Linguistics starts from a paradox. Every human society has language, yet these thousands of languages differ enormously, and still they share fundamental regularities. We understand each other through background noise, unfamiliar accents, and freshly coined words, and all automatically, without being able to explain how intuitively. Linguistic research exists to make this invisible competence and shared structures visible. Central to the research is treating language not as a single object but as a stack of structures, each with its own units and its own kind of regularity.
During my lecture, we explore these different layers and structures, starting with written text, excluding the physical process of speaking (Phonology and Phonetics). Morphology analyzes the smallest units that carry meaning. Syntax describes how words are assembled into phrases and sentences. Semantics discusses the expressions’ meaning. Pragmatics investigates how speakers use language in context. Thus, we move up the stack from small, fundamental building blocks to larger, meaning-laden, and finally socially embedded units, and no level can be reduced to the one below it.
With these fundamentals, we turn to Computational Linguistics and use the aforementioned layers and structures to automatically enrich text with information that enables downstream social science analysis, which repurposes and combines linguistic annotation to investigate how language is used in our society and what information can be extracted from written statements. We will focus on analyzing language on social media and AI-generated text, using computational approaches to analyze syntactic structure and semantic meaning.
Currently, I give the lecture series at Trier University. All materials, the full slide deck and primary literature, are available for enrolled students via StudIP. In the following series of notes on this website, I provide, for each content block, a high-level and abstract summary. Thus, it serves as additional teaching material and as a starting point for your own research. I link relevant sources and open material. If you are here for exam studying, let me warn you that these notes are not enough to pass the exam without studying the slide decks.