of parks and gardens, was also an influential and best-selling author. His How to Lay out a Garden, running into several editions, is the best known and most influential of his written works, but there were others, notably editions of the Hand-Book of Gardening, and Parks,…[Read more]

In this paper, we offer an analysis of the ​because ​X construction as non-elliptical structures. Beside English, Dutch, and German, similar constructions exist in a number of other languages as well. Furthermore, there are also constructions, albeit formally similar and diachronically related to ​because ​X, that are ellipses because they can be…[Read more]

Over recent years Web 2.0 has brought information into the hands of the public, and we are increasingly seeing non-professionals doing sophisticated information tasks not merely for work, research or personal interest, but also for leisure – and even pleasure. This paper looks at an online fanfiction repository, Archive of Our Own (AO3), and i…[Read more]

Book of Abstracts of the 5th ESTIDIA Conference – Hybrid Dialogues: Transcending Binary Thinking and Moving Away from Societal Polarizations

THIS IS A PRE-PRINT, PLEASE CITE IT AS: Tresoldi, Tiago; Rzymski, Christoph; Forkel, Robert; Greenhill, Simon J.; List, Johann-Mattis; and Gray, Russell D. (2019) “Managing historical linguistic data for computational phylogenetics and computer-assisted language comparison (PRE-PRINT)”. Jena: Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human His…[Read more]

This brief blog post discusses qualitative methods for identifying horizontal processes in the evolution of sign language handshapes in manual alphabets using phylogenetic network methods.

While language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word comparison – as a result of the recent quantitative turn in historical linguistics – has also resulted in new proposals to study language contact situations by means of aut…[Read more]

The fact that “all languages evolve, as long as they exist” (Schleicher 1863: 18f) has been long known to linguists and does not surprise us anymore. The reasons why all language change constantly, however, is still not fully understood. What we know, however, is that language usage must be at the core of language evolution. It is the dynamics amo…[Read more]

The library and information science literature on artists and designers shows that ‘inspiration’ is a crucial information need. This talk will explore how art and design libraries can help their patrons to understand, find, and foster inspiration. However, what is really meant by ‘inspiration’, and how is it found? I will be discussing some of…[Read more]

The library and information science literature on artists and designers shows that ‘inspiration’ is a crucial information need. This talk will explore how art and design libraries can help their patrons to understand, find, and foster inspiration. However, what is really meant by ‘inspiration’, and how is it found? I will be discussing some of…[Read more]

This conference paper explores ghost signs: the faded adverts for brands, organisations and services that we see inked or carved on walls or above shops. I discuss: 1. the liminality of ghosts and ghosts signs – and the ways we materially engage with them 2. how they flex time and, in doing so, gift us an organisational warning 3. and how, as m…[Read more]

This presentation covers some basic elements of data collection methods, fieldwork and interacting with speakers of a critically endangered language.

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2017. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2016. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

The article reflects on the relationship between the internationalization of higher education and language policies in Brazil. The study provides a review of language policy literature and internationalization policies materialized in national programs, such as the Science without Borders (SwB) and the Languages without Borders (LwB). The analysis…[Read more]

Despite a period of almost two decades in which quantitative approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly used, gaining constantly more popularity even among predominantly qualitatively oriented linguists, we find many problems in the field of computational historical linguistics, which have only sporadically been addressed. In the…[Read more]

By comparing the languages of the world, we gain invaluable insights into human prehistory, predating the appearance of written records by thousands of years. The traditional methods for language comparison are based on manual data inspection. With more and more data available, they reach their practical limits. Computer applications, however,…[Read more]

While the evolution of spoken languages is well understood and has been studied using traditional historical comparative methods as well as newer computational phylogenetic methods, evolutionary processes resulting in the diversity of contemporary sign languages are poorly understood, and scholars have been largely unsuccessful in grouping sign…[Read more]

Open Access (OA) initiatives, movements and policies have had a large impact on scholarly communication publishing and dissemination. This is of particular interest to Library and Information Science, through implementation, ethics and how libraries and librarians engage with the process. Library and Information Science principally concerns itself…[Read more]