Volume 5, Issue 2

Mixing dependency lengths from sequences of different length is a common practice in language research. However, the empirical distribution of dependency lengths of sentences of the same length differs from that of sentences of varying length. The distribution of dependency lengths depends on sentence length for real sentences and also under the null hypothesis that dependencies connect vertices located in random positions of the sequence. This suggests that certain results, such as the distribution of syntactic dependency lengths mixing dependencies from sentences of varying length, could be a mere consequence of that mixing. Furthermore, differences in the global averages of dependency length (mixing lengths from sentences of varying length) for two different languages do not simply imply a priori that one language optimizes dependency lengths better than the other because those differences could be due to differences in the distribution of sentence lengths and other factors.

Working out the Old Libyco-Berber (LB) writings found on the Canary Islands (CI) is a long and painstaking task. Scholars have struggled with their provenance, meaning(s), common and different features with North African cognates, scribal communities, and the assumed time-span. In this review-paper, laying theoretical guiding lines for the understanding of the successive patterns and signs is considered an advantage. Nonetheless, high-staked claims as for the origin and the decipherment of the inscriptions are eluded, with plausible scenarios being offered. While corpus enlargement and qualitative and quantitative methods stand for the correct pursuit of the Libyco-Berber scholarship, multi-disciplinary and coordinated research should gain momentum too.

As texts about sound symbolism are currently missing, this article wants to inspire new interest in this topic. To begin with, earlier studies are surveyed which dealt directly with sound symbolism in various empiric ways. Next, fields of research are depicted which presently touch upon sound symbolism, such as language evolution, synesthesia, ideophones, names in literature and brand names. It will be argued that research in sound symbolism proper could help to support and even put into perspective some quite hasty results in neighbouring disciplines.

In the present paper, the introductions of articles from the academic medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt are analyzed both on the macro- as well as microstructural levels. The corpus comprises four articles. The methodology used is a top down model especially developed for a combined macro- and microstructural analysis. The results presented here are the first ones to emerge from a larger interdisciplinary corpus study of article introductions.

The paper discusses methods of historical semantics (word semantics and conceptual semantics). The example of Max Weber's concept ‹Geist› will show means by which the linguistic description of complex semantic phenomena (transcending the level of single words) can be captured and described. Based on the original works of Max Weber, the concept ‹Geist› will be approached in three steps: investigation of the single word (the lexeme) Geist , investigation of the word formation field { geist } and investigation of the lexical field G eist (the latter, for reasons of size, must be limited to several examples). A summary of the results and an outlook on possible extensions of the question will conclude the contribution.