DDEL 18/19

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Digital Data in English Linguistics: Lexical and Functional Uses of Verb

Course description

This will be a highly research-oriented seminar that will allow the participants to get to know how to use corpus linguistic methods in semantic analysis to present their results in a student conference at the end of the semester.

Thematically, we will look at the wide range of uses attested in particular for high-frequency verbs in English. Many such verbs have both lexical and functional uses as illustrated in (1).

(1) a. Alex got some strawberries at the farmers' market.

b. Kim got involved in a discussion.
c. We should get to know each other much better.
d. The course got more and more interesting.
e. Sandy got fired.

We will extract corpus occurrences of individual verbs and try to model their various uses formally, focussing on the synchronic syntactic and semantic properties of the verbs.

There will be a parallel course at the University of Mainz. The Mainz course will look at the same phenomenon, but take a cognitive and diachronic perspective. We will have two joint compact days: a hands-on course on corpus linguistic methods and a final student conference.

The course will be structured as follows:

  • Phase 1, Theory: Participants will learn the theoretical background on lexical and functional uses of verbs.
  • Phase 2, Methodology: Participants will learn how to extract digital data for research in English linguistics (compact day), and produce short screenshot tutorials on how to use a corpus.
  • Phase 3, Research: Participants will get engaged in small research projects on individual verbs.
  • Phase 4, Presentation: Participants will present their results during a joined student conference.

Extra meetings (the workload for which will be compensated in the course of the semester):

  • 17.11.2018, 10-17.00: Corpus methods in linguistics (Mainz)
  • 16.2.2019, Student conference "REEL-Day (REsearch in English Linguistics)", Mainz

Prerequisites: - Introduction to linguistics and some introduction to semantics, ideally constraint-based semantics

Registration: By e-mail to the lecturer: sailer@em.uni-frankfurt.de