Variation and Change
Linguistic variation is omnipresent. It is always with us when we meet speakers of other languages, but also in dealing with language-internal variation. The description, analysis and modeling of this diversity is an immense linguistic challenge. The 47th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Germany 2025 at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz takes up this challenge and focuses on the linguistic aspects of this variation as it manifests itself in the approximately 7,000 languages known worldwide and in numerous dialects, sociolects, heritage languages and in different modalities (spoken language, sign language).
This diversity as we can observe it between and within languages is closely related to language change, which is motivated by factors such as
- language contact (co-territoriality, migration, social networks, new media),
- sociolinguistic aspects (language attitudes, age, gender, education),
- differences between first, second and third language acquisition and
- cognitive or universal principles (economy/iconicity vs. complexity).
The combination of this diversity with its numerous motivations results in new, dynamic possibilities for modeling grammatical properties of languages. Recent developments and new technologies have given rise to new research dynamics, which are characterized by factors such as
- different methods of data collection and their integration (e.g. field research, development of corpora, experimental data),
- suitable databases (e.g. corpora, typological databases such as WALS or Grambank) and
- new methods of analysis provided by large language models and biostatistical methods.