Author Archives: Sebastian Nordhoff

2700+ book downloads in two weeks: Interview with Roland Schäfer

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Roland Schäfer

Roland, congratulations to your text book Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen which got more than 2,700 downloads within the two weeks following publication and now leads the list of our most downloaded books.

Thanks a lot for publishing the book.

What is your textbook about? Are there not enough introductory textbooks around?

The book is about the basic facts of German grammar: surely not everything, but a large portion of what students of German linguistics should know about German grammar. At the same time, it introduces students to the standard methods used by linguists (at least traditionally) to dissect a language, i.e., mostly distributional analyses in phonology, morphology, syntax, and graphemics. No matter which theories or methods you’re going to use later, it’s hard to get by without knowing your basic categories…

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Axes of Open Review

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At Language Science Press, we are experimenting with Open Review. While investigating how we could implement an Open Review system, we discovered that there are actually very different things which could be called Open Review, and even in a small team, opinions differ as to what is the real thing.

 

Axes

We have established the following dimensions:

open not open
Selection process anyone can comment a restricted class of people can comment
Transparency the names of the reviewers are revealed the names of the reviewers remain anonymous
Online the reviews are created on the Internet the reviews are created offline (e.g. pdf comments in a file)

The  following criteria do not apply to openness, but are nevertheless relevant:

Time final publication will incorporate comments publication is finished before commenting is open
Relevance comments have an influence on the acceptance comments exist next to a different process of quality assurance
Scope comments are local, paragraph level at the maximum global comments, appreciation of the whole work

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New book: The Talking Heads experiment: Origins of words and meanings

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Steels2015We are happy to announce the first book in the series Computational Models of Language Evolution “The Talking Heads experiment: Origins of words and meanings” by Luc Steels.

The Talking Heads Experiment, conducted in the years 1999-2001, was the first large-scale experiment in which open populations of situated embodied agents created for the first time ever a new shared vocabulary by playing language games about real world scenes in front of them. Continue reading →

New book: Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen

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CoverWe are happy to announce the first book in the series Textbooks in Language Sciences: “Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen” by Roland Schäfer.

This textbook is an introduction to the descriptive grammar of German on the levels of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and graphemics. It is a recommended read for anyone interested in the grammar of German and especially for students of German philology. The book focuses on how grammatical generalizations are derived from concrete linguistic material while covering a huge number of the important phenomena of German grammar. No specific theoretical framework is adopted in the book but it constitutes an ideal starting point for reading more theory-specific textbooks and accessible research papers. Despite its length, the book is suitable for inclusion in all sorts of curricula because more advanced parts are clearly marked and can be skipped, and the five parts of the book can be read separately. Almost all chapters contain a large number of exercises with complete solutions in the appendix.

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Language Science Press Meeting at DGfS Annual Conference Leipzig

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Time: 2015 March 3, 14:00h

Place: Hörsaal 4 of Leipzig University’s Hörsaalgebäude https://conference.uni-leipzig.de/dgfs2015/index.php?id=20&L=1, very close to Gewandhaus and Augustusplatz in the city centre

Between March 4 and 6, several hundred linguists from many different countries will attend the Annual Conference of the DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft) at Leipzig University. Many of them will be interested in open-access publication and Language Science Press’s publication model, and in fact quite a few are already editorial board members or supporters.

We are organizing a one-hour meeting on the day before the conference (March 3) to bring together colleagues who would like to get an update on LangSci’s activities and to discuss future developments with us. There is no need to register for this meeting – anyone can just drop by.

The Language Science Press meeting will be followed immediately by a more general panel discussion https://conference.uni-leipzig.de/dgfs2015/index.php?id=89&L=0 on the future of linguistics publication (at 15:30, also Hörsaal 4). Panelists are Martin Haspelmath (MPi-EVA Leipzig), Kai von Fintel (MIT), Alexander Bergs (U Osnabrück), Stefan Müller (FU Berlin), and Henriette Rösch (Leipzig University Library). The topic is the major changes in publication technology and practice that we are witnessing and what linguists should do to profit from the new opportunities.

Sebastian Nordhoff, Stefan Müller, Martin Haspelmath

New book: Natural causes of language by N. J. Enfield

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Natural causes of language

Our series Conceptual Foundations of Language Science has published its first book. Listen to the author’s video below to know what it’s all about, or check out the series’ own blog at conceptualfoundations.org.

What causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated. But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has been diffused and kept in circulation through social interaction in the history of a community. This book makes the case that a proper understanding of the ontology of language systems has to be grounded in the causal mechanisms by which linguistic items are socially transmitted, in communicative contexts. A biased transmission model provides a basis for understanding why certain things and not others are likely to develop, spread, and stick in languages.

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2nd series editors’ meeting in Berlin

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sem-totale

Microphone in hand and outer space camera at the far end: we are ready for the video conference!

The second series editors’ meeting took places in Berlin on Friday November 7.
After the last meeting in March the project has made good progress, and there are a number of decisions to be made. Unfortunately, due to various reasons, not all series could attend. Furthermore, a strike on the German railway network meant that Studies in Laboratory Phonology could also not be present. We made a virtue of necessity and tried a video conference in order to allow people who could not make it to attend nevertheless. We have now gained some experience with the setup now, and so future meetings will include this possibility right from the start, making general participation easier.

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