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]

The traditional configuration of content on top and comments on the bottom on most websites often dismiss comments as of secondary importance to content. This article looks at how comment culture(s) in China operate outside of the top-bottom dichotomy where comments are increasingly supplanting content as the main form of consumable media. Through…[Read more]

This project explores the recent censorship of two Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on Tencent’s popular WeChat messaging platform. Specifically, I am advancing a technographic approach in ways that give agency to bots as not just computing units but as interlocutors and informants. I seek to understand these chatbots through their i…[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presents a dialectometric analysis of Scottish Gaelic morphology, with a focus on the noun phrase, using previously unpublished data from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland.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 paper is part of a larger research project that attempts to apply historical social network
analysis to the study of Chinese Buddhist history. The underlying research questions are
whether social network analysis (SNA) metrics can be gainfully applied to Buddhist history,
and whether network visualizations can enable us to better…[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]

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]

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]