© Universität Bielefeld
Area A: Linguistic creativity and the sign: productivity, variability, originality
A01: Creativity in (morpho)syntactic variation: The role of analogy
PIs: Dr. András Bárány/ Prof. Dr. Jutta M. Hartmann
A01 investigates the role of analogy in the formation of novel, creative morphological forms and syntactic structures both within and across languages. In particular, the project hypothesises that the existence of a grammatical structure can lead to novel, structurally similar expressions which are well-formed in a specific context, even though they are not accepted as grammatical by the speech community. We investigate this hypothesis experimentally for long-distance agreement in Hungarian, as well as embedded clauses in German and other languages.
Open Positions:
- Profile PhD position 1 (65%): The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field with a focus on (morpho-)syntax, ideally with a background in Hungarian.
Details project A01 including open position (.pdf)
A02: Creating novel phonetic representations across varying communication settings
PIs: Prof. Dr. Joana Cholin/ Prof. Dr. Petra Wagner/ Prof. Dr. Sina Zarrieß
In speech, deviations from canonical realisations of phonemes, syllables or larger units are very common. A02 aims to understand the creative flexibility of the processes involved in such productions via experimental production studies and psycholinguistic and computational modelling. We will investigate whether and how creatively constructed phonetic forms can be selectively elicited and modelled in different interactive and linguistic contexts, testing hypotheses of the dual-route account of phonetic encoding. The project also rests on the hypothesis that the planning of smooth speech output can only be achieved through close interaction between abstract linguistic and concrete motor planning.
A03: The creative listener: Interpretation at the interface of prosody, syntax and information structure
PIs: Prof. Dr. Jutta Hartmann/ Dr. Farhat Jabeen/ Prof. Dr. Petra Wagner
A03 is concerned with the creative interpretation of utterances where the information structure and/or prosody of an utterance do not match a given context. The main question is how and under what circumstances such mismatches are taken to be meaningful, such that they give rise to creative enrichment of meaning by the listeners based on formal markings of focus (prosodic or syntactic). A03 concentrates on creative meaning adjustments and inferences based on implicit focus alternatives. We investigate four languages (German, English, Hungarian, Urdu), which differ in their formal markings of focus providing a cross-linguistic perspective on creative meaning enrichment.
A04: Empirical profiles of grammatical creativity
PIs: Dr. Jana Häussler/ Prof. Dr. Ralf Vogel
A04 examines grammatical creativity, where speakers exploit their linguistic competence to create a new or modified grammatical unit that (i) fills a grammatical gap, (ii) resolves a grammatical conflict, (iii) expands the domain of use of a conventionalised construction or (iv) serves a specific communicative purpose. We will collect measures such as frequency, acceptability and reading times to investigate whether these classes of grammatical creativity have their own empirical characteristics, distinguishing them from each other and as a group from marked constructions. We will explore properties and the extent of the range of creative options in the domain of morphosyntax.
A05: Contextualised metrics of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary text
PIs: Prof. Dr. Berenike Herrmann/ Prof. Dr. Sina Zarrieß
In this interdisciplinary project falling between linguistics and literary studies, we will investigate the extent to which linguistic creativity can be measured across literary and non-literary genres with quantitative, corpus-based methods. We ask how the originality and success of linguistic signs vary depending on textual cues and are mediated by a spectrum of popular and artistic genre contexts such as travel blogs, popular fiction and literary novels. Focusing on the ubiquitous thematic domain of descriptions of spatial entities across all genres, we aim to develop data-driven metrics and models that automatically identify creative signs at sentence, paragraph and text level.
A06: Rise and restriction of creative language use. Unsuccessful creativity in German and Romance
PIs: Prof. Dr. Tanja Ackermann/ Prof. Dr. Barbara Job/ Dr. Said Sahel
A06 takes a cross-linguistic perspective to study the success and failure of creative language use on the collective level, focusing on Romance and German periphrastic verbal constructions propagated within a limited period and restricted to certain discursive and/or social contexts. We aim to thoroughly analyse the forms, the direct co-text (co-occurrence) and the wider context (genres and socio-pragmatic conditions) of these constructions to identify the mechanisms that underlie linguistic invention and the failure of creative language use in language change. Our methodology combines quantitative and qualitative corpus analyses using existing historical corpora of German and Romance.