Thispaper investigates the L2 acquisition of clausal syntax in post-puberty learnersof German and Swedish regarding V2, VP headedness and verb particleconstructions. The learner data are tested against L2 theories according towhich lower structural projections (VP) are acquired before higher functionalprojections (IP, CP), VP syntax is unproblematic (invulnerable), but where grammatical operations related to thetopmost level of syntactic structure (CP) are acquired late (e.g. Platzack’s(2001) vulnerable C-domain). It willbe shown that such theories do not hold water: native speakers of Swedishlearning German and native speakers of German learning Swedish both master V2from early on. At the same time, these learners exhibit a nontargetlike syntaxat lower structural levels: residual VO in the case of the Swedish-L1 learnersof German, and persistent nontarget transitive verb particle constructions inthe German-L1 learners of Swedish. I argue that these findings are bestexplained by assuming full transfer of L1 syntax (e.g. Schwartz & Sprouse 1996).

This study eplores the language maintenance efforts of Turkish heritage-speaker families in Sweden and their relations to state-level language policy from three angles. First, Swedish mainstream language ideology is described as it manifests in legislation, language policy and mother-tongue tuition. Then, the language practices of the families of 105 Turkish/Swedish children (age 4 to 7) are characterised via a questionnaire survey. This is complemented by findings from a follow-up study two years later, where ten of the families participated in interviews and home observations. Parents preferred to speak Turkish and wanted their child to learn and speak Turkish alongside Swedish. Another common denominator was the children's early, extensive preschool attendance. Parent-child interaction was predominantly Turkish, although second-generation parents raised in Sweden reported higher uses of the majority language Swedish. Exposure to Swedish increased over time due to schooling, sibling interaction and media use, but third-generation children still spoke Turkish to a considerable degree. In their heritage-language maintenance efforts, many parents enlisted the support of grandparents, mother-tongue tuition, and literacy activities. Parents generally considered Turkish and Swedish equally important and showed low levels of anxiety regarding their children's bilingualism, unlike what has been reported in studies of the same ethnolinguistic group in other national settings. The interviews revealed that parents who consulted Swedish health professionals and teachers were advised to speak and support the heritage language (Turkish) and maximise exposure to it in the home. Whilst unusual from an international perspective, this is in line with the official multilingual language ideology in Sweden.

This study examines macrostructural aspects of narrative skills in 52 bilingual Swedish- and English-speaking children age 5-7. Elicited fictional story production and comprehension tasks were administered in parallel fashion in both Swedish and English (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012). Scores on MAIN were compared across languages; moreover, story structure components in the narratives and answers to probe questions were qualitatively analyzed. Age effects (5-year-olds vs. 6-7-year-olds) for macrostructure production and narrative comprehension were evident, but no effect for language (Swedish/English). The results suggest that story structure is invariant across a bilingual child’s two languages at a given age, with similar awareness of the intentions and goal-directed behavior of the story protagonists, irrespective of language.

In a recent study of the clause-initial position in verb-second declaratives (the prefield), Bohnacker & Rosén (2008) found significant differences between native Swedish and German concerning the frequencies with which constituents occurred in the prefield, as well as qualitative differences concerning the mapping of information structure and linear word order: Swedish exhibited a stronger tendency than German to place new information, the so-called rheme, later in the clause. Swedish-speaking learners of German transferred these patterns from their L1 to German. Their sentences were syntactically well-formed but had Swedish-style prefield frequencies and a strong pattern of Rheme Later, which native Germans perceive as unidiomatic, as an acceptability judgment and a rewrite-L2texts task showed. The present study extends Bohnacker & Rosén's work in three ways. Learners of the reverse language combination (L1 German, L2 Swedish) are investigated to see whether similar phenomena also manifest themselves there. Secondly, written and oral data from highly advanced learners are examined to see whether the learners’ persistent problems can be overcome by extensive immersion (3, 6 and 9 years of L2 exposure). Thirdly, besides investigating theme–rheme (old vs. new information), some consideration is given to another information-structural level, background vs. focus. The learners are found to overuse the prefield at first, with non-Swedish, German-style frequency patterns (e.g. low proportions of clause-initial expletives and high proportions of clause-initial rhematic elements). This is interpreted as evidence for L1 transfer of information-structural or discourse-pragmatic preferences. After 6 and 9 years, a substantial increase in clause-initial expletive subjects, clefts and lightweight given elements is indicative of development towards the target. The findings are related to current generative theorizing on the syntax-pragmatics interface, where it is often maintained that the integration of multiple types of information is one of the hardest areas for L2 learners to master.

This paper investigates patterns of article use in monolingual early child Swedish and in child-directed adult speech. Article omissions in the adult data are found to be more widespread than previously assumed, especially articleless, “bare” singular count nouns (e.g. sten ‘stone’ instead of en sten ‘a stone’) and article omissions in doubly determined nominals (e.g. lilla tummen (little thumb-the, ‘the little thumb’) instead of den lilla tummen (the little thumb-the; ‘the little thumb’). Such omissions in the input may arguably influence the course of acquisition. In the two children studied, an initial determinerless stage (1;3-1;7) is followed by a stage of optional articles (1;8-1;11). Targetlike article provision is reached at 2;0, which is early compared to most other Germanic languages. Definite enclitic articles (e.g. -en ‘the’ as in sten-en ‘the stone’) emerge at an earlier age and are produced at higher frequencies than indefinite prenominal articles (e.g. en ‘a’ as in en sten ‘a stone’) and at an earlier age and at much higher frequencies than definite prenominal articles (e.g. den ‘the’ as in den lilla tummen ‘the little thumb’). These child frequency patterns appear to replicate those of the adult caregivers. However, input frequency is argued to be an insufficient explanation for Swedish article acquisition, because of striking mismatches in child and adult article use in other areas, especially bare nouns. Investigations of child-directed adult speech are nevertheless important because they tell us what the immediate target looks like for the young child, which may be different from what linguists and reference grammars tend to assume.

This paper explores family language policy in Turkish-speaking families in Sweden. Questionnaires were administered to the parents of 105 Turkish/Swedish children (age 4 − 7), targeting family language practices (including parent–parent, parent–child, child–parent, child-and-sibling conversation and language-fostering activities such as joint book reading, storytelling and mother tongue tuition), and parental language beliefs and attitudes. Despite much diversity in family types concerning parents’ education, country of birth, native language and ethnic affiliation (e.g. Kurdish), common traits emerge: There is a strong focus on the transmission of Turkish in the home, in the face of early and extensive Swedish pre-school attendance. Parents mostly speak Turkish with the child. However, Sweden-born parents report higher uses of Swedish in the home, and sibling interaction also drives a shift towards Swedish. Parental education appears to affect Turkish joint reading activities. Most parents consider proficiency in Turkish and Swedish as equally important for their children. Parents who rank Turkish higher do not necessarily show more maintenance efforts, pointing to some inconsistency between attitudes and practices. Overall, the family language practices observed indicate strong bilingual ideologies and strong language maintenance ideologies, in line with Swedish official state-level language policy, which supports bilingualism and minority language maintenance.

Home language education has a long tradition in Sweden and includes the teaching of Turkish to children who grow up bilingually with Swedish as their societal language and Turkish as their home and heritage language. The present paper characterises Turkish mother tongue instruction (MTI) and discusses its current status in the light of Swedish language policy, as it is reflected in official documents (legislation, policy papers and curricula) vis-a-vis its practical implementation by the municipalities. The paper also presents findings from a research project on Turkish-speaking preschool and primary school children and their families, concerning MTI attendance and attitudes towards Turkish, as well as on the experiences of Turkish MTI teachrs in a Swedish setting.

Comprehension of texts and understanding of questions is a cornerstone of successful human communication. Whilst reading comprehension has been thoroughly investigated in the last decade, there is surprisingly little research on children’s comprehension of picture stories, particularly for bilinguals. This can be partially explained by the lack of cross-culturally robust, cross-linguistic instruments targeting early narration. This book presents an inference-based model of narrative comprehension and a tool that grew out of a large-scale European project on multilingualism. Covering a range of language settings, the book uses the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives to answer the question which narrative comprehension skills (bilingual) children can be expected to master at a certain age, and explores how such comprehension is affected (or not affected) by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Linking theory to method, the book will appeal to researchers in linguistics and psychology and graduate students interested in narrative, multilingualism, and language acquisition.

This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 202 Arabic/Swedish-speaking and Turkish/Swedish-speaking bilingual children aged 4-7 growing up in Sweden, in their home/minority language (Arabic, Turkish) and in Swedish. We explore how vocabulary is affected by age, age of onset, socio-economic status (SES), and minority language exposure in the family (via parents) and via home-language (mother tongue) instruction. The comprehension and production of nouns and verbs was assessed with the Arabic, Turkish and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs, Haman m.fl. 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In this cross-sectional study, there was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores, though the effect was more pronounced for the majority language Swedish, and less so for the home language. Length of exposure had a positive effect on Swedish scores. For minority language vocabulary, language use in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic or Turkish to them had significantly higher vocabulary scores in Arabic/Turkish than other children. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of receptive and expressive vocabulary in bilingual children.

This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 100 Arabic-Swedish-speaking children ages 4;0–7;11 growing up in Sweden. We explore how vocabulary in this under-researched population is affected by age, socio-economic status (SES), age of onset, daily exposure and home language use in the family (parents, siblings, extended family and friends) and via mother tongue instruction. Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs were assessed with the Arabic and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs; Haman et al., 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In our cross-sectional study, comprehension was better in the minority home language (Arabic) than in the majority language (Swedish) for the youngest (4-year-old children), but this difference levelled out at ages 5, 6 and 7. There was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores in both languages. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). Age of onset and daily exposure had a measurable effect on Swedish vocabulary scores, whilst for Arabic, daily exposure and input in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic to them had significantly higher Arabic vocabulary scores than other children. The complex interplay of environmental and individual-level factors on vocabulary skills is also illustrated by four case studies. These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of vocabulary in bilingual children.

This paper investigates distributional patterns concerning the prefield and expletive subjects in two closely related languages, Swedish and Dutch, and in nonnative learners of Swedish. Native (Swedish, n=17; Dutch, n=17) and nonnative speakers (adult Dutch-speaking learners of Swedish, n=17) completed an oral picture description task and an unedited informal writing task. The overall frequencies with which constituents (subject vs. adverbial vs. object) occurred in the prefield were similar for all three groups in the oral data, though expletive subjects were more frequent in Swedish. In the written data, Swedish showed a more pronounced subject-initial pattern than Dutch. Distributional differences between Swedish and Dutch were smaller than previously reported for Swedish vs. German (Bohnacker & Rosén 2008, Bohnacker 2010). Learners mostly produced syntactically well-formed utterances but overused elliptic V1 clauses with overt postverbal subject (unattested in native Swedish), which can be attributed to syntactic transfer from L1 Dutch. Learners underused certain other word orders, namely prefield doubling (place adverbial + resumptive så) and postverbal expletive subjects, which in the oral genre were extremely frequent in native Swedish. The extent to which L2 learners produced postverbal expletives was found to be related to individual patterns in L1 Dutch, and for Dutch to be affected by regional origin (Netherlands vs. Flanders) and transferred to L2 Swedish.

This study investigates story comprehension in 124 typically-developing children aged 4-6 growing up in Sweden, using the LITMUS-MAIN (Multilingual Assessment instrument for Narratives, Gagarina et al. 2012). 72 Swedish monolinguals and 52 Swedish-English bilinguals from similar socio-economic backgrounds told two MAIN stories each and answered standardised questions that probe inferencing of goals and emotions of story characters. Overall comprehension scores were calculated per narrative, and responses to individual questions were analysed. Results were compared across age groups, languages, and tasks. Already at age 4, and certainly at age 6, overall comprehension scores were high, indicating good general understanding of the stories. Scores differed significantly between tasks, suggesting that comprehension of MAIN Cat/Dog is easier than Baby Birds/Baby Goats. For both tasks, protagonists’ goals were understood well at age 4, approaching ceiling (>90%) at age 5-6. Internal states as initiating events were also relatively well understood. However, many children struggled to infer emotional reactions of protagonists when this necessitated taking the whole plotline into account. We suggest that the processing abilities of the average 6-year-old are not yet developed enough to master every aspect of inferential understanding probed on the MAIN. Results held across languages and mono-/bilinguals, suggesting that they generalize.

The empirical evidence for whether narrative macrostructure skills are shared between a bilingua child's two languages is inconclusive, and it is not known how macrostructure (overall story structure) is influenced by general language provficiency and amount of exposure. The present study investigates these issues in 100 Turkish-Swedish bilingual 4- to-7-year-old childrn growing up in Sweden. Oral narratives were elicited in both Turkish and Swedish with two picture-based tasks from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) in the telling mode. We investigated to what extent the language of elicitation influences bilingual children's macrostructure (story structure, episodic complexity), and explored effects of age, narrative task, narrative length, expressive vocabulary and language exposure, both separately and combined, on macrostructure in the respective language. Story structure and episodic complexity were found to increase similarly with age in both Turkish and Swedish from 4 to 7 years. Scores did not differ between the two MAIN storytelling tasks. Expressive vocabulary and narrative lenght influenced story structure scores positively and similarly in both languages. Daily language exposure and length of exposure to Sweidhs did not show any significant effect. The results can be interpreted in support of a carry-over of narrative macrostructural skills between the two languages.

This paper investigates vocabulary production in the minority home languages of 40 Turkish-Swedish and 38 German-Swedish bilingual preschoolers aged 4;0–6;11, growing up in Sweden. We explore how age, SES, and exposure via mother-tongue instruction and home language use in the family affect child vocabulary skills. This has not previously been investigated in Sweden. Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs; Haman, Łuniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015) were used to test noun and verb production in Turkish and German. Background information was collected using a parental questionnaire. The two bilingual groups performed equally well in their respective home languages, Turkish and German. There were no effects of age, socio-economic status (SES) or mother-tongue instruction on vocabulary. However, input in the home setting had a clear effect. Children whose parents used the home language to the child and to each other had significantly higher vocabulary production scores. Having additional home-language input providers such as friends also affected the scores. These results from a Swedish context echo findings from studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of expressive vocabulary.

This paper investigates the second language acquisition of Persian object marking by 237 nativeBalochi-speaking children from age eight to eleven. The combination of Balochi and Persian has not beenstudied from an acquisitional perspective, although it widely occurs in southeastern Iran. This paperstudies the second language (L2) development of direct and indirect object marking after two and threeyears of exposure to Persian at school, vs. a control group of 133 monolingual native Persian children ofsimilar age and socio-economic background. Beginning learners predominantly use non-targetlike objectmarking constructions reminiscent of Balochi, whilst there is a clear trend towards Persian-style objectmarking in the more advanced learners. These findings suggest that L2 learners initially transfer core aspectsof their native grammar to their interlanguage Persian. The picture is complicated by the existenceof differential object marking in Balochi and Persian and the somewhat different writing patterns of nativeand non-native learners.

This paper investigates the influence of the first language (L1), here Swedish, on the acquisition of syntax and discourse pragmatics in a closely related second language (L2), here German, by looking at the information structure of Verb-Second clauses. Even though almost any type of element can occur in the so-called ‘prefield’, i.e. the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, we document language-specific patterns for native-speaker corpora: The frequencies of prefield constituent types differ substantially between German and Swedish, and Swedish postpones new (‘rhematic’) information and instead fills the prefield with given (‘thematic’) elements and elements of no or low informational value (e.g. expletives) to a far greater extent than German. Using oral production data from Bohnacker (2005, 2006) and new written production data from Rosén (2006), we compare Swedish learners of German at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels to native controls, matched for age and genre. These learners master the syntactic properties of V2, but start their sentences in nonnative ways. They overapply the Swedish principle of “rheme later” in their L2 German, indicating L1 transfer at the interface of syntax and information-structure, especially for structures that are frequent in the L1 (e.g. subject-initial clauses, expletive-initial clauses, fronted thematic objects das ‘it/this’). Implications of these findings for language teaching are discussed.

This paper investigates the interaction of syntax and discourse in two closely related languages, Swedish and German, and identifies language-specific distributional patterns and discourse-pragmatic differences concerning the clause-initial ‘prefield’ position of verb-second clauses. New corpus data indicate that Swedish has a much stronger tendency than German to place new information later in the clause. Swedish uses the prefield mainly for informationally given elements and expletives, whilst German regularly allows new information in clause-initial position. The stricter Swedish constraints on what can and does occur in the prefield have repercussions for L2 acquisition at the grammar-pragmatics interface. The paper discusses data from native speakers of Swedish learning German as a foreign language, showing that mastery of pure V2 syntax is well in advance of appropriate discourse-pragmatic use of that syntax. Syntactic and pragmatic transfer from Swedish results in L2 texts that are unidiomatic and not fully cohesive from a native-speaker perspective.

This article investigates the information structure of verb-second (V2) declaratives in Swedish, German, and nonnative German. Even though almost any type of element can occur in the so-called prefield, the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, we have found language-specific patterns in native-speaker corpora: The frequencies of prefield constituent types differ substantially between German and Swedish, and Swedish postpones new (rhematic) information and instead fills the prefield with given (thematic) elements and elements of no or low informational value (e.g., expletives) to a far greater extent than German. We compare Swedish learners of German to native controls matched for age and Genre (Bohnacker 2005, 2006; Rosén 2006). These learners master the syntactic properties of V2 but start their sentences in nonnative ways. They overapply the Swedish principle of rheme later in their second language German, indicating first language (L1) transfer at the interace of syntax and information structure, especially for structures that are frequent in the L1.

This study investigates story comprehension in 100 bilingual Turkish-Swedish children aged 4 to 7 years, growing up in Sweden with Turkish as their home language and Swedish as the societal language. Information about language development, exposure and other background factors was obtained via parental questionnaires. In both languages, children told two picture-based stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012, 2019) and answered standardised comprehension questions that probe inferencing of goals and emotions of story characters. Overall comprehension scores and response accuracies to individual questions were calculated. Story comprehension was compared across ages, languages and tasks, and related to performance on Turkish and Swedish vocabulary tasks (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks, CLT, Haman et al., 2015). A qualitative analysis explored characteristics of the MAIN picture sequences and the type of inference required to score correct on comprehension questions.

Overall comprehension scores did not differ between Turkish and Swedish at group level. Comprehension scores increased significantly with age in both languages. This increase was steeper in the majority language Swedish. Younger children (age 4-5) often performed well in Turkish, whilst more older children (age 6-7) performed well in Swedish. In both languages, older children reached relatively high scores, but did not yet master all aspects of inferential story understanding as probed by MAIN. Regression models indicate that a large part of the variance in story comprehension can be explained by age and expressive vocabulary knowledge (CLT) in the respective language. Individual case studies of exceptionally poor story comprehenders vs high performers also suggest that story comprehension and vocabulary skills are linked, but moreover that MAIN comprehension is influenced by language input and use in and outside the home.

An interesting task effect was found, indicating that the comprehension measure for the MAIN Cat and Dog picture sequences is easier than for Baby Birds/Baby Goats – even when they are administered in the very same mode. The task influenced children’s comprehension performance more than the language of testing did. Turkish and Swedish showed the same overall response patterns, with very high vs low performance on certain individual questions. We argue that due to subtle differences in the pictorial stimuli, parallel and seemingly identical comprehension questions require inferences with rather different levels of difficulty. Comprehension scores should therefore not be straightforwardly compared across MAIN tasks.

We describe data collected among 138 migration experts about the repercussions of scenarios of social change on migration between the Middle East & North Africa and Europe, during the period 2021-2030. Scenarios include changes in the cultural, demographic, economic, and political determinants of migration in sending and receiving countries. Assessments focus on the change in the number of family, work, and return migrants, the number of refugees, and the likelihood of achieving safe, orderly, and regular migration. Experts were at the moment of the survey active in European research centers or European (supra-) national governmental or civil society organizations. The survey features a factorial design, which allows for identifying a causal relationship between the experts' assessments and the scenarios of social change. Our data may be used to estimate projection models of future migration flows, map out what experts consider as critical migration issues for the region, and identify areas of agreement or disagreement between them. As such, our dataset may illuminate decision-making regarding migration policies in Europe and beyond.

Finding the year of writing for a historical text is of crucial importance to historical research. However, the year of original creation is rarely explicitly stated and must be inferred from the text content, historical records, and codicological clues. Given a transcribed text, machine learning has successfully been used to estimate the year of production. In this paper, we present an overview of several estimation approaches for historical text archives spanning from the 12th century until today.

This paper is a condensed report on the third year of the Touche lab on argument retrieval held at CLEF 2022. With the goal to foster and support the development of technologies for argument mining and argument analysis, we organized three shared tasks in the third edition of Touche: (a) argument retrieval for controversial topics, where participants retrieve a gist of arguments from a collection of online debates, (b) argument retrieval for comparative questions, where participants retrieve argumentative passages from a generic web crawl, and (c) image retrieval for arguments, where participants retrieve images from a focused web crawl that show support or opposition to some stance.

Nasal presents in Proto-Indo-European have been linked to higher valence, as seen in Vedic, Greek, Slavic, and Germanic. Hittite employs an infix -nin- to roots, and recent studies have confirmed its causitivizing and transitivizing functions. However, exactly what criteria of causativity and transitivity are affected by the infix remains ambiguous. This thesis set out to investigate this impact philologically by comparing infixed verb forms with other derived stems. The analysis revealed that -nin- enhanced the different transitive and causative aspects of verbs across different semantic groups. For movement verbs, -nin- increases the involvement of additional participants, thereby adding complexity to the action. In non-causatives, -nin- refines the verb’s action without altering its non-causative nature. In factitives, -nin- enhances the intentionality and result-oriented nature of verbs, making actions more deliberate and impactful. Finally, in real causative verbs, -nin- intensifies the direct causation effect, linking the subject’s actions more explicitly to the consequences experienced by the object. The findings not only confirm previous scholarship regarding the connection between -nin- and transitivity and causativity but also provide a more detailed analysis concerning exactly what criteria are impacted and in which contexts.

We present initial exploratory work on illuminating the long-standingquestion of areal versus genealogical connections in South Asia using computa-tional data visualization tools. With respect to genealogy, we focus on the sub-classification of Indo-Aryan, the most ubiquitous language family of South Asia. Theintent here is methodological: we explore computational methods for visualizinglarge datasets of linguistic features, in our case 63 features from 200 languagesrepresenting four language families of South Asia, coming out of a digitized versionof Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. To this dataset we apply phylogenetic soft-ware originally developed in the context of computational biology for clustering thelanguages and displaying the clusters in the form of networks. We further exploremultiple correspondence analysis as a way of illustrating how linguistic featurebundles correlate with extrinsically defined groupings of languages (genealogicaland geographical). Finally, map visualization of combinations of linguistic featuresand language genealogy is suggested as an aid in distinguishing genealogical andareal features. On the whole, our results are in line with the conclusions of earlierstudies: Areality and genealogy are strongly intertwined in South Asia, the tradi-tional lower-level subclassification of Indo-Aryan is largely upheld, and there is aclearly discernible areal east–west divide cutting across language families.

Like many other research fields, linguistics is entering the age of big data. We are now at a point where it is possible to see how new research questions can be formulated and old research questions addressed from a new angle or established results verified on the basis of exhaustive collections of data, rather than small, carefully selected samples. For example, South Asia is often mentioned in the literature as a classic example of a linguistic area, but there is no systematic, empirical study substantiating this claim. Examination of genealogical and areal relationships among South Asian languages requires a large-scale quantitative and qualitative comparative study, encompassing more than one language family. Further, such a study cannot be conducted manually, but needs to draw on extensive digitized language resources and state-of-the-art computational tools. We present some preliminary results of our large-scale investigation of the genealogical and areal relationships among the languages of this region, based on the linguistic descriptions available in the 19 tomes of Grierson's monumental Linguistic Survey of India (1903-1927), which is currently being digitized with the aim of turning the linguistic information in the LSI into a digital language resource suitable for a broad array of linguistic investigations.

In this chapter we describe a multilingual extension of Swedish FrameNet++, intended to address research questions of a broad comparative nature, in genealogical, areal and typological linguistics, focusing on the integration into Swedish FrameNet++ of so-called core vocabularies, used in several linguistic subfields in order to conduct massive comparative studies involving large numbers of languages. Specifically, we describe the inclusion of two such lexical databases covering several hundred South Asian languages, with the aim of investigating areal and genealogical connections among these languages.

CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), which aims at (a) making extensive language-based materials available as primary research data to the humanities and social sciences (HSS); and (b) offering state-of-the-art language technology (LT) as an eresearch tool for this purpose, positioning CLARIN centrally in what is often referred to as the digital humanities (DH). The Swedish CLARIN node Swe-Clarin was established in 2015 with funding from the Swedish Research Council.

In this paper, we describe the composition and activities of Swe-Clarin, aiming at meeting the requirements of all HSS and other researchers whose research involves using text and speech as primary research data, and spreading the awareness of what Swe-Clarin can offer these research communities. We focus on one of the central means for doing this: pilot projects conducted in collaboration between HSS researchers and Swe-Clarin, together formulating a research question, the addressing of which requires working with large language-based materials. Four such pilot projects are described in more detail, illustrating research on rhetorical history, second-language acquisition, literature, and political science. A common thread to these projects is an aspiration to meet the challenge of conducting research on the basis of very large amounts of textual data in a consistent way without losing sight of the individual cases making up the mass of data, i.e., to be able to move between Moretti’s “distant” and “close reading” modes.

While the pilot projects clearly make substantial contributions to DH, they also reveal some needs for more development, and in particular a need for document-level access to the text materials. As a consequence of this, work has now been initiated in Swe-Clarin to meet this need, so that Swe-Clarin together with HSS scholars investigating intricate research questions can take on the methodological challenges of big-data language-based digital humanities.

We present our work aiming at turning the linguistic material available in Grierson's classical Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) from a printed discursive textual description into a formally structured digital language resource, a database suitable for a broad array of linguistic investigations of the languages of South Asia. While doing so, we develop state-of-the-art language technology for automatically extracting the relevant grammatical information from the text of the LSI, and interactive linguistic information visualization tools for better analysis and comparisons of languages based on their structural and functional features.

There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.