Call for Papers

The Institute for the German Language in Mannheim is pleased to announce the 6th international conference Grammar and Corpora. The conference will take place in Mannheim, Germany, on 9-11 November 2016.

In recent years, the availability of large annotated and searchable corpora, together with a new interest in the empirical foundation and validation of linguistic theory and description has sparked a surge of novel and interesting work using corpus methods to study the grammar of natural languages. However, a look at relevant current research on the grammar of German, English, or the Romance and Slavic languages reveals a variety of different theoretical approaches and empirical foci which can be traced back to different philological and linguistic traditions. Still, this state of affairs should not be seen as an obstacle but arguably provides an ideal basis for a fruitful exchange of ideas between different research paradigms.

In addition to deepening our knowledge and understanding of individual languages, corpus-oriented work on grammar has wider implications that concern methodological as well as theoretical aspects. Relevant topics and research questions concern e.g. annotation schemata for (larger) syntactic units and syntactic relations, the increased use of (advanced) statistical methods and models in linguistics, the relation and boundary between grammar and discourse, and more generally the interface between corpus linguistics and linguistic theory.

We welcome submissions that explore the use of corpus methods in the description and theoretical analysis of the grammar of natural languages. Focal areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Corpus-based studies on the grammar of Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages:
   
   
   • The use of (large) corpora in the description of patterns of grammar from both a language-specific and a contrastive/cross-linguistic perspective
   • The identification and formal modelling of (different types of) synchronic linguistic variation using corpus methods
   • New insights into the connection between linguistic variation and change made available by inspecting “language change in progress” in large corpora
   • The use of advanced corpus-linguistic and statistical methods in historical linguistics as a means to compensate for the relative scarcity of data
     
   
   
2. Theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to corpus-oriented research on grammar:
   
   
   • Tools, methods and techniques in corpus assembly, annotation and analysis
   • The interaction between corpus linguistics and computational linguistics
   • The interaction between corpus linguistics and linguistic theory
   • The use of statistical and quantitative methods in detecting patterns of grammar
   • The impact of corpus-based vs. corpus-driven approaches on our view/understanding of grammar

A subset of these issues will be the focus of several invited keynotes, a number of tutorials on applied corpus linguistic, statistical and computational tools and techniques, and of a poster session. Conference languages are English and German.