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Ulrike Mosel

Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, General Linguistics (ISFAS), Emerita

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Ulrike Mosel is a Professor emerita of the University Kiel. After concluding her studies of Semitic languages with a dissertation on Sibawaih's Al-Kitab (1974), she became a linguist and specialised on the documentation of endangered languages in the Pacific. Together with Even Hovdhaugen she wrote the Samoan Reference Grammar (1992) and recently published the electronic Multifunctional English-Teop Dictionary (2019). Her articles focus on corpus-based grammaticography and lexicography.

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SUNY: University at Buffalo

Emanuele Pianta

Bruno Kessler Foundation

Charles Darwin University

Universität Bielefeld

Stephen c. Levinson

Patrick McConvell

The Australian National University

Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education

Sebastian Drude

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

SOAS University of London

Anthony Aristar

Retired

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Papers by Ulrike Mosel

Methods of language documentation in the DOBES program

Language Resources and Evaluation, May 1, 2002

The DOBES program for the documentation of endangered languages, started in September 2000, has j... more The DOBES program for the documentation of endangered languages, started in September 2000, has just completed its pilot phase. Eight documentation teams and one archiving team worked out agreements on formats, tools, naming conventions, and encoding, especially the linguistic level of encoding. These standards will form the basis for a five-year main phase, which will include about 20 teams. In the pilot phase, strategies to set up an online archive incorporating redundancy and regular backup were developed and implemented. Ethical and legal aspects of the archiving process were discussed and amounted to a number of documents to which all participants have to adhere to. Tools and converters developed within the pilot phase are available to others.

Lexicography in endangered language communities

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 1999

Tolai and Tok Pisin: The Influence of the Substratum on the Development of New Guinea Pidgin

Language, Jun 1, 1983

dictionaria/teop: A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary

A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary by Ulrike Mosel

Corpus linguistic and documentary approaches in writing a grammar of a previously undescribed language

Drawing on her experiences with writing a grammar in the course of the Teop language documentatio... more Drawing on her experiences with writing a grammar in the course of the Teop language documentation project, the author explores how corpus linguistic methods can be employed for the analysis and description of a previously undescribed language. After giving a short introduction into the creation of a digital corpus and complex corpus search methods, the chapter focuses on the importance of creating a diversified corpus. It demonstrates that different text varieties such as spoken and written legends, procedural texts and descriptions of objects show different preferences for certain ways of expression and thus represent valuable resources for various grammatical phenomena. Accordingly, a grammar which is based on texts should account for this variation by incorporating a detailed description of the corpus, giving references and metadata for each example and providing information on the kind of contexts particular grammatical features are usually associated with. In the following, I will briefly explain some corpus linguistic methods of grammatical analysis and grammar writing in §2, then in §3 discuss how a corpus can be compiled that meets both the wishes of the speech community and the interests of the grammaticographer, and in the following sections focus on three kinds of grammatical variation:

Creating educational materials in language documentation projects – creating innovative resources for linguistic research

In its first two sections this paper briefly discusses two models of language documentation proje... more In its first two sections this paper briefly discusses two models of language documentation projects: the hierarchical model, in which the language documentation corpus (LDC) serves as a resource for the development of educational materials (EMs), and the integrative model, which integrates the production of EMs into the LDC and makes them a resource for linguistic research. The third and the fourth section describe how the integrative model was applied in the Teop Language Documentation Project and what kind of linguistic research topics it provides.

CUT-verbs of the Oceanic language Teop: A critical study of collecting and analysing data in a language documentation project

ANU Press eBooks, Dec 17, 2020

Teop is an Oceanic language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and has been documented for... more Teop is an Oceanic language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and has been documented for more than two decades in close collaboration with a team of native speakers from coastal villages of the Tinputz region. 1 The present study of Teop cut-verbs was inspired by Anna Wierzbicka when she invited me to a workshop on endangered meanings held in Canberra in 2013. Having been a tutor for her courses in the '90s, I soon realised that the English translation equivalents of Teop cut-verbs in the Teop Language Corpus do not provide sufficient information for a semantic analysis, because the translators (including myself ) have been 'imprisoned in English' (Wierzbicka 2014). To understand the meanings of cut-verbs, we therefore need to complement the corpus data by 1 The Teop language documentation has been funded by the

Corpus Compilation and Exploitation in Language Documentation Projects

This chapter analyzes the specific characteristics of corpora of endangered languages from a corp... more This chapter analyzes the specific characteristics of corpora of endangered languages from a corpus linguistic perspective. Therefore it starts with a definition of the central notions of corpus and text and then investigates how the heterogeneous language documentation corpora may fit into a general typology of corpora. The third section looks at the genres and registers that for methodological and theoretical reasons are typical for language documentations, whereas the fourth section deals with the structure of corpora and how texts of a particular content, genre or register can be accessed in archives. The format of the texts, which are typically annotated audio and video recordings, is described in the fifth section and deals with metadata, transcription, orthography, translation, glossing, and syntactic annotation. How annotated corpora can be analyzed for grammatical and lexical research is shown in the sixth section. The last section summarizes the specific features of language documentation corpora.

Turning the linguist's lexical database into a community dictionary

Advances in the accountability of grammatical analysis and description by using regular expressions

This paper discusses the representativeness, coextensitivity and scientific accountability of cor... more This paper discusses the representativeness, coextensitivity and scientific accountability of corpus-based grammatical descriptions of previously unresearched languages. While a grammatical description of a previously unresearched language can hardly be representative for any kind of its varieties, it can be adequate in coextensitivity if it covers the linguistic phenomena presented in the corpus. In order to allow other researchers to retrieve the examples in their context and check the analysis, the corpus should not only contain text collections, but also the elicited data, provide metadata and be accessible to other researchers. Scientific accountability, however, can only be achieved, if the description facilitates the replicability of the analysis, which presupposes that the authors' corpus linguistic search methods are documented, so that the readers can find other, if not all examples for the described phenomena, and scrutinize the search methods, the analysis and the description. As is illustrated in this paper, a suitable query language for this kind of scientific grammatical analysis and description are the so-called regular expressions which are implemented in the annotation tool ELAN.

Putting oral narratives into writing -experiences from a language documentation project in Bouganville, Papua New Guinea

International Symposium on Language and Culture Documentation (Buenos Aires, August 14-15, 2008), 2008

This paper shows the lexical and syntactic changes that native speakers of the Oceanic language T... more

Chapter 12 Sketch grammar

De Gruyter eBooks, Apr 23, 2009

Chapter 3 Fieldwork and community language work

De Gruyter eBooks, Apr 23, 2009

Matabuu An orphan, called Matabuu, grows up with his grandparents who do not treat him well. He r... more Matabuu An orphan, called Matabuu, grows up with his grandparents who do not treat him well. He rund away. The grandmother searches for him. When she finds him, he climbs a kaoto-tree which bends over a lagoon full of sharks. In spite of the warning of his grandmother he jumps down into the lagoon and is killed by a shark. His blood splashes up and colours the leaves of the tree red. (the story includes songs

Tolai syntax and its historical development

Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. ... more Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. PL ART ta kana umana kaka i 1 a i in his PL song ta ra tinata Kuanua. in ART speaking Kuanua i it umana pakapaka-na-tinata PL pieces-c-speaking comp l et e ba i kidoloina or it complete His sentences, the parts of speech in his songs were completely correct Tolai sentences.

dictionaria/teop: A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary

A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary by Ulrike Mosel

Ergativity in Samoan

Most typological and language specific studies on so- called ergative languages are concerned wit... more Most typological and language specific studies on so- called ergative languages are concerned with case marking patterns, particularly split ergativity, with the organization of syntactic relations as defined by syntactic operations such as coreferential deletion across coordinate conjunctions, Equi-NP-deletion and relativization , and with the notion of subject, but usually neglect the notion of valency, though the inherent relational properties of the verb , i. e. valency, play a fundamental role in the syntactic organization of sentences in ergative as well as in other languages . The following investigation of ergativity in Samoan aims to integrate the notion of valency into the description of semantic and syntactic relations and to outline the characteristic features of Samoan verbal clauses as far as they seem to be relevant to recent and still ongoing discussions on linguistic typology and syntactic theory. The main points of the definition of valency […] are: Valency is the ...

Complex predicates and Juxtapositional Constructions in Samoan

Complex Predicates in Oceanic Languages, 2004

... element in Juxtapositional Constructions. All of them are derived by fa'a-which represen... more

Chapter 3 Fieldwork and community language work

Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

Towards a typology of valency : ein Beitrag zu den Techniken Valenz und Orientierung

Grammatical relations, particularly the notions of transitivity, case marking, ergativity, passiv... more Grammatical relations, particularly the notions of transitivity, case marking, ergativity, passive and antipassive have been a favourite subject of typological research during the last decade, but surprisingly, the notion of valency has been of marginal interest in cross-linguistic studies, though the syntactic and semantic status of participants is, to a great extent, determined by the relational properties of the verb. Valency is the property of the verb which determines the obligatory and optional number of its participants, their morphosyntactic form, their semantic class membership (e.g. ± animate, ± human) ,and their semantic role (e.g. agent, patient, recipient). The valency inherently gives information on the nature of the semantic and syntactic relations that hold between the verb and its participants. If a verb is combined with more participants than allowed or less than required, or if the participants do not show the required morphosyntactic form or class membership, the...

Methods of language documentation in the DOBES program

Language Resources and Evaluation, May 1, 2002

The DOBES program for the documentation of endangered languages, started in September 2000, has j... more The DOBES program for the documentation of endangered languages, started in September 2000, has just completed its pilot phase. Eight documentation teams and one archiving team worked out agreements on formats, tools, naming conventions, and encoding, especially the linguistic level of encoding. These standards will form the basis for a five-year main phase, which will include about 20 teams. In the pilot phase, strategies to set up an online archive incorporating redundancy and regular backup were developed and implemented. Ethical and legal aspects of the archiving process were discussed and amounted to a number of documents to which all participants have to adhere to. Tools and converters developed within the pilot phase are available to others.

Lexicography in endangered language communities

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 1999

Tolai and Tok Pisin: The Influence of the Substratum on the Development of New Guinea Pidgin

Language, Jun 1, 1983

dictionaria/teop: A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary

A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary by Ulrike Mosel

Corpus linguistic and documentary approaches in writing a grammar of a previously undescribed language

Drawing on her experiences with writing a grammar in the course of the Teop language documentatio... more Drawing on her experiences with writing a grammar in the course of the Teop language documentation project, the author explores how corpus linguistic methods can be employed for the analysis and description of a previously undescribed language. After giving a short introduction into the creation of a digital corpus and complex corpus search methods, the chapter focuses on the importance of creating a diversified corpus. It demonstrates that different text varieties such as spoken and written legends, procedural texts and descriptions of objects show different preferences for certain ways of expression and thus represent valuable resources for various grammatical phenomena. Accordingly, a grammar which is based on texts should account for this variation by incorporating a detailed description of the corpus, giving references and metadata for each example and providing information on the kind of contexts particular grammatical features are usually associated with. In the following, I will briefly explain some corpus linguistic methods of grammatical analysis and grammar writing in §2, then in §3 discuss how a corpus can be compiled that meets both the wishes of the speech community and the interests of the grammaticographer, and in the following sections focus on three kinds of grammatical variation:

Creating educational materials in language documentation projects – creating innovative resources for linguistic research

In its first two sections this paper briefly discusses two models of language documentation proje... more In its first two sections this paper briefly discusses two models of language documentation projects: the hierarchical model, in which the language documentation corpus (LDC) serves as a resource for the development of educational materials (EMs), and the integrative model, which integrates the production of EMs into the LDC and makes them a resource for linguistic research. The third and the fourth section describe how the integrative model was applied in the Teop Language Documentation Project and what kind of linguistic research topics it provides.

CUT-verbs of the Oceanic language Teop: A critical study of collecting and analysing data in a language documentation project

ANU Press eBooks, Dec 17, 2020

Teop is an Oceanic language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and has been documented for... more Teop is an Oceanic language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and has been documented for more than two decades in close collaboration with a team of native speakers from coastal villages of the Tinputz region. 1 The present study of Teop cut-verbs was inspired by Anna Wierzbicka when she invited me to a workshop on endangered meanings held in Canberra in 2013. Having been a tutor for her courses in the '90s, I soon realised that the English translation equivalents of Teop cut-verbs in the Teop Language Corpus do not provide sufficient information for a semantic analysis, because the translators (including myself ) have been 'imprisoned in English' (Wierzbicka 2014). To understand the meanings of cut-verbs, we therefore need to complement the corpus data by 1 The Teop language documentation has been funded by the

Corpus Compilation and Exploitation in Language Documentation Projects

This chapter analyzes the specific characteristics of corpora of endangered languages from a corp... more This chapter analyzes the specific characteristics of corpora of endangered languages from a corpus linguistic perspective. Therefore it starts with a definition of the central notions of corpus and text and then investigates how the heterogeneous language documentation corpora may fit into a general typology of corpora. The third section looks at the genres and registers that for methodological and theoretical reasons are typical for language documentations, whereas the fourth section deals with the structure of corpora and how texts of a particular content, genre or register can be accessed in archives. The format of the texts, which are typically annotated audio and video recordings, is described in the fifth section and deals with metadata, transcription, orthography, translation, glossing, and syntactic annotation. How annotated corpora can be analyzed for grammatical and lexical research is shown in the sixth section. The last section summarizes the specific features of language documentation corpora.

Turning the linguist's lexical database into a community dictionary

Advances in the accountability of grammatical analysis and description by using regular expressions

This paper discusses the representativeness, coextensitivity and scientific accountability of cor... more This paper discusses the representativeness, coextensitivity and scientific accountability of corpus-based grammatical descriptions of previously unresearched languages. While a grammatical description of a previously unresearched language can hardly be representative for any kind of its varieties, it can be adequate in coextensitivity if it covers the linguistic phenomena presented in the corpus. In order to allow other researchers to retrieve the examples in their context and check the analysis, the corpus should not only contain text collections, but also the elicited data, provide metadata and be accessible to other researchers. Scientific accountability, however, can only be achieved, if the description facilitates the replicability of the analysis, which presupposes that the authors' corpus linguistic search methods are documented, so that the readers can find other, if not all examples for the described phenomena, and scrutinize the search methods, the analysis and the description. As is illustrated in this paper, a suitable query language for this kind of scientific grammatical analysis and description are the so-called regular expressions which are implemented in the annotation tool ELAN.

Putting oral narratives into writing -experiences from a language documentation project in Bouganville, Papua New Guinea

International Symposium on Language and Culture Documentation (Buenos Aires, August 14-15, 2008), 2008

This paper shows the lexical and syntactic changes that native speakers of the Oceanic language T... more

Chapter 12 Sketch grammar

De Gruyter eBooks, Apr 23, 2009

Chapter 3 Fieldwork and community language work

De Gruyter eBooks, Apr 23, 2009

Matabuu An orphan, called Matabuu, grows up with his grandparents who do not treat him well. He r... more Matabuu An orphan, called Matabuu, grows up with his grandparents who do not treat him well. He rund away. The grandmother searches for him. When she finds him, he climbs a kaoto-tree which bends over a lagoon full of sharks. In spite of the warning of his grandmother he jumps down into the lagoon and is killed by a shark. His blood splashes up and colours the leaves of the tree red. (the story includes songs

Tolai syntax and its historical development

Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. ... more Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. PL ART ta kana umana kaka i 1 a i in his PL song ta ra tinata Kuanua. in ART speaking Kuanua i it umana pakapaka-na-tinata PL pieces-c-speaking comp l et e ba i kidoloina or it complete His sentences, the parts of speech in his songs were completely correct Tolai sentences.

dictionaria/teop: A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary

A multifunctional Teop-English dictionary by Ulrike Mosel

Ergativity in Samoan

Most typological and language specific studies on so- called ergative languages are concerned wit... more Most typological and language specific studies on so- called ergative languages are concerned with case marking patterns, particularly split ergativity, with the organization of syntactic relations as defined by syntactic operations such as coreferential deletion across coordinate conjunctions, Equi-NP-deletion and relativization , and with the notion of subject, but usually neglect the notion of valency, though the inherent relational properties of the verb , i. e. valency, play a fundamental role in the syntactic organization of sentences in ergative as well as in other languages . The following investigation of ergativity in Samoan aims to integrate the notion of valency into the description of semantic and syntactic relations and to outline the characteristic features of Samoan verbal clauses as far as they seem to be relevant to recent and still ongoing discussions on linguistic typology and syntactic theory. The main points of the definition of valency […] are: Valency is the ...

Complex predicates and Juxtapositional Constructions in Samoan

Complex Predicates in Oceanic Languages, 2004

... element in Juxtapositional Constructions. All of them are derived by fa'a-which represen... more

Chapter 3 Fieldwork and community language work

Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

Towards a typology of valency : ein Beitrag zu den Techniken Valenz und Orientierung

Grammatical relations, particularly the notions of transitivity, case marking, ergativity, passiv... more Grammatical relations, particularly the notions of transitivity, case marking, ergativity, passive and antipassive have been a favourite subject of typological research during the last decade, but surprisingly, the notion of valency has been of marginal interest in cross-linguistic studies, though the syntactic and semantic status of participants is, to a great extent, determined by the relational properties of the verb. Valency is the property of the verb which determines the obligatory and optional number of its participants, their morphosyntactic form, their semantic class membership (e.g. ± animate, ± human) ,and their semantic role (e.g. agent, patient, recipient). The valency inherently gives information on the nature of the semantic and syntactic relations that hold between the verb and its participants. If a verb is combined with more participants than allowed or less than required, or if the participants do not show the required morphosyntactic form or class membership, the...

Unmarked Reflexive and Marked Disjoint Object Pronouns in Teop

draft, 2021

Teop, an Oceanic language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, uses the same pronouns as sub... more Teop, an Oceanic language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, uses the same pronouns as subjects and reflexive objects, but distinct pronouns as disjoint objects, e.g. Enaa ... enaa 'I ... myself,' but X ... anaa 'X ... me.' To my present knowledge, this kind of reflexive construction hasn't yet been attested in the typological literature on reflexivity 1. The forms of 1 st and 2 nd person reflexive object pronouns are identical with the heavy pronouns of topical subject pronouns, whereas disjoint object pronouns referring to speech-act participants are marked by an object marker. Pronouns referring to non-speech-act participants distinguish between a 3 rd and a 4 th person. The 3 rd person pronouns function as subjects, reflexive objects and, if the subject refers to a speech act participant, also as disjoint objects. But if the subject is 3 rd person pronoun or a NP, a disjoint object is represented by a 4 th person pronoun or a NP that is marked by a special object article. In certain contexts this article also marks reflexive 3 rd person pronouns and disjoint 1 st and 2 nd person pronouns functioning as secondary objects or oblique arguments. A reflexive relation between the object and the subject may be emphasised by an adverbial and adnominal intensifier, but the intensifier is optional and occurs in other construction with the same meaning, so that it cannot be classified as a "reflexive marker." Being a pragmatic language, Teop allows the ellipsis of all kinds of arguments including reflexive objects and their antecedents, so that the interpretation of transitive clauses has to rely on the context and the interaction of morphosyntax, lexicon, semantics and pragmatics. The data of the analysis come from the Teop Language Corpus.

The Teop-English encyclopedia of fishes and other swimming creatures

The Teop-English encyclopedia of fishes and other swimming creatures, 2014

This bilingual enzyclopedia contains 156 descriptions of fishes and other swimming creatures livi... more This bilingual enzyclopedia contains 156 descriptions of fishes and other swimming creatures living in the South Pacific near the Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea. The descriptions were written in Teop and translated into English. The Appendices contain an English-Teop Wordlist and an index of scientific names and their Teop and English translation equivalents.