Hans C Boas

Affiliated Professors — Ph.D., Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Professor; Director, Linguistics Research Center; Director, Texas German Dialect Project

Curriculum Vitae

Contact

E-mail: hcb@austin.utexas.edu
Phone: 232-6358
Office: BUR 328
Campus Mail Code: C3300

Biography

I am a professor for Linguistics in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to Austin, I was a postdoctoral researcher with the FrameNet project at the International Computer Science Institute and a research fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst ('German Academic Exchange Service'). Prior to that, I studied law and linguistics at the Georg-August- Universität Göttingen, Germany. I received both my M.A. (thesis: The Passive in German) and my Ph.D. (dissertation: Resultative Constructions in English and German) in the Linguistics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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. This research has resulted in a number of books: A constructional approach to resultatives (2003, CSLI Publications), Construction Grammar - Back to the roots (2005, John Benjamins, co-edited with Mirjam Fried), Contrastive Studies and Valency (2006, Peter Lang, co-edited with Petra Steiner and Stefan Schierholz), and Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar (2010, John Benjamins, edited). I am currently collaborating with Ivan Sag (Stanford University) on an edited volume on Sign-based Construction Grammar, to be published in 2011.

My secondary research focus is concerned with implementing FrameNet principles in the design of corpus-based lexical databases for languages other than English. This research interest grew out of my postdoctoral fellowship with FrameNet at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)). My edited book Multinlingual FrameNets: From Theory to Application was published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2009. At UT Austin I am currently working on creating a FrameNet for German. Based on Frame Semantics and supported by corpus evidence, German FrameNet documents the full range of semantic and syntactic valences of each word in each of its senses. The resulting database consists of lexical entries that contain information about the semantic frame to which a lexical unit (a word in one of its senses) belongs, in combination with semantic and syntactic valence descriptions, and a collection of annotated corpus attestations. The data produced by German FrameNet will be useful for research in Natural Language Processing as well as Foreign Language Education.

My third research area consists of language variation, multilingualism, language contact, and language death. 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 dialect will become extinct within the next 25-30 years. To date, I have interviewed more than 350 speakers of Texas German. The recordings, together with their transcriptions and translations, are stored in the web-based multi-media Texas German Dialect Archive after being processed by a web-based set of tools I developed between 2002-2005. My research on Texas German has been honored with a one-year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the Hugo-Moser Prize for Germanic Linguistics from the Institut für Deutsche Sprache ("Institute for the German Language") in Mannheim (Germany). My latest book The Life and Death of Texas German was published with Duke University Press in 2009. This book won the 2011 Leonard Bloomfied Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America for the most outstanding contribution to the development of our understanding of language and linguistics.

Interests

Syntax, Lexical Semantics, Computational Lexicography, Language Contact & Variation, Contrastive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Pragmatics, Morphology, Endangered Languages, Phonology

Publications

Boas, H. (ed.) (2010) Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar. John Benjamins.

Boas, H.C. (2009) Case Loss in Texas German: The Influence of Semantic and Pragmatic Factors. In Bar & S. Chelliah (Eds.), The Role of Semantics and Pragmatics in the Development of Case (pp.347-373). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Boas, H.C. (2009) The life and death of Texas German. Durham: Duke University Press.

Boas, H.C. (2009) Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography: Methods and Applications. Mouton de Gruyter.

Boas, H.C. (2008, September) Determining the Structure of Lexical Entries and Grammatical Constructions in Construction Grammar. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 6, 113-144.

Boas, H.C. (2008, September) Towards a Frame-constructional Approach to Verb Classification. Revista Canaria Estudios Ingleses, 57, 17-47.

Boas, H.C. (2008) Resolving Form-meaning Discrepancies in Construction Grammar. In J. Leino (Ed.), Constructional Reorganization (pp.11-36). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Boas, H.C. (2007, September) Construction Grammar in the 21st Century. English Language and Linguistics, 11(3), 569-585.

Boas, H.C. & Weilbacher, H. (2007) How Universal Is the Pragmatic Detachability Scale? Evidence from Texas German Discourse Markers. The Proceedings of the Texas Linguistic Society IX Conference The Proceedings of the Texas Linguistic Society IX Conference.

Boas, H.C. (2006) Contrastive Studies and Valency. Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang.

Boas, H.C. (2006) A frame-semantic approach to identifying syntactically relevant elements of meaning. In P. Steiner, H.C. Boas & S. Schierholz (Eds.), Contrastive Studies and Valency. Studies in Honor of Hans Ulrich Boas (pp.119-149). Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang.

Boas, H.C. (2006, September) From the Field to the Web: Implementing Best-Practice Recommendations in Documentary Linguistics. Language Resources and Evaluation, 40(2), 153-174.

Boas, H.C. (2005) From Theory to Practice: Frame Semantics and the Design of FrameNet. In S. Langer & D. Schnorbusch (Eds.), Semantik im Lexikon (pp.129-160). T: Narr.

Boas, H.C. (2005, September) Determining the Productivity of Resultative Constructions: A Reply to Goldberg & Jackendoff. Language, 81(2), 448-464.

Boas, H.C. (2005, September) Semantic Frames as Interlingual Representations for Multilingual Lexical Databases. International Journal of Lexicography, 18(4), 445-478.

Boas, H.C. & Fried, M. (2005) Introduction. In M. Fried & H.C. Boas (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Back to the Roots (pp.1-9). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Boas, H.C. (2005) A Dialect in Search of its Place: The Use of Texas German in the Public Domain. In C. Cravens & D. Zersen (Eds.), Transcontinental Encounters: Central Europe Meets the American Heartland (pp.78-102). Austin: Concordia University Press.

Boas, H.C. & Mirjam Fried. (2005) Grammatical Constructions: Back to the Roots. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Boas, H.C. (2005, September) Texas German Dialect. ABC-CLIO, 1029-1035.

Boas, H.C. (2005, September) Review of Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Studies in Language 29(1), 189-199.

Boas, H.C. (2004) You wanna consider a Constructional Approach to Wanna-Contraction?. In M. Achard & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Language, Culture, and Mind (pp.479-491). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Boas, H.C., Bailey, M., Eubank, E., Kelton, K., Kishi, C., Lippmann, J., Raizen, E., Rhodes, S., TenBarge, J. & Wilbur, J. (2004) Technology-based Language and Culture Projects at the University of Texas at Austin. In Y. Saito-Abbott, R. Donovan & T. Abbott (Eds.), Emerging Technologies in Teaching Language and Cultures (pp.363-381). San Diego: LARC Press.

Boas, H.C., Ewing, K., Moran, C. & Thompson, J. (2004, September) Towards Determining the Influence of Internal and External Factors on Recent Developments in Texas German Phonology. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 10(1), 47-59.

Boas, H.C. (2003) A Constructional Approach to Resultatives. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Boas, H.C. (2003) A Lexical-constructional Account of the Locative Alternation. Proceedings of the 2001 Western Conference on Linguistics, Vol. 13 Proceedings of the 2001 Western Conference on Linguistics, Vol. 13.

Boas, H.C. (2003) Tracing Dialect Death: The Texas German Dialect Project. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Boas, H.C., Rauch, I., Barker, G., Cleek, J., Coffey, M., Dewey, T., Goldman, J., Janko, J., Kooiker, J., Shin, S. & Toth, G. (2003, September) On the German Language of Civility/Vulgarity: Evidence from Bonn. Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, 8(2), 261-289.

Boas, H.C. & Petruck, M. (2003) All in a Day. Matfyzpress Prague: Matfyzpress.

Boas, H.C. (2002) Lexical or Syntactic Selection of Non-subcategorized Nominal Arguments? The case of German. In I. Rauch & G. Carr (Eds.), New Insights in Germanic Linguistics III (pp.9-26). New York: Peter Lang.

Boas, H.C. (2002) On Constructional Polysemy and Verbal Polysemy in Construction Grammar. Proceedings of the 2000 Western Conference on Linguistics, Vol. 12 Proceedings of the 2000 Western Conference on Linguistics, Vol. 12.

Boas, H.C. (2002) The Texas German Dialect Archive as a Tool for Analyzing Sound Change. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Resources and Tools in Field Linguistics held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Las Palmas, Spain: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Resources and Tools in Field Linguistics held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.

Boas, H.C. (2002) Bilingual FrameNet Dictionaries for Machine Translation. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. IV Las Palmas, Spain: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. IV.

Boas, H.C. (2002) On the Role of Semantic Constraints in Resultative Constructions. In R. Rapp (Ed.), Linguistics on the way into the new millennium. Vol. 1 (pp.35-44). Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang.

Boas, H.C. (2001) Frame Semantics as a Framework for describing Polysemy and Syntactic Structures of English and German Motion Verbs in Contrastive Computational Lexicography. Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2001 Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2001.

Boas, H.C. (2000) Optimal Syllabification of Yiddish First Grade Diminutives. Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics 2000, Vol. I Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics 2000, Vol. I.

Boas, H.C. (2000) Resultatives at the Crossroads between the Lexicon and Syntax: Where are they formed?. Proceedings of the 1999 Western Conference on Linguistics, Vol. 11 Proceedings of the 1999 Western Conference on Linguistics, Vol. 11.

Boas, H.C. (1998, September) Review of Historical English Syntax. Indogermanische Forschungen, 320-324.

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