Forschung

Organizers

Principal organizers were Annette Endruschat of the Institut für Romanistik and Johannes Helmbrecht, Chair of General and Comparative Linguistics.

Invited speakers

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Mosel (University of Kiel)
Dr. Roland Meyer (University of Regensburg)

There was an international workshop "Language Documentation Meets Corpus Linguistics: how to exploit DOBES corpora for descriptive linguistics and language typology?" at the University of Regensburg, September 27-28, 2011.

The major goal of this workshop was to bring together documentary linguists and corpus linguists in order to explore and discover ways how DOBES corpora – and there are more than 50 digital corpora in the archive of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nimegen by now - can be automatically or semi-automatically exploited for descriptive linguistics and language typology?"

The workshop topic is a hot topic in the linguistic community – in particular among the documentary linguists who are also interested in descriptive linguistics and typology. During the last 10 years the Volkswagen Foundation has funded more than 50 documentation projects all over the world and other comparable funding initiatives e.g. in Great Britain and the US have funded large and smaller sized documentation projects as well. The results of these projects are large and digitally available data repositories containing audio and video recordings, transcribed and glossed text collections of all kinds of text genres and text types, and lexical data bases. Most of the linguists who were involved in the collection of these data are not only interested in the data collection itself, but also in language description or comparative linguistics (typology and historical linguistics). The question then arises how these corpora can be used in linguistic research.

The workshop "Language Documentation Meets Corpus Linguistics – how to exploit DOBES corpora for descriptive linguistics (and language typology?)"  addressed the following questions:

• How should a corpus look like? Principles and problems  of the creation of a representative text corpus
• What kinds of information should be included in the corpus: the question of annotations
• What kinds of searches does a descriptive linguist need?  Search procedures and possibilities
• Technical questions: how to apply corpus linguistic methods on DOBES corpora
• How reliable and significant are concordances of DOBES corpora – the unpleasant question of statistics in linguistics
• The linking of the descriptive grammar with the text corpus

Download Workshop Program (PDF/64kB)