Projekt

This project investigates the relative frequencies of nouns, verbs, and pronouns in spoken language corpora of Baure, Bora, Chintang, Even, N|uu, Sakha, Sri Lanka Malay, and English. We focus on two questions: (1) Why do languages vary so drastically in the overall ratio of nouns and pronouns per verb, ranging from roughly 1:1 (Chintang) to roughly 2:1 (Sri Lanka Malay)? Here we investigate typological factors such as argument indexing on verbs, which may make the overt realization of arguments as nouns or pronouns unnecessary. (2) Why are there regular peaks of heavy noun use as narrative texts unfold roughly every 10-15 clauses? Do these peaks reflect universal cognitive constraints which necessitate the re-introduction of discourse participants by full lexical nouns after their activation has decayed? Along with this, we investigate the role of the speakers' and listeners' mutual acquaintance and that of text genres, testing whether formal genres are universally 'nouny'. We apply computational methods for quantitative analyses of annotated textual data, mostly produced by DoBeS projects.

• Dr. Frank Seifart

  University of Amsterdam (UvA)
  Faculty of Humanities
  Capaciteitsgroep Taalwetenschap
  Amsterdam
  Niederlande
  

• Prof. Dr. Roland Meyer

  Humboldt-Universität Berlin
  Philosophische Fakultät II
  Institut für Slawistik
  Berlin
  

• Dr. Sebastian Nordhoff

  Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre
  Anthropologie
  Department of Linguistics
  Leipzig
  

• Dr. Dr. Brigitte Pakendorf

  Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre
  Anthropologie
  Unabhängige Nachwuchsgruppe für Vergleichende
  Populationslinguistik
  Leipzig
  

• Hans-Jörg Bibiko

  Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre
  Anthropologie
  Linguistik
  Leipzig
  

• Dr. Swintha Danielsen

  Universität Leipzig
  Philologische Fakultät
  Institut für Linguistik
  Leipzig
  

• Prof. Dr. Alena Witzlack-Makarevich

  Universität Kiel
  Institut für Skandinavistik, Frisistik und
  Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ISFAS)
  Fachrichtung Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Kiel
  

• Taras Zakharko

  Universität Zürich
  Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Zürich
  Schweiz
  

• Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel

  Universität Zürich
  Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Zürich
  Schweiz