10/25/2021

Antrittsvorlesung:Investigating language variation and change in English with computational modeling

PD Dr. Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb presents how we can detect and analyze variation with data-driven methods answering questions such as how does scientific language change over time and possibly become more optimal for scientific communication, how do gender and social class differences impact language use within formal vs. informal contexts or do literary research articles experience an effect of “scientization” over time, e.g. by becoming more standardized.

Possible effects of selected linguistic choices on language use are traced at the level of local linguistic context. In accordance with communicative accounts -- stating that variation helps to modulate the information content of linguistic units achieving optimization effects for efficient communication (Jaeger and Levy, 2007; Piantadosi et al., 2011) -- we focus on tracing effects of variation that modulate the information content transmitted.

Die Veranstaltung findet online via Teams  ab 16 Uhr s.t. statt.