HANS C. BOAS  

     Research

Syntax, Lexical Semantics, Computational Lexicography, Language Contact and Variation, Contrastive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Pragmatics, Morphology, Endangered Languages and Dialects, Foreign Language Education, Phonology, Forensic Linguistics, Language Planning, Intercultural Communication, and History and Philosophy of Linguistics.

My main research revolves around the relationship between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the structure of the lexicon, which I approach from a contrastive perspective (English/German). The theoretical frameworks I work with are primarily Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics with a strong bias towards corpus-based research methods. Most recently, I have worked on Argument Structure Constructions such as Resultative Constructions, Passive Constructions, and the Locative Alternation, among others.  

Design and structure of multilingual lexical databases:

In recent work, I have investigated how to best implement FrameNet principles in the design of corpus-based lexical databases for languages other than English.  As a first step, I have looked into the feasibility of adopting this approach for German by working on the design of lexical entries for German motion and communication verbs.  Currently, I am working on the linguistic design of the German FrameNet database as well as a corresponding multilingual semantic representation language that will be useful for information retrieval, text summarization, machine translation, and foreign language education. 

In September 2001, I founded the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) in order to record, archive, and analyze the remnants of Texas German. This endangered native dialect of Texas will become extinct within the next 25 years. Besides conducting fieldwork at three different locations in central Texas, I am currently investigating which syntactic, lexical, morphological, and phonological features of Texas German have changed over the last thirty years and why (language contact & shift). As a next step, I will compare the changes found in Texas German with those of other rapidly eroding dialects that are in contact with English and other languages. The efforts of the TGDP have so far been supported by the University of Texas at Austin, Humanities Texas (formerly Texas Council for the Humanities), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In January 2005, I established the Texas German endowment at UT Austin, which will support the on-going activities of the TGDP in years to come.

Over the last four years, I have traced the linguistic, legal, and educational effects of the reform of German orthography that took place in 1998. In particular, I am investigating whether the educational advantages predicted by proponents of the controversial reform have materialized. In addition, I am in the process of determining the linguistic and cultural effects that the English-only laws passed during and after WW I had on Texas German. 

As part of my work on the architecture of Construction Grammar, I am investigating the system of Tense, Mood, and Aspect Markers in Seychellois Creole. At the moment, I am working on developing a model that recognizes each marker as an individual construction with syntactic as well as semantic constraints on the types of markers with which it may be unified. The analysis will eventually be expanded to cover other Creole languages.

Based on my training in law and frame semantics I am currently working on discovering the principles that underlie the lexical organization of words in the semantic domain of crime in English and German legal texts. A second project investigates how the legal concept of separation of church and state is expressed in the constitutions of the United States and Germany and how it is interpreted differently in the two countries.

In recent work I analyzed the phonological and morphological constraints governing wanna-contraction in English. The Construction Grammar analysis I provide illustrates how morpho-syntactic phenomena interact with phonological and semantic restrictions. Working within the framework of Optimality Theory, I also examined a variety of diminutive formation patterns in Yiddish.  I proposed a unified analysis that accounts for the phonological constraints on Yiddish diminutive formation including d-epenthesis.