Martin Hilpert: Life is too short for long words – Studying English clippings in language use and in the laboratory

The Institute of the Czech National Corpus FF UK cordially invites you to the online lecture of Professor Martin Hilpert. In his talk, Professor Hilpert will address the morphological word formation process that is known as clipping.

Existing work characterizes clipping as a highly variable phenomenon, arguing that it is difficult to predict how a given source word will be shortened. Recently however, the view that clipping is unsystematic or unpredictable has been empirically challenged. This talk continues that line of research and presents new empirical insights. Specifically, the talk will report on new results that have been obtained on the basis of a newly-compiled large database of English clippings, and through experimental, psycholinguistic methods.

Martin Hilpert is a Professor of English Linguistics at the Université de Neuchâtel. His research interests include language variation and change, cognitive linguistics, construction grammar and corpus linguistics. He is the author of several seminal works on diachronic construction grammar of English, such as Constructional Change in English (2013) or Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar (2021), and of the textbook Construction Grammar and its Application to English (2014).

The lecture will be held online, via the Zoom platform:

Zoom meeting ID: 932 6795 4786
passcode: seminar
https://cuni-cz.zoom.us/j/93267954786