WiSe24/25: Digital Data in English Linguistics

Digital Data in English Linguistics: Profiling Negative Polarity Items

Course information

Wednesday 8:15-9:45 a.m.
IG 3.201, and on zoom

Lecturers

Manfred Sailer (Frankfurt a.M.)
E. David Martínez García (Nicosia)

Course description

In this seminar, students will work on small research projects based on corpus data. The results of these projects will be presented in a student workshop.

In their projects, the participants will look at Negative Polarity Items (NPI). NPIs are expressions such as ever or lift a finger that usually only occur in negated sentences. While native speakers have relatively reliable intuitions on the distribution of these items, their distribution is usually not well documented in dictionaries, grammars, and largely ignored in second-language teaching.

The focus of the course is two-fold: (i) We will study recent approaches to the phenomenon. (ii) Will get acquainted with corpus linguistic methods to get a better understanding of the data. The participants will work in groups to investigate individual NPIs and their occurrence patterns and present their results in class and at a student workshop Saturday, 8.2.2025, organized jointly with colleagues from Mainz. Participation at the student workshop is an obligatory course requirement.