Linguistic data is inherently multidimensional, with complex interactions between
different linguistic features and structures being the norm rather than the
exception. Historical linguistic change typically is the result of such complex interactions.
The core remit of historical linguistic work is to identify a language change
and to understand how different relevant factors have interacted with each other
across time to effectuate the change.
At the end of January, Miriam Butt, Melanie Herschel, and Christin Schätzle (members of projects D02 and D03 of the SFB/Transregio 161) organized a workshop on Data Provenance and Annotation in Computational Linguistics in Prague, co-located with the Treebanks and Lingustic Theory (TLT16) conference.
This year, the Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa) took place from 22-24th May in Gothenburg, Sweden. The 21st edition of NoDaLiDa was also the 40th anniversary of the conference which was celebrated by 184 participants from all over the world.
I am working on the diachrony of case and word order in Indo-European languages. More precisely, I am conducting a corpus linguistic and visual analytic study of dative subjects in Icelandic. During my work I noticed, that I need more knowledge about Icelandic in order to fully understand and cope with the erroneous annotations in Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus and to improve the qualitative part of the data analysis. In August I attended a three weeks Icelandic summer school, including an intensive language course at the University of the Westfjords in Ísafjörður, Iceland.
On the 23rd of June, Paul Kiparsky, professor of linguistics at Stanford University and honorary doctor of the Department of Linguistics of the University of Konstanz, gave a talk at the 50th anniversary workshop of the lingustic department in Konstanz in which he talked about “The Konstanz Approach: An Appreciation and an Emulation”.