The Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRM) Scoping Tool is a structured methodology designed to assess the feasibility, gaps, and opportunities for integrating disaster risk management (DRM) systems across multiple dimensions. The tool combines a standardized questionnaire and facilitated focus-group workshops to capture both quantitative appraisals and qualitative insights from DRM stakeholders. This methodology policy-paper outlines the conceptual foundations, design, and application of the tool, providing guidance on its implementation in diverse contexts. The IDRM Scoping Tool enables researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to systematically explore DRM integration at city and national levels, track trends over time, and inform policy and governance improvements. Additionally, it highlights the importance of complementary studies — such as actor-mapping and in-depth governance analysis — to strengthen its applicability. While the tool offers a flexible and participatory approach to evaluating DRM systems, it is not intended as a standalone assessment but rather as an exploratory step to guide further research and decision-making. Likewise, the paper discusses the advantages, limitations, and potential refinements of the tool, with the aim of continually enhancing its contribution to disaster risk governance and resilience-building efforts.

Im Wintersemester 2024/25 wurde auf dem Campus der Freien Universität von einem Team der Universitätsbibliothek eine kombinierte Interview- und Beobachtungsstudie durchgeführt. Ziel war es, Gründe und Kontexte für die Nutzung von Arbeitsplätzen außerhalb der Bibliotheken zu finden (z.B. Flure, Foyers, Mensen). In über 300 Interviews auf dem Campus konnten Hauptgründe für die Nutzung alternativer Arbeitsorte zu den Bibliotheken der Freien Universität Berlin ausgemacht werden: Gewohnheit; zu weite Strecken zur Bibliothek (z.B. zwischen zeitnahen Kursen); zu viel wahrgenommener Aufwand durch Garderobenregelung und erwarteten Füllstand der Bibliothek; zu schlechter Zugang zu Verpflegung während des Aufenthaltes in der Bibliothek (durch Verbote) und in den Pausen (durch räumliche Distanz der Bibliothek zu Verpflegungsquellen). Es berichteten 78% der Interviewten, dass sie in anderen Kontexten durchaus auch eine der Bibliotheken der Freien Universität nutzten.

Synopsis:

This collective volume investigates linguistic dynamics in language contact, focusing on heritage speakers. The chapters provide new insights into the role of speaker repertoires and the distinction between contact-induced change and language-internal variation by reporting on corpus-linguistic studies across different communicative situations in heritage and majority languages. Conducted in the context of the DFG Research Unit “Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations” (FOR 2537), the studies focus on bilingual adolescent and adult speakers of German, Greek, Russian and Turkish as heritage languages, and of English and German as majority languages, and on monolingually raised adolescent and adult speakers of all five languages. Crucially, they are not restricted to standard language, but target broader speaker repertoires that cover informal as well as formal settings in both spoken and written modes. The contributions are united by their positive perspective on language contact and multilingual speakers, a comparative approach across several heritage and majority languages, and a shared methodology that captures variation within repertoires for both heritage speakers and monolinguals. The chapters take various theoretical standpoints, highlighting different facets of the data as well as its potential for enhancing our understanding of language contact and language variation.

Synopsis:

This volume presents a timely discussion on one of the most fundamental and yet elusive questions in historical linguistics: why do certain linguistic changes take place in some languages at specific times, but not in others, even under similar conditions? The actuation problem, first articulated by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), remains a central puzzle in the study of language change, at the crossroads between language structure, cognitive processes, and social dynamics. While significant progress has been made in identifying pathways and constraints on change and in understanding the social embedding of linguistic variation, the ultimate challenge of predicting language change remains unresolved, raising the question of whether historical linguistics can ever be a predictive science. The main reason for skepticism is that the inherent complexity of language structure and use makes it extremely challenging to predict when and how a given change may occur. Even so, a reassessment of where the discipline stands with respect to its most central research question is in order.

Building on recent advances in variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalization theory, and probabilistic modeling of language, the contributions in this volume offer fresh theoretical and methodological perspectives on the actuation problem, discussing the interplay between principles of language change, the role of bilingualism and language contact more generally, the distinction between innovation and propagation, and the role of sociocultural change. Research presented in this volume shows that there is indeed cause for hope, bringing at least a probabilistic answer to the actuation problem within closer reach.

Synopsis:

The book Universality of semantic frames and language specific Bulgarian data is devoted to the principles of data organisation in the Bulgarian FrameNet, which has been in development for more than 20 years and has gone through various phases. Originally it was developed as an independent resource, but for about fifteen years it has been correlated with the Berkeley FrameNet, observing the following basic principles: The information in the FrameNet that is relevant for the description of Bulgarian is considered language-independent (e.g. definition of frames and relations between them, definitions of frames and elements and relations between them, etc.) and is automatically transferred into a structure called a superframe. For each superframe, there may be one or more Bulgarian frames in which the language-independent information is restructured, if necessary, so that it corresponds exactly to the description for the Bulgarian language. The Bulgarian verbs of communication, change, movement, contact and emotion are described in more detail, their subclasses are delineated and the similarities and differences in the semantic and syntactic description for Bulgarian and English are compared and discussed. It is shown how the semantic frames can be used in an experiment to assess children's mastery of semantic conceptualisation and syntactic use of verbs from their basic vocabulary. These and a number of other applications: automatic assignment of semantic roles, automatic recognition of events in news, automatic recognition of scenes in images and videos are some of the applications in which the Bulgarian FrameNet can be used. In addition, the semantic and syntactic information in the Bulgarian FrameNet can be used for theoretical considerations, including comparative studies focussing on the modern state of the Bulgarian language and other languages for which a FrameNet has been developed.

Synopsis:

This book showcases the latest research from the world’s leading experts on Celtic linguistics. The 15 chapters span a variety of linguistic subdisciplines as well as theoretical and methodological perspectives. Together, these articles highlight critical aspects of contemporary inquiry into the linguistic systems of Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and their ancestor languages. The volume is organized around four key sub-areas: (1) Syntax and Semantics, (2) Phonology and Phonetics, (3) Language Change, Historical Linguistics and Grammaticalization, and (4) Sociolinguistics and Language Documentation. The volume's papers offer detailed investigations of current theoretical issues in Celtic syntax, semantics, phonology, and phonetics, as well as of language policy and ideology, language weaponization, and diachronic and synchronic language change. These state-of-the-art contributions represent the impressive diversity of the field of Celtic linguistics and emphasize the wide body of work being conducted in the language communities of the six Celtic nations.

Synopsis:

Yongning Na, also known as Mosuo, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Southwest China. This book provides a description and analysis of its tone system, progressing from lexical tones towards morphotonology. Tonal changes permeate numerous aspects of the morphosyntax of Yongning Na. They are not the product of a small set of phonological rules, but of a host of rules that are restricted to specific morphosyntactic contexts. Rich morphotonological systems have been reported in this area of Sino-Tibetan, but book-length descriptions remain few. This study of an endangered language contributes to a better understanding of the diversity of prosodic systems in East Asia.

The analysis is based on original fieldwork data (made available online), collected over the course of ten years, commencing in 2006.

This book is a new edition of https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/109

The analysis is based on original fieldwork data (made available online), collected over the course of ten years, commencing in 2006.

Synopsis:

The volume Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic deals with questions of information structuring at discourse level, focusing on narrative discourses. More precisely, it is about the contribution of grammatical devices to the organization of texts as well as their diagnostic potential for the narrative text type. Although it is well-known that information packaging had a much greater impact on the distribution of grammatical patterns in historical stages of a language than it does today, so far many studies on the relationship between information structure and grammatical patterns do not go beyond the sentence level, in other words, they do not take into account the possible influence of the text type on the manifestation of certain grammatical patterns. How and to which degree changes in grammatical patterns correlate or are affected by changes in either discourse and/or narrative structure, how the two layers interact with each other and affect each other, and how such issues can be operationalized are still understudied. This volume aims to shed more light on these issues by presenting eight papers, which address these questions more or less explicitly. As the research questions imply, the papers all take a historical or diachronic perspective. Another commonality between the studies is that they all focus on data from Germanic languages, as we assume that by comparing closely related languages, the relationships in question become more pronounced. Specifically, the languages in question are German, Dutch, English and Icelandic. Understandably, the contributions in this volume can only highlight some aspects of the complex relationship between grammar and narration(s). Addressing among others questions of narrative progression, temporal structure, reference tracking and discourse functions, the contributions discuss phenomena such as temporal adverbials at the left periphery as well as later in the clause, left dislocation structures, fronting of the finite verb in dependent and independent clauses, linguistic means to express aspectual and tense information, and the distribution of nominalization patterns across text types.

Synopsis:

Fillers are non-silent linguistic devices used in disfluencies to gain time while searching for words. In addition, they are frequently used intentionally to avoid words for reasons of politeness, ‘conspirational’ motivations, or rhetorical purposes. Two syntactically distinct types of conventionalized fillers can be distinguished: placeholders and hesitatives (also called hesitators). Placeholders are referential and morphosyntactically integrated, while hesitatives are neither. Strikingly, even though fillers are cross-linguistically widespread, dedicated studies of such items in particular languages are still largely lacking.

This collective volume comprises in-depth descriptions of conventionalized fillers in a substantial variety of languages from Eurasia, Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas, hoping to stimulate typological research on fillers, both hesitatives and placeholders. The book aims to contribute to a better visibility of the topic among general linguists, to make data and analyses accessible that will be useful for further typological studies on the topic, and to provide models for descriptive linguists.

The introductory chapter discusses issues emerging from the previous literature and offers a new typology of fillers. It also highlights the major findings of the eleven remaining chapters. Each of these contains a detailed and typologically informed analysis of fillers in one or several underdescribed languages, based on corpora of natural speech and focusing on lexical fillers rather than on phenomena below the word-level (phonetic lengthening, truncation) or above the word-level (such as idioms and discourse markers like ‘you know’, or rhetorical questions like ‘what’s the word for that?’). The chapters cover a large amount of diversity, both in terms of languages and with respect to the type of filler. They focus on (i) the criteria for identification of the various types of fillers and the terminology used, keeping in mind that the domain is still largely under construction, (ii) a detailed analysis in terms of morphosyntactic distribution and, if possible, (iii) frequency in speech, and (iv) some reflection on the diachronic development of these disfluency markers.

The smearing effect of kernel estimates of the local density, local proportions and local means is used as a means for the construction of anonymized maps. The standard anonymization criteria were derived for the display of case numbers of a predefined area system. However, for kernel estimates there does not exist such a defined area system. We discuss the resulting difficulties of the application of these criteria for kernel estimates. Besides, there are some de-anonymization risks which are specific for kernel estimates. We discuss these topics for data from 1.9 million Berlin taxpayers with known exact address and taxable income. In the conclusions we vote for a much stronger emphasis on the output format of a map and the labelling of the displayed values in the map.