General Linguistics Colloquium (WiSe 2026/2017)

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Linguistic diversity is a multidimensional phenomenon that can be studied across and within languages, as well as at different levels of linguistic structure. The presentation will review the main approaches to measuring linguistic diversity, with particular emphasis on the methodological considerations involved.
The discussion will focus on three complementary dimensions of diversity: a) variety i.e. the number of linguistic categories; b) balance i.e. their relative distribution, and; c) disparity i.e. the degree of difference between them. This framework offers a way to compare and integrate different approaches, including measures of language richness and evenness, entropy-based indices, linguistic distance, typological and phylogenetic methods and corpus-based measures.
The presentation will examine how quantitative measures, such as Shannon entropy and Hill numbers, extend simple language counts by accounting for differences in speaker populations. It will also consider how dependency-parsed corpora can be used to study diversity at the lexical, morphological and syntactic levels.
Finally, the talk will address key methodological challenges, including the distinction between languages and dialects, the reliability of speaker statistics, the treatment of multilingualism, the effects of corpus size, the selection of linguistic features and distance measures and the lack of consistency in the terminology and metrics used to quantify linguistic diversity.

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German modal particles are typically described as prosodically weak, yet doch can show noticeable prominence in spontaneous speech. This talk asks whether such variation is incidental or whether it reflects differences in what a doch-utterance is doing in discourse. Focusing on the relation between prosodic prominence and discourse function, the analysis points to a picture that is more systematic and at the same time more complex than it might initially appear. The talk thus explores what prosody can reveal about the pragmatic role of doch in interaction.

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no talk. Students are welcome to participate to the accreditation of the study programs.

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