Abstracts

Dieter Gunkel: Tone-melody matching in ancient Greek music

See here.

Emanuela Sanfelici: The syntax of historical languages through parsed corpora

In this talk I will demonstrate that syntactically annotated corpora are essential tools to understand the syntax of historical languages. The empirical testing ground is provided by the syntax of Old Italian nominal phrases and the syntactically annotated corpus of Old Italian SYNOI (still under construction). The talk will consist of two parts.

I will first provide a practical demonstration of how parsed corpora can be used to tackle syntactic questions related to historical languages. The focus will lie on case resolution phenomena in free relative clauses in Old Italian. I will show that the phenomenon is strictly dependent on a more general property of the nominal phrase (the parameter WEAK PERSON, Longobardi 2008) which is also responsible for the presence/absence of the definite article with nominal arguments headed by kind names. Moreover, I will show that there are two competing grammars in Old Italian which represent different stages.

The final part of the talk will discuss a desirable extension of the use of corpora on historical languages, namely the use of historical parsed corpora to solve the logical problem of language acquisition, as recently suggested in the project PARTHICO (Sanfelici et al. 2023). A central question in linguistics is to explain the tension between the universal nature of the human language faculty and the observed diversity of its empirical instantiations. Various proposals try to solve this tension relying on the notion of parameters, i.e. binary options allowing for cross-linguistic structural variation (Chomsky 1981, 2005; Roberts 2007; Biberauer 2019). The implementation of parameter theories incurs into two major problems: they usually resort to ungrammaticality judgments, a kind of evidence language acquirers do not have access to, and they leave unexplored the procedure behind parameter setting. We can embrace these challenges by measuring the power of parametric models through an innovative method, i.e. the application of parameter theories to historical corpora, which qualify as an ideal testing ground, since they contain continuous texts which can be taken as a proxy for the primary linguistic data used by language acquirers. In so doing, we will be able to validate a parametric setting procedure on positive evidence, which will be able to bridge the gap between descriptive and explanatory adequacy.

Tara Andrews: Algorithms for the manipulation and transformation of text variant graphs

While text variant graphs are increasingly frequently used for the visualization of a text transmitted in multiple versions, the graph is also a very appropriate model for the querying and transformation of such a text in the course of producing a critical edition. This article describes the algorithms used in the StemmaREST repository for variant text traditions, and specifically the use of reading relations to infer additional relations and to create a normalised projection of a graph, which in turn helps the editor to establish a canonical text.

Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya: What if we were to combine all dictionaries into one? The concept of the meta-dictionary based on TEI Lex-0
In my presentation I will introduce the concept of the "meta-dictionary", which aims to capture diverse information from various lexicographical sources. The lexical descriptions from the dictionaries are to be transferred into a machine-readable TEI format and merged into an xml schema. I will discuss various problems that arise at different levels, from conceptual decisions (such as homonymy, polisemy, paradigm variations, sense differentiation)  to markup adjustments.

Jeremy Bradley & Veronika Milanova: OPED (Open Pashto-English Dictionary): Repurposing and Adapting Wheels
Pashto, the second-most widely spoken Iranian language with ~45 million total native speakers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is by no means an obscure language. Its accessibility to scholarly and lay communities is, however, not commensurate with its linguistic and geopolitical importance. Resources that exist were generally created for anachronistic purposes, do not satisfy the needs of modern user bases, and are insufficiently accessible.
OPED aims to tackle these challenges head-on by creating a sustainable, adaptable, openly accessible, open-source, TEI Lex-0 conform online dictionary, designed with the wishes and requirements of the myriad user groups (native speakers, foreign scholars, computational linguists, etc.) in eye. This talk will address challenges encountered in the process when working with an under-resourced language and applying approaches and tools to a language (that uses the right-to-left Arabic script and uses several graphemes not used in Arabic and/or Persian) for which they were not designed. Special attention will be paid to the balance between making existing tools work in spite of their design limitations, and on occasion having to reinvent a wheel as none of the existing ones, in the circumstances faced at a time, will roll.

Timo Frühwirth & Sandra Mayer: Encoding Semantics, Doubt, and Interpretation in Scholarly Digital Editing

The British-American poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) was one of the most influential 20th-century writers in the English language. For the last fifteen years of his life, Auden divided his time between the US and Austria, where he wrote most of his late poetry. However, while Auden’s English and American periods have been intensively researched, the poet’s life and work in Austria are still under-investigated and have attracted scholarly attention only since the early 2000s. It is in the emerging field of Austrian Auden Studies that the Auden Musulin Papers (AMP) project (ACDH-CH, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021-2024) is situated: an open-access scholarly digital edition that makes available Auden’s ‘working correspondence’ to Welsh-Austrian writer Stella Musulin. An FWF-funded follow-up project, Auden in Austria Digital (AAD, 2024-2027), will make all Auden materials in Austrian archives openly accessible to create a unique and comprehensive resource for studying the poet’s Austrian period 1958-1973.

In this presentation, we would like to offer an insight into our approach with regard to semantic data modeling. The AMP and AAD editions of literary papers, correspondence, legal documents, etc. aim to meet the highest standards of textual scholarship. At the same time, these materials are highly relevant as sources of biographical data as well as historical information with regard to political, social, legal, and cultural discourses in 1960s/1970s Austria. Following an ‘assertive edition’ model of scholarly digital editing (Vogeler: 2019, 2021), we seek to balance the data needs of historically-oriented research (extractable structured data, processable through databases) and the requirements of textual scholarship. In addition, we are particularly concerned with representing interpretation and uncertainty both on the level of user interface as well as on that of formal data modeling. On the one hand, we seek to tackle aspects of uncertainty in a productive manner that neither negates doubt nor leaves it unrepresented. On the other hand, scholarly processes of interpretation will be rendered explicit, transparent, machine-readable, and reusable.

Stefan Hagel: Digitally understanding ancient doublepipes
In spite of a small library of ancient Greek and Latin musical writings, philology can take us only that far in understanding their musical implications, mostly due to a level of abstraction that is already present in the earliest extant texts from the fourth century BCE. Music-archaeological methods can take us a step
further. I will talk about a digital method to unravel the musical secrets of wind-instrument finds and some surprises its latest applications have had in store.

Alexandra N. Lenz: 8 years of SFB 'German in Austria' - Digital perspectives
The lecture will present and reflect on the activities and outputs of the SFB 'German in Austria. Variation - Contact - Perception'. One focus will be on the digital agendas of the subprojects and their outputs. In particular, the corpus of spoken language, which has been built up and expanded over the last 8 years, will be presented on the possibilities that the corpus opens up for future linguistic research (and beyond)."

Sophia Seereiner, Lisa Krammer, Elissa Pustka & Barbara Soukup: VisibLL – high schoolers explore Vienna’s multilingual linguistic landscape with the Lingscape app

This talk reports on a central part of the currently ongoing project ‘VisibLL – High school students explore the (in)visible multilingualism of the Viennese Linguistic Landscape’ (2022–2025), funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research under the ‘Sparkling Science 2.0’ scheme, which promotes citizen science (CS) in school contexts.

One of the main project activities was the documentation and annotation of signs containing ‘non-German’ languages in the Viennese linguistic landscape (LL) by high school students using the smartphone app Lingscape. On the scientific level, the activity served to generate a digital corpus of language-coded LL items filtered through the perceptual lens of non-linguists, with a view to exploring language categorisation and contact phenomena. On the didactic level, the goals included fostering the students’ digital competence, training them in good scientific practice and raising their awareness of multilingualism in public space as a reflection and (re)negotiation of social group dynamics, representation and power.

The talk will provide an overview of the project VisibLL and present some preliminary results regarding the amount and distribution of languages found in the LL before discussing the potential and challenges of creating, annotating and analysing a digital corpus with students as citizen scientists.