In dem Seminar wird Sprachwandel aus verschiedenen Perspektiven beleuchtet.

Salaria Kea was the only African American woman to serve with the American Medical Unit during the Spanish Civil War. Her experience has been silenced and edited within the archive by traditionally more authoritative voices. Reconsidering the impact of intersectionality on personal experience can lead to a better understanding of Black U.S.…[Read more]

In the course, I give a basic introduction into some of the recent developments in the field of computational historical linguistics. While this field is predominantly represented by phylogenetic approaches with whom scholars try to infer phylogenetic trees from different kinds of language data, the approach taken here is much broader,…[Read more]

“People acquire phobias,” evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson observed, to “abrupt and intractable aversions, to the objects and circumstances that threaten humanity in natural environments” (The Diversity of Life 351). This often overlooked observation, conceptualized by an evolu­tionary biologist whose canon launched the Western corpus of…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the developme…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

The prominent Russian writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was known mainly for his work on the Soviet prison camps. In many of his fictional and non-fiction works, however, Solzhenitsyn dealt with the subject of Germany. This article analyses Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of Germany in the works August 1914, The Gulag A…[Read more]

This is a book review that evaluates the Spanish-language edition of the letters written by the Mexican poet Helena Paz Garro to the German writer Ernst Jünger, which were originally written in French. The reviewer had access to the original letters in the German Literature Archive in Germany and she compares the original texts with the…[Read more]

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

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]

This document is a basic guide for graduate students who need to work in archives or other special libraries. The guide includes items to bring or have on hand as well as steps for planning your visit and organizing your notes.

I’m a disability activist and musicologist with multiple sclerosis (PhD, Musicology, Cornell, 2014). I’m unaffiliated due to discrimination against my disabilities. However, I often give guest lectures, both virtually and in person. My speaking engagements help to advance diversity and representation in academia: I offer students the opportunity…[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]