The doctoral program Empirical and Applied Linguistics organizes events on a regular basis. In addition to the guest lectures in the Research Forum, which are open to the public, we offer workshops for our doctoral students at least once a year, which serve to teach relevant working tools or to deepen methodological knowledge. Twice a year, the doctoral colloquium is held, in which doctoral students present and discuss their dissertation projects.
Every two years, the doctoral students organize a junior research conference on their own, the topic of which they are free to choose. They receive support within the framework of the workshop, which is accompanied by a mentor from among the teaching staff, usually the spokesperson of the doctoral program. The past conference was held under the title "Language and Power"
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.
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
