Skip to main content
European Commission logo
Deutsch Deutsch
CORDIS - Forschungsergebnisse der EU
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary

Productive Signs. A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Evolutionary, Typological, and Cognitive Dimensions of Word Families

Projektbeschreibung

Verständnis von Wortfamilien durch Computermodellierung

Wörter, die innerhalb derselben Sprache oder über Sprachen hinweg denselben Ursprung teilen, werden als Wortfamilien bezeichnet. Durch die Dynamik des Sprachgebrauchs interagieren diese Familien miteinander und entwickeln sich weiter. Diese Tatsache wird jedoch in den Sprachwissenschaften meist außer Acht gelassen. Das EU-finanzierte Projekt ProduSemy wird Computermodelle entwickeln, um die Daten zu Wortfamilien über Sprachen hinweg zu vereinheitlichen. Das Modell wird auf Daten der historischen, typologischen und kognitiven Linguistik angewendet werden und dazu beitragen, das Wissen über die zahlreichen Wege, wie Wortfamilien sich zusammensetzen und strukturiert sind, in diesen Disziplinen zu vertiefen. Auf diese Weise wird das Projekt die Integration von Methoden und Daten in die Linguistik, die Kognitionswissenschaft und die Psychologie voranbringen.

Ziel

All human languages have simple and complex words. Simple words refer to meanings regardless of their form, while complex words are formed from other words, and their formation can be semantically motivated. Since words can share lexical material, we can group them into families. Word families can vary greatly in size, ranging from small ones – comprising only a few members –, to large ones – spanning several hundred words –, but it is still unclear why some words are more productive than others in forming new words. Lexical compositionality has received some attention in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and cognitive linguistics, but so far studies have mostly concentrated on the morphological complexity of individual words and languages, while the fact that words form families which interact during language change and language use has been typically ignored. As a result, many questions regarding word family formation remain unresolved, and we do not know 1) how word families evolve along language phylogenies, 2) which semantic processes underlying word family formation are universal, and 3) to what extent human cognition influences the productivity of lexical roots to form families. The project will tackle these three target questions by unifying evolutionary, typological, and cognitive insights into lexical compositionality. Building on a computer-assisted framework that reconciles classical and computational approaches in historical linguistics and linguistic typology, the project will design new models to standardize cross-linguistic data on word families, apply them to integrate data from historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and cognitive linguistics, and develop new methods for the computer-assisted inference of word families, their underlying motivation patterns, and their evolutionary histories in large datasets. In this way, the project will deepen the integration of cross-linguistic studies in cognitive and psychological sciences.

Programm/Programme

Gastgebende Einrichtung

UNIVERSITAT PASSAU
Netto-EU-Beitrag
€ 2 000 000,00
Adresse
INNSTRASSE 41
94032 Passau
Deutschland

Auf der Karte ansehen

Region
Bayern Niederbayern Passau, Kreisfreie Stadt
Aktivitätstyp
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Gesamtkosten
€ 2 000 000,00

Begünstigte (2)