With its theme of Tracing Patterns – Sprachlichen Mustern auf der Spur (Tracing Linguistic Patterns), the 48th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) will focus on research into linguistic patterns, with a particular emphasis on methodological approaches to their analysis.

'Patternicity' is an empirically observable property of linguistic utterances at all levels of description, both traditional linguistic (e.g. phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic patterns) and beyond (e.g. pragmatic, multimodal, discursive patterns). A fundamental question in the study of linguistic patterns is their definition: patterns are often regarded as abstract phenomena that can be described by rules based on minimal units. However, the nature of these minimal units is currently the subject of debate. At the same time, the question of what degree of abstraction is appropriate for an empirically adequate or cognitively plausible description of a linguistic phenomenon is also controversial. Variation phenomena play a major role in these debates, some of which are considered ‘noise’ in the pattern and some of which are considered integral parts of the pattern.

Linguistic methods for the empirical recording and theoretical modelling of linguistic patterns cover a wide range; from the derivation of patterns based on principles such as repetition, series formation, or contrast of minimal units, to inductive methods that no longer assume a clear-cut categorisation of minimal units, but regard them as epiphenomena. Methodological approaches are also receiving important new impetus from the use of newer machine learning techniques, which offer new possibilities for obtaining relevant data and for inducing and modelling patterns, while posing challenges for their interpretation.

With the overarching theme of Tracing Patterns – Sprachlichen Mustern auf der Spur (Tracing Patterns – Tracking Linguistic Patterns), we invite conference participants to revisit the discussion of patterns in language against the backdrop of a multitude of current methodological approaches. This will take place in 15 workshops (nine long and six short workshops) that will explore this phenomenon and other central questions in linguistics.

We are also looking forward to the four plenary lectures by Jennifer Cole (Northwestern University), Annette Gerstenberg (Universität Potsdam), Simon Meier-Vieracker (TU Dresden), and Peter Uhrig (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg), who will present examples of methodologically innovative research on various aspects of linguistic patterns.