The Research Initiative for Computational Analysis of Linguistic Development (CALD) at the University of Konstanz brings together researchers from three disciplines:

• Computational Linguistics
• Databases, Data Mining, and Visualization
• Typology & Historical Linguistics.

In recent years a new interdisciplinary field sometimes referred to as “evolutionary dynamics” has increasingly attracted the joint attention of researchers from a variety of established disciplines such as historical linguistics, computer science, evolutionary biology, genetics, anthropology, and archaeology. One of the most interesting and challenging issues out of this field is the evolution of human language which shows to have some similarities with biological evolution but some crucial differences as well.

The amount and complexity of languages as well as their complex relations and interactions make the exploration of language evolution a demanding challenge for research. Computer modelling and visualization of linguistic developments are therefore gaining importance, possibly revealing developmental patterns whose perception would otherwise remain vague and impressionistic or go unrecognized in the sea of detail. Both internal and external history, relating to mental grammars and speech communities respectively, are of interest.

In a joint effort we aim to develop new analytic and visualization techniques for relating the available data on speech-community and grammar/lexicon histories, to measure structural and historical "distances", and to model linguistically realistic developmental scenarios.

CALD Research Initiative Members

Research Directors

 

Prof. Dr. Miriam Butt, Computational Linguistics
Department of Linguitics
 
Prof. Dr. Daniel Keim, Databases, Data Mining, and Visualization
Department of Computer and Information Science
 
Prof. Dr. Frans Plank, Typology and Historical Linguistics
Department of Linguistics

Staff Members

 

Annette Hautli, Computational Linguistics, Lexical Semantics
Department of Linguistics

Christian Rohrdantz, Databases, Data Mining, and Visualization
Department of Computer and Information Science

Florian Schönhuber, Typology and Language Change
Department of Linguistics

Thomas Mayer, Computational Linguistics, Typology
Department of Linguistics

Former Members

 

Astrid Kraehenmann, Phonetics and Phonology, Language Change, Germanic Languages
Manu Raster, Computational Linguistics, and Indo-European Linguistics
Michael Spagnol, Semitic Linguistics and Typology
Tikaram Poudel, South Asian linguistics, with a particular emphasis on the languages of Nepal.