Getting a quantitative grip on diachronic processes in morphosyntax

As part of the research forum, Dr. Freek Van de Velde (KU Leuven) will give a guest lecture on Monday, November 10, 2025, at 4 p.m (room ES 24, Johannisstraße 12-20). Anyone interested is cordially invited. The talk will be given in English. 

Towards the end of the previous century, diachronic linguistics enjoyed increasing popularity after decades of obscurity, especially in the field of morphosyntax, with landmark publications like Hopper & Traugott's textbook on grammaticalization (1993) and Harris & Campbell's textbook on diachronic syntax (1995) (to name just two examples). What was lacking at the time was the connection with the quantitative turn in linguistics. Some pioneering work in quantitative operationalization of grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994) notwithstanding, quantitative linguistics dealt primarily with relative frequencies. The present century has witnessed an explosion of quantitative corpus linguistics. While frequency-based metrics have continued to be the backbone of corpus linguistics, we are now in a position to achieve higher resolution in detecting trends in the changing morphosyntax of a language, as will be shown in this talk.

Computational methods in gender linguistic research: Distributional semantics and discriminative learning

As part of the research forum, Dr. Dominic Schmitz (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf) will give a guest lecture on Monday, December 1, 2025, at 4 p.m (room ES 24, Johannisstraße 12-20). Anyone interested is cordially invited. The talk will be given in English. 

Computational methods offer, alongside corpus-based and experimental approaches, an additional quantitative perspective for empirical research in gender linguistics. Accordingly, they have increasingly been employed in recent years to systematically investigate linguistic structures, meanings, and biases (e.g. Schmitz, 2024; Sökefeld & Amaral, 2025). This talk introduces two central domains within this methodological area: distributional semantics, which models word meaning using high-dimensional vectors (Boleda, 2020), and the discriminative lexicon model, which conceptualises language processing as a learning process linking form and meaning (Baayen et al., 2019). The two computational implementations of the discriminative approach – naive discriminative learning and linear discriminative learning (Baayen et al., 2011, 2019) – are discussed alongside selected techniques from distributional semantics. Drawing on concrete studies, the talk illustrates how these approaches can be used to model and theoretically interpret questions in gender linguistics on a data-driven basis

Names in Mind; Cognitive Onomastics

Im Rahmen des Forschungsforums wird Prof. Dr. Olena Karpenko (Odesa I. I. Mechnykov National University) am Montag, 30. Juni 2025, 16 Uhr, einen Gastvortrag via Zoom halten. Interessierte sind herzlich eingeladen!

The lecture introduces students to the cognitive foundations of proper names, focusing on their conceptualisation and categorisation within the mental lexicon. The lecture positions proper names as phenomena rooted in mental representations, highlighting the fundamentally cognitive nature of language.

Special attention is given to the organisation of the onymic component in human cognition and its role in linguistic production and interpretation. The real existence of language, including proper names, is limited to the mental lexicon of people. Since language exists in speakers' minds, only what is present in the mental lexicon can emerge into speech, whether oral or written. Thus, linguistic data drawn from texts and informant surveys are secondary to the cognitive realities
they represent.

What exists in lingua mentalis and how it exists there is the task of cognitive linguistics, concerning proper names – of cognitive onomastics. Proper names are explored not merely as linguistic units but as cognitive constructs within at least nine identifiable onymic frames. These frames serve as an organising mechanism within the mental lexicon, reflecting both individual and collective linguistic experience. An onymic frame is a structured cognitive schema within the
mental lexicon that organises proper name concepts by shared functions, referential domains, communicative roles. Unlike semantic frames, onymic frames are not built around typical event scenarios, but around name-related conceptualisations.