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The proceedings of this year’s HPSG conference are now available! The volume includes a contribution by Manfred Sailer & Nicolas Lamoure on “Superlative ever in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish.”

The paper examines borrowed instances of emphatic superlative ever (ES-ever) into two Germanic languages (Dutch and German) and two Romance languages (French and Spanish). Manfred & Nicolas extracted naturally occurring instances of ES-ever and modeled the data in three stages:

• Stage-1: constructional borrowing (el coolest job ever ‘the coolest job ever’),
• Stage-2: diaconstruction (la  mejor canción ever ‘the best song ever’),
• Stage-3: lexical borrowing (las portadas más photoshopeadas ever ‘the most photoshoped portals ever’).

In their formalization, they extend the HPSG approach to social meaning taken in Asadpour et al. 2022 to borrowing.

Manfred & Nicolas had presented part of this work earlier in a more informal way at the workshop on “Coexistence, Competion, and Change” at DGfS 2023. This work is also related to the initiative on the Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact (DALC).

References

Asadpour, Hiwa, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer. 2022. Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use. In Stefan Müller & Elodie Winckel (eds.), Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Online (Nagoya/Tokyo), 6–26. Frankfurt/Main: Uni-
versity Library. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2022.1)

Sailer, Manfred & Lamoure, Nicolas. 2023. Superlative ever in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish. In Stefan Müller & Elodie Winckel (eds):  Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 80–100. Frankfurt/Main: University Library. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2023.5)

Links

• HPSG 2023 conference page: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~fabiolah/hpsg23/index.html
• HPSG 2023 proceedings page: https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/issue/view/47
• Nicolas Lamoure’s page at Goethe University: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/68891709/Nicolas_Lamoure
• Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact (DALC): https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/dalc/

Hiwa Asadpour has published a paper on “A corpus analysis of the effects of definiteness and animacy on word order veration”. In this article deals with the analysis of word order variation regarding subjects, direct objects, and non-direct object phrases called the “Target” in the corpus of languages of northwestern Iran, viz., Armenian, Mukri Kurdish, and Northeastern Kurdish (Indo-European), Jewish Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (Semitic), and Azeri Turkic (Turkic). The objective is to examine the effects of formal and semantic (in)definiteness in combination with animacy on Target word order variation to find out which one can be a triggering factor.

The paper is available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/8/4/279

Reference

Asadpour, Hiwa. 2023. A corpus analysis of the effects of
definiteness and animacy on word order variation. Languages 8(4): 279.
https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8040279

Links

• Hiwa’s homepage: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/109653793/Associate_researcher
• Link to the paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/8/4/279

Iverina Ivanova’s dissertation is now available from the university library server.

In her dissertation, Iva investigated the structure of research articles in the field of Computational Linguistics (CL) with the goal of establishing that a set of distinctive linguistic features is associated with each section type. She analyzed the interaction between the intentional and the linguistic structure of each section type. The results from the quantitative and qualitative analysis show that each section possesses an individual profile of linguistic features which are associated with it more or less strongly. These section-feature mappings are shown to be derivable from the hypothesized intentions of each section type. Her research findings provide insights into the writing strategies that writers employ in the component sections of a research article so that the overall goal
of the article is achieved.

Reference

Ivanova, Iverina. 2023. Section-Type constraints on the choice of linguistic mechanisms in research articles: a corpus-based approach. Frankfurt a.M.: University Library.
DOI: 10.21248/gups.74388

The datasets for this thesis are available on:
DOI: 10.25716/gude.1jnt-32xh

On 25 October, Sascha Bargmann  gave a keynote talk via Zoom on “Complex Idiom Modification” at the International Conference on Advance in Education, Humanities and Language (ICEL) 2023 in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia.

Sascha’s talk was based on Bargmann, Gehrke & Richter (2021) and the introductory chapter of his dissertation (Bargmann 2019).

After an introduction to idioms in general and fully-idiomatic idioms in particular, he presented Ernst (1981)’s three types of idiom modification – internal, external, and conjunction – to then zoom into conjunction modification and provide detailed analyses of two of Ernst’s examples as well as two examples from the ENCOW16A (World Englishes) corpus (accessible via https://www.webcorpora.org).

The talk can be watched at: (Sascha’s talk is about minutes 3-40)
(slides)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQcvLRJ_IaI

References

Bargmann, Sascha. 2019. Chopping up idioms: Towards a combinatorial analysis. Frankfurt a.M.: University Library. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21248/gups.73455

Bargmann, Sascha, Berit Gehrke & Frank Richter. 2021. Modification of literal meanings in semantically non-decomposable idioms. In Berthold Crysmann & Manfred Sailer (eds.), One-to-many relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics, 245–279. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4729808

Ernst, Thomas. 1981. Grist for the linguistic mill: Idioms and ‘extra’ adjectives. Journal of Linguistic Research 1(3). 51–68

Links

• Corpus ENCOW 16A, accessible via https://www.webcorpora.org
• International Conference on Advance in Education, Humanities and Language (ICEL) 2023: https://snifib.ub.ac.id/icel
• Sascha Bargmann’s homepage: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/82889671/Sascha_Bargmann

Manfred Sailer and Nicolas Lamoure (Frankfurt a.M.) presented a paper on “Superlative 'ever' in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish" at the 30th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 2023.  Manfred and Nicolas look at the use of English ever in emphatic superlatives as in (1) in two Germanic and two Romance languages:

(1) a. nl: de beste opmerking ever 'the best comment ever'
       b. de: bestes Bild ever 'best picture ever'
       c. fr: la meilleure idée ever 'the best idea ever'
       d. es: la mejor foto ever 'the best picture ever'

They propose a three stage borrowing process:

• First, a constructional borrowing, which may include English adjectives and nouns.
• Second, a blend between the matrix language construction and the English construction, which still conserves ever as an English word.
• Third,  the word ever turns into a lexical borrowing and is, then, freely compatible with all constructions that allow matrix language emphatic superlative expressions such as German aller Zeiten 'of all times.'

The analysis is expressed within the modelling of social meaning proposed in Asadpour et al. 2022. It is a further develpment of Manfred and Nicolas' presentation at a DGfS workshop structural borrowing earlier this year.

Links

• Abstract of the paper: https://www.english-linguistics.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Sailer_Lamoure-Abstract.pdf
  (note: the analysis sketched in the abstract differs considerably from the one in the slides)
• Slides: https://www.english-linguistics.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/SailerLamoure_HPSG23_Slides.pdf
• HPSG 2023: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~fabiolah/hpsg23/index.html

References

Asadpour, Hiwa & Hassan, Shene & Sailer, Manfred. 2022. Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 6–26. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2022.1) (https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/898)