Category Archives: Publications

Desintegration attributiver Adjektivphrasen (Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 2025)

Sayatz, Ulrike & Roland Schäfer. 2025. Desintegration attributiver Adjektivphrasen. In Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft (angenommen).

Abstract

This paper examines graphemic ways of marking constituents as syntactically non-integrated despite a strong default reading as fully integrated. Specifically, we look at canonically positioned pre-nominal APs in German which can be marked as non-integrated through punctuation marks such as commas, dashes, and parentheses (as well as prosodically though pauses and intonation curves). We present  evidence (from an elicitation experiment and a large-scale corpus study) for influencing factors triggering the use of the aforementioned punctuation marks as well as for their functional differentiation. The paper is written from the perspective of Probabilistic Graphemics, a production-oriented framework dedicated to decoding the mapping of grammatical categories onto graphemic usage, which is derived from usage-based approaches.

Statistical Inference for Everybody and a Linguist (in progress)

Mission

This book is work in progress. I restarted essentially from scratch in 2025, and I hope two designated a-authors will join shortly. It’s a cleanly frequentist introduction to statistics without any friggin’ software package. In this book you get to use paper, a pen, and a pocket calculator. Why does “hands-on introduction to statistics” always mean that we’re flooded with R commands starting on page 1? This book is for people without a deadline who would like to do some serious thinking (with me) about what inferential frequentist statistics actually does for us, but without the usual misinterpretations. No real-life data sets are used in this book, only intentionally simplified fictional examples from toy linguistics and lots of simulations. Who cares about the examples anyway? As I’m not a statistician and above all not perfect, please don’t hesitate to look at whatever is there at the moment. If you find errors, tear the PDF apart, throw it in my face, and tell me about those errors as harshly as you can. Yell at me if necessary! I’m serious. As opposed to many of our colleagues, I find nothing more satisfying than being corrected and understanding why I was wrong. I’m not being ironic, sarcastic, or what have you. Email me or submit a ticket on GitHub.

Progress on Chapters (21 March 2025)

1 Scientific Inference and Error (0%)
2 Inference: Successes and Failures (100%)
3 Data: Central Tendency and Variance (100%)
4 Estimation: Means and Proportions (100%)
5 Inference: Mean Differences (100%)
6 Inference: Three or More Means (0%)
7 Inference: This and That (0%)
8 Inference: Making Positive Inferences (0%)
9 Data: Co-Varying Variables (0%)
10 Modelling: Linear Relationships (0%)
11 Modelling: Arbitrary Outcomes (0%)
12 Modelling: Grouped Data (50%) – Will be based on this.

Downloads and GitHub

The GitHub links to this work in progress:
PDF direct: https://github.com/rsling/Inferencelinguistics/blob/main/main.pdf
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/rsling/Inferencelinguistics

Situating language register … (Frontiers)

Pescuma, Valentina N. & Serova, Dina & Lukassek, Julia & Sauermann, Antje & Schäfer, Roland & Adli, Aria & Bildhauer, Felix & Egg, Markus & Hülk, Kristina & Ito, Aine & Jannedy, Stefanie & Kordoni, Valia & Kühnast, Milena & Kutscher, Silvia & Lange, Robert & Lehmann, Nico & Liu, Mingya & Lütke, Beate & Maquate, Katja & Mooshammer, Christine & Mortezapour, Vahid & Müller, Stefan & Norde, Muriel & Pankratz, Elizabeth & Patarroyo, Angela G. & Pleșca, Ana-Maria & Ronderos, Camilo R. & Rotter, Stephanie & Sauerland, Uli & Schnelle, Gohar & Schulte, Britta & Schüppenhauer, Gediminas & Sell, Bianca Maria & Solt, Stephanie & Terada, Megumi & Tsiapou, Dimitra & Verhoeven, Elisabeth & Weirich, Melanie & Wiese, Heike & Zaruba, Kathy & Zeige, Lars Erik & Lüdeling, Anke & Knoeferle, Pia (2022) “Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, & cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods”, Frontiers in Psychology 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.964658 Continue reading →

Probabilistic German Morphosyntax (Habilitationsschrift)

Probabilistic German Morphosyntax is a sequence of papers with a methodological introduction representing my kumulative Habilitation (cumulative version of the second thesis in the German-speaking systems). As a result, I obtained the venia legendi for German and General Linguistics from the Faculty of Language Sciences (Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on 10 April 2019.

Download: Roland Schäfer (2018) Probabilistic German Morphosyntax. General introduction, overview, and wrap-up (Rahmentext der kumulativen Habilitationsschrift). Continue reading →

Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen (Language Science Press)

Inhalt und Zielpublikum

Diese Einführung in die deutsche Grammatik unterscheidet sich von allen anderen Werken mit oberflächlich gesehen ähnlicher Zielsetzung dadurch, dass sie einerseits die Sprache an sich, nicht aber die Linguistik als ihren Gegenstand auffasst. Andererseits ist ihre Konzeption jedoch anspruchsvoll genug, dass die wesentlichen Generalisierungen, die linguistische Theorien abzubilden versuchen, nach ihrer Lektüre genau so gut oder besser erfasst werden können. Das Buch setzt sich ausdrücklich keinen spezifischen theoretischen Rahmen, steht aber oberflächenorientierten und stark lexikalistischen Theorien nah. Während es ausdrücklich für Lehramtsstudiengänge und polyvalente Studiengänge konzipiert ist, wird eine vordergründige spezifische Ausrichtung auf das Lehramt ausdrücklich abgelehnt. Das Buch behandelt nach einer Einleitung, einer Positionierung zur Rolle der Grammatik im Deutschunterricht und einer Diskussion von Wortklassen die elementaren Teilbereiche der Grammatik ab: Phonetik, Phonologie, Morphologie, Syntax und Grammatik. Continue reading →