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:
The student research page has been updated with two bachelor theses on the Perfect in Swedish.
Our paper titled The perfect in dialogue is now in press with Linguistics in the Netherlands. You can find an early preprint here.
In other news, the Dutch magazine VakTaal featured a short article on using translations of Harry Potter to discover variation in tense use across languages. The text will soon be posted here.
Next week, António Leal and Purificação Silvano from Universidade do Porto will visit our team for two days. They will share their work on participial clauses in Portuguese on 25 June 2019, 14.00 to 15.00. All are welcome. More info (location and abstract) here.
Jos Tellings gave a talk at SALT29 at UCLA, titled When-questions and tense in Inquisitive Semantics. Handout here.
On April 5, Martijn van der Klis was invited to give a talk at the CLARIAH Toogdag on his (very positive!) experiences with the Dutch research infrastructure for linguistics. He linked his experiences to his recent research on since-adverbials. You can find his talk here.