Recent studies in the usage based paradigm (e.g. Bybee 2006, 2010, Gries/Divjak 2012) show, that the frequency of a linguistic phenomenon in production and perception is a mayor factor for the entrenchment of linguistic structures as mental representations. Nevertheless, the question on what role ...

My dissertation draws on a corpus of bilingual speech which I recorded amongst Russian-speaking communities in Germany. In code-mixing, stems from language A with affixes from language B alternate with fully-fledged constituents of language A used in the morphosyntactic context ...

The project aims at modelling the factor "frequency" in language change if the change is seen as a change in the cognitive representation of a linguistic form.
The current restructuring of the English modal system has long been noted as an ongoing language change process. Previous work ...

Prior research in the domain of input enhancement has shown that exposing second language learners not only to natural input, but also to pedagogically enriched input (e.g., in so-called input floods) is often not enough to trigger incidental learning. The PhD thesis proposes that learners’ ...

How does the frequency of word-strings influence sentence processing and interpretation? In the sentence "Der Polizist, dem die Kollegin überrascht den Jungen zeigte, war außer sich vor Freude." ( The policeman, that_DAT the colleague_NOM surprisedly/surprised the boy_AKK showed, was very happy / ...

The central thesis of my dissertation is that the distinction between non-salient and salient dialectal features lies in their negative frequency. To put it simply, the less probable a speech string containing a feature is, the more conspicuous it becomes. An example could be definite article ...

This PhD thesis describes the change in the system of auxiliary selection in Spanish. Until the end of the 17th century haber ('have') + participle replaced ser ('be') + participle in intransitive past contexts. In a first step I demonstrate that the two constructions do not have the same function ...

This book represents a contribution to the study of phonetic reduction. It presents the first quantitative investigation of acoustic-phonetic reduction in Icelandic and deals with the reduction patterns of a class of Icelandic adverbs ending in the suffix ?lega. Three questions are asked: Which ...

As we speak, we mostly don't generate novel sentences from scratch. Instead, we often refer back to already holistically stored sequences. However, what constitutes such sequences is highly debated. An investigation into the occurrence of hesitations can offer some insight into the way language is ...

My study proposes an empirical corpus-based analysis of noun+noun constructions in contemporary written Romanian, born out of a mixture of socio-cultural phenomena during the past decades and having tremendous implications on the understanding of language change and cultural kinship. This study is ...