29.1325, Rising Stars: Meet Carlotta Hübener

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1325. Mon Mar 26 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1325, Rising Stars: Meet Carlotta Hübener

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Editor for this issue: Clare Harshey <clare at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2018 17:29:09
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Stars: Meet Carlotta Hübener

 Dear Readers,

For several years, we have featured linguists with established careers and
interesting stories to tell. This year, we will also be highlighting “Rising
Stars” throughout our Fund Drive, undergraduates who were nominated by their
mentors for their exceptional interest in linguistics and eager participation
in the global community of language researchers.

Selected nominees were asked to share their view of the field of linguistics:
what topics they see emerging as important or especially interesting, what
role they see the field filling in the coming decades, and how they plan to
contribute. We hope you will enjoy the perspectives of these students, who
represent the bright future of our field.

Today, we are featuring Carlotta Hübener, a senior at the University of
Hamburg. She is most interested in morphology and syntax, having written
 her BA thesis on the German linking element -s- and its role in 
disambiguating compounds.

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The importance of language

Language has fascinated me ever since I started to talk; however, the immense
importance of language did not become clear to me until I started my
university studies. Human language is an incredibly valuable asset,
particularly with regards to its cognitive, social, cultural and historical
aspects. Language allows us to make inferences about how human thinking is
organized. Syntactic regularities often reflect human priorities. A striking
example of this is the influence of the animacy hierarchy in various
grammatical areas. Frequently, animate or even human referents assume a
special grammatical role, for example, they may be preferred to inanimate
referents in syntactic orders. (Conventionalized) metaphors are another
example for the interplay of language and cognition. It is believed that they
reflect existing presumptions or human thinking, and vice versa, shape human
perception.

My personal interest: Grammar

So far, my studies have been focused on grammar from a diachronic and a
synchronic perspective. My particular interests are morphology and syntax,
together with their interfaces. Empirical methods are indispensable to
investigate these subjects. It is invigorating to learn more about the way
people use linguistic structures, how they are modified over time and how
people generalize over them or render them unproductive. In addition,
linguistically doubtful cases are highly appealing to me as they often
indicate language change, and point out limitations to the production and
processing of language.

I would like, with my work, to contribute to bringing syntactic irregularities
into sharper focus. In this way, new perspectives may be opened on linguistic
phenomena which were previously neglected or even considered as fully
discussed. It is really exciting to investigate how prototypically transitive
scenarios are morphologically reflected. In my undergraduate thesis, I was
able to show, with the use of a questionnaire, that the linking-s in newly
coined German compounds has a disambiguating effect because it supports
transitive interpretations.

Perspectives to linguistics

The ever-increasing production of written language data, such as online
magazines, forum discussions, chats etc. will extend the possibilities of
corpus linguistics. These empiric resources will allow researchers to use
digital corpora more comprehensively than before. Advances in computational
linguistics will hopefully allow automatic tagging systems to be improved.
This will, in turn, simplify the processing of large amounts of linguistic
data. Large and current corpora will allow the change in language to be
recognized faster and to be described more accurately. This may also serve as
a starting point to examine rare linguistic phenomena, which may otherwise
have been overlooked.

Interactive end devices are, increasingly, becoming a part of daily life.
Their use leads to an increasing demand on communication. The most immediate
form of communication still is human language, hence, computational
linguistics is increasingly being challenged to simplify natural man-machine
communication, i.e. making it as easy as communicating with other humans. To
this end, language must be represented digitally. Like that, digital avatars
and machine-translation systems could be substantially improved.

As a whole, linguistic research and its subdisciplines encompass countless
interesting possibilities. Surely, interdisciplinary research will become
increasingly important for further progress. Science and particularly language
belong to the general public. Access to current scientific results must be
simplified. This includes digital provisioning of results as well as matching
their formal complexity to the needs of the general public. Naturally, this
should lead to an increasing exchange of ideas between researchers and the
interested public. In this way, linguistics will continue to contribute to
enlightenment and hinder potential misuse of the force of language as commonly
found in hate speeches and fake news.

******************************************************************

If you have a student who you believe is a “Rising Star” in linguistics, we
would love to hear about them! We are still accepting nominations for
exceptional young linguists. Please see the call for nominations for more
information.

If you have not yet–please visit our Fund Drive page to learn more about us
and why we need your help! The LINGUIST List relies on your generous donations
to continue it support of linguists around the world.

https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

Gratefully,

The LINGUIST List Team



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