Research into grammaticalization has an established genealogy, which records the birth of the term “grammaticalization” in more or less its present-day sense with Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), but recognizes an intellectual lineage extending back to at least the Enlightenment. Among the immediate predecessors of Meillet, Georg von der Gabel…[Read more]

The prefix r- in Tlacochahuaya Zapotec is most commonly a habitual aspect marker, but it also has other functions, including, with certain verbs, a progressive aspect marker. In this presentation, I describe the distribution of r- in both elicited and naturalistic contexts and compare this distribution with the use of r- in related languages. This…[Read more]

The creation of mental models is one of the key modes of human thinking and is how we interact with the world. However, our perception of time and how we experience time is directly linked to this sort of modeling behavior.

This study aims to explore the concept, benefits, challenges and activities related to Internationalization at Home (IaH), defined as the integration of international/intercultural dimensions into the formal/informal curriculum in domestic learning environments (Beelen & Jones, 2015), as an alternative for more inclusive activities in higher…[Read more]

This study offers a space to think about the internationalization of Brazilian higher education institutions in a more critical way based on a meta-analysis of the studies of a research group that addresses issues such as internationalization programs, language policies and internationalization in that context. Findings of the meta-analysis…[Read more]

This article provides a response to a target article by Jäger (2019), in which an alternative method for the comparison of linguistic reconstruction systems is proposed that is not based on the edit distance.

This paper discusses the interface between internationalization and language policies in general in Brazil by looking for evidence and traces of evidence in a local context. More specifically, Brazilian national programs such as the Science without Borders (SwB), the Languages without Borders (LwB) and the Capes PrInt call are analysed in the…[Read more]

Efforts on language documentation have been increasing in the past. While the amount of digital data of the world’s languages is increasing, only a small amount of the data is sustainable, since data reuse is often exacerbated by idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the comparability of linguistic data.…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2018. 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 document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2018, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

Spanish Abstract: Notas sobre la teoría feminista del género gramatical de Ana M. Vigara presentada en “Nombrar en femenino: Sexo ‘gramatical’, juicio social” (2009), referente al debate social sobre el uso variable del género masculino y femenino en español. Vigara defiende una posición feminista moderada, que tiene en cuenta la tradición grama…[Read more]

Review of Greek Alchemy from Late Antiquity to Early Modernity. Edited by EFTHYMIOS NICOLAIDIS. Pp. 198, illus., index. Brepols: Turnhout. 2018. £72. ISBN: 978-2-503-58191-0.

(First paragraphs.) — The notion of “mental time” refers to the experience and awareness of time, including that of past, present, and future, and that of the passing of time. This experience and awareness of time raises a number of puzzling questions. How do we experience time? What exactly do we experience when we experience time? Do we actua…[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]

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]