News

I’ve invited Dr. Thomas Schmidt to UT Austin on January 31, 2024, to talk about music, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. Come listen to his exciting talk, see the announcement here.

Issue 16 of the annual newsletter of the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) is published. Click HERE for the latest updates from the TGDP.

Together with John Benjamin, Karen Ewing, Maggie Gemmell, Karoline Kiefel, and Anja Moehring, I organized a panel “Learning new words with the German Frame-based Online Lexicon” at this year’s annual ACTFL convention in Chicago.

I’ve invited Prof. emeritus Glenn Gilbert to visit UT Austin to give a talk on his pioneering research in the 1960s and 1970s on Texas German. He has also donated more research record on Texas German to the TGDP.

I’ve invited author Thomas Meinecke to visit UT Austin to hold a reading of his novel (in progress) featuring Texas German. He also donated a set of audio and video recordings he made of Texas German speakers in the 1990s and early 2000s to the TGDP.

Munich in October!!! It’s not just the Oktoberfest that makes Munich a top attraction during this time of the year. Together with the University of Eichstaett, the University of Munich is hosting the German Abroad 5 conference, and the Texas German Dialect Project will be represented with 5 different talks.

New Podcast on Texas German! Listen to award-winning author and journalist Melvin E. Edwards’ podcast episode of “Real Life” on Texas German, entitled “Sprechen Sie Texas German, Y’all?”. Check it out here.

Returning to “normal.” After 4 years as Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies and 8 years as Director of the Linguistics Research Center, I am returning to a more normal faculty life, focusing on research, teaching, and service. I’ve been fortunate to have been working with wonderful staff, students, and colleagues during my roles as Chair and Director.

On August 21-23, 2023, the international workshop on “Focus on Minority Languages” will take place at UT Austin, organized by Verena Sauer. See [ here ] for the full program.

Today, a group of colleagues consisting of Oliver Czulo, Alexander Ziem, Thomas Schmidt, Hans C. Boas, Alexander Willich, Susanne Triesch, Gerard de Melo founded the Global FrameNet Association in Duesseldorf.

Together with my colleagues Jaakko Leino (Univ. of Helsinki) and Benjamin Lyngfelt (Univ. of Gothenburg) I presented a talk “What’s Construction Grammar doing Usage-Based?” at the 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Duesseldorf.

Just published: Freywald, Ulrike, Wiese, Heike, Boas, Hans C., Brizic, Katharina, Dammel, Antje, and Stephan Elspass. 2023. Deutsche Sprache der Gegenwart. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: JB Metzler. vii +323 pp.

Together with my colleagues Jaakko Leino (Univ. of Helsinki) and Benjamin Lyngfelt (Univ. of Gothenburg) I presented a talk “What do construction grammarians think about Construction Grammar?” at the 12th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Prague.

I’ll be co-organizing next year’s Annual Symposium of the Society for German American Studies at UT Austin, to take place April 4-6, 2024.

Matthias Warmuth successfully defends his Ph.D. dissertation “Phonological Convergence and Variation in a Dying Language Variety: The Case of Texas German.” Congratulations Matthias!!!

Historical 19th century Texas German letters. The Texas German Dialect Project has started scanning historical TX German letters from the Briscoe Center at UT Austin to study written Texas German, thereby complementing our insights into spoken TX German in the 20th and 21st centuries. The scanned letters will be deposited with the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

I am excited to announce that the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) has received a generous grant of $1,000,000 from an anonymous donor for its efforts to document and preserve Texas German. The funds will support training graduate and undergraduate students to learn these techniques and interview the remaining speakers of Texas German across the state. I am extremely thankful for this award, which enables the TGDP to continue to build awareness and appreciation for Texas German.

New publication (with Alexander Ziem): Debunking some myths about the role and relevance of (restricted) semantic role sets: Some thoughts on Ágel & Höllein 2021. In F. Gallez & M. Hermann (eds.). Cognition and Contrast. Festschrift for Sabine De Knop, 65-96. Brussels: Saint-Louis University Press.

Together with Maggie Gemmell, I co-presented at talk on teaching interactional frames to beginning German students, at the 17th International Conference of German Teachers in Vienna, Austria.

On May 16, 2022, I was honored to give a talk on Ideology in Dictionaries at the Academy of Sciences in Goettingen, Germany.

Story on 60 years of innovation and scholarship at the Linguistics Research Center (LRC) in Life & Letters. Read up on the accomplishments of the LRC, which I directed from 2012-2020.

Come and learn about dictionaries and how they are created and used! I’m organizing the Texas Symposium on Lexicography on the UT Austin campus on March 29th, 2022.

New publication! I’m excited to announce the publication of a new edited volume Directions for Pedagogical Construction Grammar, which was published by De Gruyter today.

Listen to an interesting podcast on the history and structure of Texas German, which got published today on Yellow of the Egg Podcast.

New publication just out: Boas, Hans C. 2021. Zwei Jahrzehnte digitale Dokumentation und Erforschung eines aussterbenden deutschen Auswandererdialekts: Das Texas German Dialect Project (2001-2021). Zeitschrift für deutschsprachige Kultur und Literatur 30, 29-268. [ PDF ]

The Texas German Dialect Project in the Department of Germanic Studies at UT Austin, which I founded in October 2001, is turning 20 years old. Happy Birthday TGDP!

This month, the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which I directed from 2012-2020 is turning 60 years old. Happy Birthday LRC !!!

Together with my colleagues Benjamin Lyngfelt (Univ. of Gothenburg) and Jaakko Leino (Univ. of Helsinki) I am organizing a round table discussion on “The current state of Construction Grammar” at the 11th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Antwerp, Belgium, August 18, 2021.

New book publication is out: Hans C. Boas & Steffen Hoeder (eds.). 2021. Constructions in Contact 2: Language Change, Multlingual Practices, and Additional Language Acquisition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

I’ve been invited to give a plenary lecture at the conference German Language Minorities Worldwide in Contrast: Case Studies, Methods and Corpora, to be held at the University of Bamberg, Germany, March 3-4, 2022.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has awarded me the Humboldt Research Award for my academic achievements.

Together with my colleague Steffen Hoeder (University of Kiel, Germany), I will be hosting a workshop on “Argument structure constructions in language contact” at the 11th International Conference on Construction Grammar, to be hosted August 18-20, 2021, at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

The Texas German Dialect Project publishes its 13th annual newsletter. Click HERE to download the newsletter as a PDF.

I just published a new paper on German speech islands. Boas, Hans C. 2020. Zur Vergleichbarkeit von Sprachinseldaten. Ein Plädoyer für eine “bottom-up” Methodologie im Rahmen der Konstruktionsgrammatik und der Frame Semantik (“On comparing speech island data. Developing a bottom-up approach using Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics”). In C. Földes (ed.), Kontaktvarietäten des Deutschen im Ausland. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. 66-88. (Hans C. Boas) [ PDF ]

I’ve been invited to present a lecture at the conference “Deutsche Pressesprache im Ausland” (German-language newspapers abroad) at the University of Erfurt, Germany, in November 2021.

Together with a three colleagues I just published a new paper on the German Frame-based Online Lexicon: Lorenz, Alexander, Crane, Cori, Benjamins, John, and Hans C. Boas. 2020. L2 German Learners’ Perceptions and Use of an Online Semantic Frame-Based Dictionary. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 53.2, 191-209. [ PDF ].

I’ve been invited as a plenary speaker at the conference “Rootedness and Acculturation: Experiences from German Immigrant Communities in the USA (1883-1918)” at the University of Bordeaux, France (Oct. 2021).

After serving for eight years as Director of the Linguistics Research Center at UT I will be on a one-year long leave to focus on completing my book manuscript on Frame Semantics.

I just published a new article on semantic frames: Boas, Hans C. 2020. A roadmap for determining the universal status of semantic frames. In R. Enghels, B. Defrancq, and M. Jansegers (eds.), New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. 21-52. [ PDF ]

I am excited to announce that the Texas German Dialect Project received a very generous donation (from an anonymous donor), which will fund the position of Graduate Research Assistant during the Academic Year 2020-21.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the Texas German Dialect Project has moved its interviews with Texas German speakers online. Using Zoom, members of the TGDP will continue interviewing Texas German speakers throughout the pandemic.

The program for German Abroad 4 in Windhoek, Namibia, is now online. Thanks to the members of the program committee to help select an exciting array of talks on German contact varieties around the world. See you in Namibia in March!

Together with Todd Krause of the Linguistics Research Center I participated in the Symposium on “Teaching Large General Linguistics Classes” at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans.

I am excited about a new donation to the Linguistics Research Center, which I direct. The “Bill Stutts Endowment for Linguistic Research” will help support graduate students conducting research at the Linguistics Research Center in the summer months of each academic year. This donation will enable the LRC to continue its mission to provide online resources for specialists and non-specialists to further their knowledge of ancient languages and cultures.

Great news about my home department! The German program in the Department of Germanic Studies at UT Austin has been designated a German Center of Excellence by the American Association of Teachers of German.

New book is out! Together with my colleague Marc Pierce, I’ve co-edited a volume entitled “New Directions for Historical Linguistics” (Brill, 2019), a follow-up publication to the 1968 volume “Directions for Historical Linguistics” (edited by Lehmann and Malkiel). Our volume also includes a paper by one of the original co-authors of a paper in the 1968 volume, William Labov.

I’m excited to announce that the workshop proposal on “Argument Structure Constructions in Language Contact,” proposed by Steffen Hoeder and me,  just got accepted for the 11th International Conference on Construction Grammar, to be held in Antwerp in August 2020.

As Director of the Linguistics Research Center I’m happy to announce that we have our second freely available lesson series with audio online, Old Norse. If you want to hear what the language of the Vikings sounded like, check it out here.

Get ready to go to the German Abroad 4 conference! It will take place in Namibia in March 2020. As head of the program committee, I just posted the call for papers on the LINGUIST List.

Today, the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation announced its support for the Texas German Dialect Project with funding for a year-long Graduate Research Assistant position. The funding will allow the TGDP to continue recording more of the remaining speakers of Texas German and to archive these recordings in the Texas German Dialect Archive. I am extremely grateful for the generous support by the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation.

I feel very honored to have been invited to present an invited plenary lecture at the Annual International Conference of the Seoul National University Korean Language Education Research Institute, October 2019.

I am excited to announce a test screening of the documentary film All Guet Things on Texas German on March 25, 2019, at UT Austin.

I feel very honored to have been invited to present a plenary talk at the 2020 Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable, to be held at UC Berkeley in April 2020.

I am excited to announce the release of our new co-edited book: Boas, Hans C. & Steffen Höder (eds.). 2018.  Constructions in Contact. Constructional perspectives on contact phenomena in Germanic languages.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. vi+316pp.

I have been invited to present a talk and lead a workshop at the end of March 2019 on Texas German as a part of “German Heritage Weekend” at Indiana University in Bloomington.

In July 2019, I will be presenting an invited lecture at the International Workshop German(ic) in language contact: Grammatical and sociolinguistic dynamics at the Free University of Berlin, Germany.

Together with the Texas German Dialect Project, I am contributing to the conference The German Language in (North) America Revisited, held at UT Austin Oct. 19-20, 2018 (organizer: Marc Pierce)

Today I begin my term as Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Our new book was just published in time for the 10th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Paris: Boas, Hans C. & Alexander Ziem (eds.). 2018. Constructional Approaches to Syntactic Structures in German. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Together with Steffen Hoeder (University of Kiel, Germany), I will be hosting a special session on “Languages in Contact” at the 10th International Conference on Construction Grammar, to be held July 16-20, 2018, at the Sorbonne in Paris.

The Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Randy Diehl, appointed me as Chair of Germanic Studies, effective September 1, 2018.

I am excited to announce that Ryan Dux (UT Ph.D. 2016) accepted a tenure track job at Sam Houston State University. Congratulations Ryan!

I am excited to announce that Alexander Lorenz defended his dissertation and accepted an offer for a tenure track job at the University of South Carolina (Upstate). Congratulations Alex !

I have been invited as a plenary speaker for the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of Finland, entitled Constructional semantics: Cognitive, functional and typological approaches, to take place at the University of Helsinki, August 24-25, 2018.

The Texas German Dialect Project publishes its 10th Annual Newsletter. Click here for a PDF copy.

I am organizing the conference Construcionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy 3 (CALP 3)  at the University of Texas at Austin, February 15-17, 2018. The call for papers can be found here.

Through a partnership with Brill Publishing, I’ve been able to organize a reprint of the famous 1968 volume “Directions for Historical Linguistics” (ed. by W.P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel). The reprint will be presented at the Roundtable “New Directions for Historical Linguistics” at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 23) in San Antonio, TX, July 31-August 4, 2017.

Ryan Dux (UT Ph.D. 2016) receives a prestigious Mellon/Volkswagen Postdoctoral fellowship to conduct research at the Institute for the German Language (Mannheim, Germany) during the 2017-2018 Academic Year. Congratulations Ryan!

I am co-organizing a Special Session Roundtable “New Directions for Historical Linguistics” at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 23) in San Antonio, TX, July 31-August 4, 2017. This exciting roundtable is the follow-up event to the Symposium “Directions for Historical Linguistics” held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 (organized by W.P. Lehmann).

I am co-organizing a panel on “The History of Texas German” at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 23) in San Antonio, TX, July 31 – August 4, 2017.

Conference program posted for Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference 23 (GLAC). I am on the organization committee. The University of Texas at Austin, April 20-23, 2017.

I will be organizing the third conference “Constructional Approaches to Language Pedagogy” (CALP-3), which will take place at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2018. The call for papers will be published in early April 2017.

I’m happy to announce that my Ph.D. student Annika VanNoy successfully defended her dissertation “Culture specific aspects of semantic frames in multilingual frame descriptions.” Congratulations Annika !!!

I’ve been invited to Southwest University in Chongqing (P.R. China) to give a series of lectures on Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics in April and May 2017.

I’ve been invited to give a presentation at the symposium Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding, which takes place as a part of the Spring 2017 symposium of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University (California), in March 2017.

Invited session on “Linguistics at the University of Texas” at NAAHoLS meeting in January 2017. I’ll be co-presenting a paper on “Analog to digital: The Linguistics Research Center” (together with Todd Krause) at the joint NAAHoLS – LSA winter meeting in Austin, TX.

Maggie Gemmell (Ph.D., 2015), who wrote her dissertation under my direction, accepted an offer for a one-year long position as Adjunct Instructor of German in the Division of Humanities and Culture at Southern Oregon University. Congratulations Maggie !!!

Program posted for German Abroad 2 Conference. The program for the conference German Abroad 2, to take place at UT Austin (Nov. 2-3, 2016) is now posted online.

GLAC 2017 in Austin, Texas ! I am on the organizing committee that will host the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference 23 in April 2017 (chair or organizing committee is my colleague Marc Pierce). Watch out for the call for papers some time in September 2016.

Invited Plenary Lecture at IDS. The Institut fuer Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim (Germany), has invited me to give a plenary lecture at their annual conference in March 2017.

Ryan Dux, who will be graduating with his Ph.D. in May 2016, just accepted a one-year long position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. Congratulations Ryan !!!

David Huenlich, who recently finished his Ph.D. on multiethnolects under my co-supervision, has accepted a position as junior researcher with the Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. David will be involved in researching the linguistic integration of refugees in Germany. Congratulations David!

Plenary speaker at IWODA’16. The University of Santiago de Compostela has invited me as a plenary speaker for the Santiago de Compostela International Workshop on Discourse Analysis in October 2016.

Summer teaching at the Viadrina! In May and June of 2016, I will be participating again in the faculty exchange between UT Austin and the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. I will be teaching a class on language and politics as well as a class on language contact and language death.

Special Session on Language Change at the MLA. I am organizing a special session on “(Re)Living Language Change” at the 2016 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association in Austin, TX.

German Abroad 2 Conference at UT Austin! I am organizing the Conference “German Abroad 2” at UT Austin, from Nov. 2-4, 2016: “German Abroad 2: Perspectives from variationist sociolinguistics, language contact, and multilingualism.” Deadline for submission of abstracts: March 1, 2016.

The Chicago Linguistic Society has invited me as a plenary speaker for their 52nd annual meeting, April 21-23, 2016.

World premiere of “Texanische Liebeslieder” by David Hanlon with lyrics by Kathleen Kelly (on the UT Austin campus, August 28, 2015), based on transcripts of interviews stored in the Texas German Dialect Archive. We are thrilled that the interviews and transcriptions of the Texas German Dialect Project have formed the basis of such wonderful and inspiring music about German immigrants and their descendants in Texas. Click “here” for music clip.

The German news show Die Tagesschau (First Channel of German Public Broadcasting TV) airs a clip on Texas German, including an interview with me.

I have been invited as a plenary speaker for the conference Categories in Grammar at the FU Berlin, Germany, to be held July 2-4, 2015.

Our new book Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar was published this week by John Benjamins (editors Hans Boas and Francisco Gonzalvez-Garcia).

Together with my colleague Steffen Höder (University of Kiel, Germany), I organized an exciting workshop on applying constructional concepts to the study and analysis of language contact phenomena. The workshop was a part of the 8th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Osnabrück, Germany, in September 2014.

On October 25, 2014, the Texas German Dialect Project will host a public outreach event at Rudi Lechner’s restaurant in Houston (4:30 – 6 p.m.). The goal is to connect to Houston area supporters of the TGDP.

The Texas German Dialect Project is featured in a radio show by the “Deutschlandfunk”. Click here for the text, and here for the audio.

My former Ph.D. student Karen Roesch (UT Austin, 2009) accepted a job offer to join the Indiana University – Purdue University faculty at Indianapolis as Assistant Professor, Hoyt-Reichmann Scholar of German-American Studies, and Director of the Max Kade German American Resource Center as of August 1, 2014.

Together with my colleagues Stefan Engelberg and Kristel Proost, I am organizing a workshop on verb classes and valency at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany (June 2014).

Together with my colleague Juergen Streeck, I initiated an official academic cooperation with the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany. One major research focus of this cooperation is Frame Semantics, specifically contrastive lexicography and Construction Grammar. Another one is language contact.

I have been invited as a plenary speaker at the conference “German abroad: variationist, language contact, and multilingualism research perspectives” to be held at the University of Vienna in July 2014.

Together with Steffen Hoeder (University of Kiel, Germany), I am organizing a workshop on Construction Grammar and Language Contact at the 8th International Conference on Construction Grammar, which will take place in Osnabrueck in September 2014. Click here for more details.

Dean Randy Diehl appoints Hans C. Boas to the Raymond Dickson, Alton C. Allen, and Dillon Anderson Centennial Professorship in the College of Liberal Arts at UT.

The Texas German Dialect Project is featured in the July issue of Texas Monthly. Click here for article.

The Texas German Dialect Project is featured on the BBC (click here) and NPR’s All Things Considered (click here).

I have been invited as a plenary speaker to the colloquium on “Contrastive linguistics: constructional and functional approaches” at the University of Ghent, Belgium, to take place in February 2014.

The Texas German Dialect Project is featured in a front-page story by the Houston Chronicle. Click here for article.

I have been invited as a plenary speaker to the 8th International Conference on Construction Grammar in Osnabrueck, Germany, to take place in September 2014. Click here to see the conference website.

The Texas German Dialect Project, which I founded in 2001 and which I am still directing, was featured in three major newspapers in Europe. Der Standard, Leipziger Volkszeitung, and Neue Presse Hannover.

Together with Ivan Sag of Stanford University I published an edited volume titled “Sign-based Construction Grammar” with CSLI Publications in Stanford. This book brings together research in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Berkeley Construction Grammar. Click here to visit the website.

I have been invited as a plenary speaker at the Conference on Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at the University of Freiburg, Germany. January 24-26, 2013. Click here to visit the website.

The Provost of the University of Texas has appointed me as Director of the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas, effective September 1, 2012.

During the summer semester 2012, I have been invited to teach a summer course on Language Contact in Texas at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

I have been invited as a speaker for the Languages Abroad Workshop on Heritage Language at the University of Gothenburg, Oct. 24-25, 2012.

I have been invited as a plenary speaker at the first International Symposium …Continue Reading

I just learned from the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts that I will be promoted to full professor, effective September 1, 2012.

I have been invited as a plenary speaker at the Annual Meeting of the German Society for Applied Linguistics (GAL) in Erlangen, Germany …Continue Reading

This month, the Texas German Dialect Project is celebrating its 10 year anniversary at …Continue Reading

I have been offered a one-year long fellowship at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Goettingen.

I just learned that I will be an invited speaker at this year’s annual meeting …Continue Reading

Interview on Texas German for Texas Public Radio show about German heritage in Texas. …Continue Reading

The governing board of the European Master in Lexicography voted …Continue Reading

At this year’s annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Pittsburgh, PA, …Continue Reading

Today I learned that I was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the …Continue Reading