On articles and multivariate analysis in English

On January 9 and 10 2012 Prof Marianne Hundt taught the seminar "Variable article use". Marianne Hundt has been Professor of English Linguistics at Zürich University since 2008. Prior to that she held a chair of English Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. She obtained her MA, PhD and Habilitation at the University of Freiburg and was a visiting scholar at Portland State University, Oregon (USA) and at Victoria University, Wellington (New Zealand). In her PhD Prof Hundt dealt with New Zealand English, and her investigation led to a monograph published by John Benjamins. In her Habilitation in English Linguistics Prof Hundt investigated the English mediopassive construction, and this study was published by Rodopi. Her 2009 co-authored monograph Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study, published by Cambridge University Press, is also well-known in the field. Prof Marianne Hundt has edited and co-edited a number of books with leading publishers such as Cambridge University Press, John Benjamins and Rodopi, and has published extensively in international journals on issues such as new Englishes, the English verbal paradigm, English syntax (relativisation, complexity) and language change in general.
Outline of the seminar: The definite and indefinite articles in English are amongst the most frequent words. However, the contexts where there are used (or at times omitted) are difficult to describe and there is variability across time, regional varieties, text types, etc. In this seminar, Prof Hundt started out by briefly looking at the history of articles in English and then moved on to three case studies. The first provided a focus on article use with institutional nouns like church and university in two major reference varieties, namely British and American English. The second considered diachronic change in article use with single role referents like president and captain in predicate position. The third case study took language contact into account and focus on variable article use in a variety of Indian English. The seminar provided the theoretical background necessary to study variable article use in English. Prof Hundt also looked at issues related to data retrieval and analysis, such as the definition of a variable context and variable rule analysis. Finally, the seminar provided an insight into the specific challenges involved in the analysis of spoken data.

Information structure and word-order variation

On June 22 and 23 2011 Prof Gregory Ward (taught the seminar "Information structure and word-order variation". Gregory Ward received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1986. His primary research area is discourse/pragmatics, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, intonational meaning, and reference/anaphora. Recent publications have investigated deferred reference, event anaphora, functional compositionality, generalized conversational implicature and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. With Birner, he co-authored Information status and noncanonical word order in English (Benjamins, 1998). With Birner and Rodney Huddleston, he is co-author of the chapter "Information packaging" in The Cambridge grammar of the English language (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is co-editor of Blackwell's The handbook of pragmatics (Blackwell 2004). Prof Ward also serves as a freelance linguistic consultant on legal issues relating to sentence and utterance interpretation.
Outline of the seminar: 1. Introduction and theoretical preliminaries. Information Structure (partitioning of information in a discourse into given – old, familiar – and new information). The 'Given-New Contract'. Communicative Dynamism. Topichood. Aspects of information structure: reference (choice of referring expression), cohesion (coherence relations), topic (discourse topic vs. sentence topic), focus (focus/presupposition, common ground), intonation/prosody. 2. Word-order variation. Noncanonical Word Order. Argument Reversal: inversion (discourse-status and hearer-status of the constituents of inversion; is it discourse-status or hearer-status that is relevant?), preposing (subcategorized PPs vs. adjunct PPs, NPs, PPs, VPs, APs; types: focus preposing and topicalization), postposing, right/left-dislocation, wh/it/that-clefts related constructions: passives with by-phrases. 3. A corpus-based analysis.

Corpus linguistics and applications

On 3 June 2011 Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Málaga) lectured on “Linguistics with corpus: foundations, challenges and applications”. Gloria Corpas Pastor completed her PhD at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, after which she developed research stays in Exeter, Leipzig, Lancaster and Harvard. She is currently Full Professor at the Department of Translation and Interpreting in Málaga, as well as Visiting Professor in Translation Technologies at the University of Wolverhampton. In Málaga, Prof Corpas is the main investigator of the research group ‘Lexicography and Translation’. She is an active member of AIETI (Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación), AMIT (Asociación de Mujeres Investigadoras y Tecnólogas), EUROPHRAS (European Society of Phraseology) and EURALEX (European Association for Lexicography). She was awarded the 1995 EURALEX Verbatim Award for her investigation in lexicography. Prof Corpas is part of national and international committees (AEN/CTN 174, CEN/BTTF 138) whose goal is to implement a number of standardized regulations in the field of translation and interpreting.
Abstract: The seminar covered the following issues: 1. The birth of a new paradigm (computational linguistics, applied linguistics, lexical grammars, translation). 2. Key concepts (collocation, colligation, preference, types of corpora). 3. Main applications (concordancers, translation tools). During the practical sessions, Prof Corpas illustrated the theoretical introduction by means of hands-on exercises on translation universals, translation techniques applied to a number of text-types/genres, phraseology, etc.

Natural Language Processing: on brains and computers

On 2 June 2011 Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton) taught a seminar on "Natural Language Processing: Challenges and Applications". Ruslan Mitkov received his MSc from the Humboldt University in Berlin, his PhD from the Technical University in Dresden and he worked as a Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. Prof. Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton which he joined in 1995, where he set up the Research Group in Computational Linguistics. In addition, he is also Director of the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing. His extensively cited research covers areas such as anaphora resolution, automatic generation of multiple-choice tests, machine translation, natural language generation, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, centering, translation memory, evaluation, corpus annotation, bilingual term extraction, question answering, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, and an NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals. Mitkov is author of the monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and sole Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press). Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge University Press), Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Language Processing book series of John Benjamins publishers, and Consulting Editor of Oxford University Press publications in Computational Linguistics. He is also working on the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Computational Linguistics (co-authored with Patrick Hanks) and the future second, substantially revised edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics.
Abstract: The talk introduced Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a discipline and discussed NLP applications for Applied Linguistics developed by the speaker and/or his research group. After a brief historical review, the speaker argued that natural languages resent major problems for computers. Basic language processing tasks, methods and solutions were outlined. The speaker then proceeded to selected topics of his recent research which have to do with the employment of NLP methodology in Applied Linguistics and more specifically topics including but not limited to lexicography, translation and translation studies, language teaching (assessment) and language change.

The processing of agreement

On 12 and 14 April 2011 Carlos Acuña Fariña (University of Santiago de Compostela) taught a seminar on the grammar and the processing of agreement in English and Romance. Professor Acuña Fariña completed a PhD at Santiago with work on the grammar of apposition that would in time gain him an international reputation as one of the world's leading expert on the topic. He doubles as a psycholinguist (leads two current research projects on the processing of agreement) and has published in some of the most prestigious venues, such Cognitive Linguistics, Lingua or Cognition. He currently teaches English Morphosyntax in Santiago.
Abstract: Agreement has become a major challenge for both linguistic theory and psycholinguistics. As Corbett (2006: 116) has noted, it has moved from a peripheral position in grammatical studies to the centre stage. Most theories of language now recognise something equivalent to an agreement phase or operation in the creation of sentential messages, and disputes often arise only when discussing how to embed agreement computations inside a larger context containing further computations. Due to its pronounced redundancy and alliteration, agreement co-indexations are often only explainable if viewed as "dysfunctional", "manifestations of humans' delight in (...) form-focused activities" (Taylor 2002: 332). Yet agreement is present in over 70% of the world's languages and even in the languages where it is not so conspicuous, like English, its operations are central to the structure and the creation of predications (English speakers actually confront the requirements of number agreement at least once every 16 words or so, or once every five seconds; Eberhard 2005: 532-33). Furthermore, as Bock et al. (1999: 331) note, even 4-year-olds use correctly agreeing verbs over 94% of the time in spontaneous speech (Keeney & Wolfe, 1972): "This makes it all the more plausible to view agreement, in its typical manifestations, as one of the automatic mechanisms of normal language production rather than a nicety of carefully prepared speech". In this course, we will examine the psycholinguistic dynamics of agreement and ask ourselves questions like the following:
1. Is agreement an essentially formal or an essentially conceptual phenomenon?
2. Are the grammar of agreement and the processing of agreement 'in good agreement' with each other?
3. Are there cross-linguistic differences in the way agreement is processed?
4. Do we compute agreement differently for gender and number? For semantic gender and morphosyntactic gender?
5. Does the mind, and the brain, react differently to agreement based on either semantic or formal regulation?
6. Is the processing of agreement the same across domains?
The course introduces students into some of the latest experimental research on the topic, and will help them become familiar with the methodologies used in this field, such as 'eye-tracking' and E.R.P.