Friedel Frowein

Telephone: +61 3 9479 6410 Email : fmfrowein@students.latrobe.edu.au Fax: +61 3 9467 3053

Friedel Martin Frowein is working on a descriptive grammar of Siar (also known as Siar-Lak) under the supervision of Professor R.M.W. Dixon. Siar is an Austronesian language of New Ireland (Papua New Guinea) which is spoken by about 2,500 speakers.

Friedel has studied General linguistics, English linguistics and German linguistics at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal in Germany. As a student auxiliary he has participated in a project which is compiling a lexicon of Irish verbs and verb equivalents. For this project, Friedel has developed the computer program "Sárchlár" (Irish for 'super-program') which is able to identify and list all verbs in any Irish (Gaelic) text corpus. By applying about 80 linguistic tests (e.g. check for verbal morphology, syntactic position, lexical status etc) Sárchlár can reach accuracy rates of up to 99.8%, sometimes performing better than competent speakers. Sárchlár is to a certain degree capable of learning, its accuracy increases the more a human speaker interacts with it. For his MA thesis, Friedel has expanded Sárchlár to identify English, Turkish, and German verbs as well and contrastively analyzed the methods and problems for each language and how accurate Sárchlár works compared to competent human speakers.

Another project has been to create a website for Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German), the only German-lexifier creole language which developed in the Rabaul area of Eastern New Britain (Papua New Guinea). Unserdeutsch is now almost extinct, with only very few remaining speakers living in Papua New Guinea and Australia. The website is hosted by the German Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen e.V.(Society for Endangered Languages) who also funded the project.

Friedel is also interested in creole languages in general. Especially the phenomenon of creole genesis and its relation to language acquisition theory has been of particular interest to him. Contrastive linguistics, grammaticalization and computational linguistics have been other focuses. Next to his studies on Siar, Friedel also hopes to be able to develop a computer program which is able to inductively acquire a target grammar itself by parsing written language data and direct positive evidence from human speakers. The typological generalizations that have been made by the RCLT would surely be useful for such a project.


References (contact author for copy):

Frowein, Friedel Martin (2007): "Verb identification with Sárchlár - A contrastive analysis of the advantages, problems, and limitations of computational verb recognition with special regard to English, Irish (Gaelic) and Turkish", unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Wuppertal

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