Linguists have always been at the forefront of the corpus revolution in the humanities. It still proves hard to bring together the interests of computationally oriented linguists with those of more theoretically oriented ones, though. We argue that progress can be made by applying quantitative corpus methods in the field of semantic micro-typology, in particular by exploiting the possibilities of translation corpora. To do so, we focus on one of the most challenging tense-aspect categories found across languages: the Perfect. Its use at the sentence and discourse level varies across languages, and it competes with past and present tenses. Instead of avoiding this variation, we embrace it to unveil the meaning of the Perfect, using a ‘smart’ integration of quantitative and qualitative methodology in a data intensive approach. Over the next couple of years, we aim to develop a micro-typology of the Have Perfect grounded in a technique we dub Translation Mining (Wälchli & Cysouw 2012), based on translation equivalences between English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish. The analysis has three key ingredients: (i) a semantic map of the sentence-level meanings of the Perfect, (ii) a semantic map of the discourse interaction usages of the Perfect, (iii) an integrated truth-conditional and inquisitive semantics of the Perfect. The project sets a gold standard for the integration of quantitative corpus methods in theoretical linguistics. It is further developed as a basis for new finer-grained analysis of L2 tense/aspect acquisition, to promote inquiry-based learning in the five school languages the project represents and to help translators by means of the development of an online course module and a translation software plugin (MIT license).
The project offers opportunities for internships and thesis research to BA/MA students of linguistics, artificial intelligence, translation, education and any of the language programmes (English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, possibly others). We hope to extend these opportunities to research on L2 acquisition in the nearby future. Feel free to send an e-mail to one of the project leaders if you are interested in joining our perfect investigations!
Our team is based at Utrecht University and currently consists of:
Our SALT 32 paper Perfect variations in dialogue: a parallel corpus approach has been published online.
Today, Jianan Liu and Bert Le Bruyn presented their joint Translation Mining work with Shravani Patil, Daria Seres and Olga Borik on reference in Hindi, Russian and Mandarin at Sinn und Bedeutung. You can find the slides here.
Our paper on Parallel Corpus Traditions has appeared in 'Languages' and is available @ doi:10.3390/languages7030176.
Bert Le Bruyn and Henriëtte de Swart will be teaching about cross-linguistic semantics and Translation Mining during the second week of ESSLLI. You can find the Dropbox of the course here. Please also check out Henriëtte's evening lecture during the first week 'From translation corpora to cross-linguistic semantics'!
Jianan Liu and Bert Le Bruyn have teamed up with Shravani Patil, Daria Seres and Olga Borik in a series of studies on reference across 'articleless' languages. First results to be presented @ Sinn und Bedeutung and Formal Description of Slavic Languages. Abstracts here and here.