German Professor Teaches at Potsdam University

Christopher Sapp was among visiting summer school lecturers

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Christopher Sapp

Christopher Sapp, associate professor of German and linguistics in the UM Department of Modern Languages, taught summer school Sept. 15-20 at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Sapp’s weeklong course, “Corpus-based research on diachronic Germanic syntax,” was a hands-on exploration of various diachronic phenomena using selected Germanic corpora. Sixteen graduate students from several European countries attended.

“My students learned how to use various interfaces to search the corpora for phonological, morphological and syntactic features,” Sapp said. “They also learned how to import the results of their search into a statistics program and to use that program to conduct a multivariable statistical analysis.”

The summer school offered five courses taught by leading experts and combined theoretical aspects of historical linguistics with courses in extinct Germanic languages. Other institutions represented included the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, the University of Minnesota at Morris and SUNY University at Buffalo.