Institute for the German Language Mannheim (IDS)

The Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim was founded in 1964. It is the central non-university research institution for the study and documentation of the German language, its contemporary use and modern history. A member of the Leibniz Association, the IDS is funded half by the Federal Republic of Germany and half by the state of Baden-Württemberg, with financial contributions from other states as well.

The Institute’s research projects are predominantly long term projects, which make it necessary to work in larger research groups. On a number of projects, the IDS therefore collaborates with project teams and independent researchers from universities.

Departments of the IDS:

Department of Lexical Studies

Profile: The research focus of the Department of Lexical Studies (under the direction of Professor Dr. Stefan Engelberg) is the lexical inventory of the German language, both present and in its recent history. Currently there are 14 research projects studying different types of lexical items, such as neologisms, foreign words, verbs with argument structures, phrasemes and the vocabulary of political discourse. These types of lexical items are processed lexicographically and recorded, to contribute to the development of linguistic theory. Research is based on extensive empirical studies, mostly in the field of corpus linguistics.

Website of the Department of Lexical Studies

Department of Grammar

Profile: The research focus of the Department of Grammar (under the direction of Professor Dr. Angelika Wöllstein) is grammatical structures in contemporary German. Based on modern theoretical and methodological standards in the field of German linguistics, research is conducted contrastively and typologically on the one hand, and on the basis of corpora on the other hand. Statistical methods, as well as methods from computer linguistics and text technology are used to describe and develop grammatical knowledge. Online information systems, such as grammis 2.0, ProGr@mm and EuroGr@mm, are available to anyone interested in linguistics. The head office of the Council for German Orthography is also assigned to the department.

Website of the Grammar Department

Department of Pragamtics

Profile: The research focus of the Department of Pragmatics (under the direction of Professor Dr. Arnulf Deppermann) is the spoken German language and verbal actions in conversations. This is the topic of three long-term research projects:

Verbal-communicative processes for the documentation of comprehension in verbal interaction
Variations of the spoken German language
Migration linguistics

Website of the IDS Pragmatics Department

Reasearch Infrastructure Programme

Profile: The Research Infrastructure Programme (director: Dr. Andreas Witt) was established in 2009. It concentrates on research regarding the compilation and handling of digital voice data, and its aim is a future-oriented optimisation of existing research structures, as well as the advancement of sustainable activities of the IDS in this area. The Research Infrastructure Programme promotes close cooperation with similar centres of competence, and represents the IDS as a cooperation partner in various joint initiatives. These include D-SPIN / CLARIN, TextGrid, WissGrid and nestor in particular. Another function of the Research Infrastructure Programme is the coordination of competences required in a modern research environment, such as contributing to the development of standards for language resources, promoting legal expertise with regard to licensing rights, and the establishment of computer-based structure nodes as part of national and international joint initiatives.

Website of the Research Infrastructure Programme

Corpus Linguistics Programme

Profile: This programme of the IDS (director: Cyril Belica) is in charge of constantly and duly documenting random samples of the written German language in the DEUTSCHER REFERENZKORPUS. Based on fundamental reflections on linguistic theory construction, a methodology for corpus analysis based on mathematical and statistical methods is being developed. The generalisations resulting from this methodological research are discussed theoretically, contributing to the development of theoretical linguistics. Moreover, the acquired methodology is used for cooperative research in other, also third-party financed projects to extract and linguistically describe common word combinations, and other preference relation structures.

Website of the Corpus Linguistics Programme

Contact details:

Institute for the German Language (IDS)
Member of the Leibniz Association
P.O. Box 10 16 21
68016 Mannheim
Germany
http://www.ids-mannheim.de