Corpus, Colligation, Register Variation (AG 6)

We are organising a workshop under the auspices of the

31. Annual Meeting of the
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS)

Form and Function

Date: 4 – 6 March 2009   •   Venue: Universität Osnabrück

Call for papers

Register variation, i.e. functional linguistic variation according to situational context, has been the subject of numerous studies addressing a wide spectrum of features deemed to be characteristic of specific registers. Many register studies focus on single or relative small sets of texts instead of being based on studies of larger corpora. This limits the possibilities of systematically evaluating register features in larger and more diverse sets of registers and, thus, the wider applicability of the results. Furthermore, most registers are not reliably characterized by features that are exclusively found in a single register, but rather by sets of lexical and grammatical features that are principally found in any text, albeit to varying extent. It has been shown that methodologies based on qualitative as well as quantitative corpus studies are well suited to the study of registers from different perspectives (e.g. synchronic, diachronic, comparative, cross-linguistic etc.). Advances in corpus-based methodology in combination with the increasing availability of corpora and tools for their annotation and analysis at different levels of linguistic organization make more extensive and systematic register studies feasible. In particular, they enable the investigation of a more diverse set of types and combinations of register features that require qualitative and quantitative corpus analyses.
The main interest of this workshop is the exploration of the methodological possibilities and limitations of present-day corpus-based register studies with a focus on lexico-grammatical and grammatical register features. Central issues are lexical co-occurrence patterns such as collocations and other types of multi-word expressions and lexico-grammatical patterns such as colligations which are postulated to characteristically co-occur in individual registers.
For this workshop, we invite papers on synchronic and diachronic register studies with a focus on the following topic areas:

• lexical, grammatical and semantic analyses of colligation and collocation,
• methods in exploring register features,
• corpus compilation and annotation for register studies.

The focus of this workshop is going to be on methodology in corpus-based register studies, yet contributions on theoretical issues are also welcome.


Dates and Data:
Submission format: abstract of approximately 300 words length plus references

Deadline:  30 August 2008
Submit to: bartsch(at)linglit.tu-darmstadt.de

For further enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact us directly with any enquiries you may have. If you already know that you are planning to submit an abstract, we welcome early expressions of interest.

Looking forward to receiving your submission
Sabine Bartsch  &  Monica Holtz

Please download 

the Call for Papers here

The keynote speakers

We are happy to announce that the following two outstanding linguists are our keynote speakers for the workshop:

Geoff Thompson,
     University of Liverpool

Erich Steiner,
     Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken