Blog

Our advisory board member Nikolaus Himmelmann, who’s also a founding father of Documentary Linguistics and pioneer of corpus-based prosodic typology, will give a presentation on “Universals of Language 3.0” at Abralin ao vivo on Wednesday 12.01.2022, 5:00 PM (UTC) / 6:00 PM (a recording of the talk will also be available anytime after that on the website). Highly recommended! https://aovivo.abralin.org/lives/nikolaus-p-himmelmann/

Congratulations to DoReCo PostDoc Ludger Paschen for the appointment of a six-months replacement professorship in Slavic linguistics at University of Potsdam. Lots of success there! We will dearly miss him until his return to DoReCo in March 2022.

Matthew Stave’s presentation on morphological typology was awarded the prestigious award for the best presentation by a PostDoc at this year’s Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) conference. The paper analyses 19 DoReCo corpora testing correlations between morphological characteristics associated with ‘agglutinating’ vs. ‘inflecting’ languages. Stay tuned for the write-up of this study!

Matthew Stave, Kilu von Prince & Frank Seifart. 2021. A usage-based approach to morphological typology. Paper presented at the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) 2021. Workshop 14: Integrating sociolinguistics and typological perspectives on language variation, 30 August – 3 September 2021, online.

Corpus-based measures taken on 21 DoReCo data sets shed new light on an old puzzle: How are phonological and morphological complexity related? It turns out there is a positive typological correlation, specifically between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis, even if looking separately at nouns vs. verbs, and word-initial vs. word-final complexity. Why? Read all about it in Easterday, Stave, Allassonnière-Tang & Seifart’s newest Frontiers paper at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638659

We finalized processing of 17 languages and analyzed these regarding final lengthening. Results were presented at three conferences: the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production (poster), the 18th Old World Conference on Phonology (abstract), and the 43rd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) (workshop program). Thanks to the audiences for feedback! Here’s a snapshot of some of the results:

Next week DoReCo PI Frank Seifart delivers a lecture in Melbourne (well, virtually) on studying speech rate cross-linguistically. Join in and find out how we build the DoReCo database and how we exploit it: http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/news-and-media/events/article/?id=um-coedl-zoom-seminar-studying-speech-rate-cross-linguistically-frank-seifart-14-aug

It’s official: (Former) DoReCo project member Shelece Easterday will be
assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i. Congratulations,
Shelece! We’re looking forward to cooperating with you at U Hawai’i on
corpus-based, cross-linguistic studies on, e.g., phonological complexity.

More research leading up to DoReCo in press now: Are utterance-final words pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial ones across diverse languages? Yes, results from 10 language documentation corpora indicate, and sometimes even penultimate words. Read all about it at http://doreco.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/SeifartEtAl_FinalLengthening.pdf

What makes speakers of diverse languages pronounce a word more quickly vs. more slowly? Research leading up to DoReCo investigated the effects of word frequency, complexity, position, and part of speech on word durations, comparing ten language documentation corpora. Read the full story at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24926

Early into the second project year, we have now received data sets from more than 50 languages (see http://doreco.info/languages/). These data sets are currently at various stages of processing, but we have already fully processed and created alignments at the word and segment levels for the following five languages: Arapaho, Kamas, Svan, Urum, and Yongning Na. As the number of fully processed corpora grows, several exciting phonetic and morphological studies are already on their way, building on the research ideas described in http://doreco.info/project/. Stay tuned for more info!