Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce an upcoming volume on “Interdisciplinary, cross-lingual, diachronic and synchronic perspectives on the emergence and interpretation of multiword expression meanings”, which will be published by Springer. With this email, we invite article contributions to this peer-reviewed volume.
We welcome contributions from computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and all other disciplines taking empirically grounded approaches to linguistic phenomena.
TOPIC OVERVIEW Multiword expressions (MWEs) such as compound nouns (e.g. “loan shark”) and particle verbs (e.g. “take off”) provide a convenient way to express complex ideas, and new MWEs are often generated to refer to new or complex concepts. However, the extent and mechanisms by which new MWEs can be created, used, learned, and interpreted by humans and computational language models in an accurate and communicatively useful manner remains an open question.
A key complicating factor is that MWEs can have multiple, sometimes opaque and idiosyncratic interpretations. Sometimes, these interpretations are fully determined by their constituents expressions; other times, they go beyond these in unexpected directions. One still underexplored factor behind these challenges are meaning changes of multiword expressions – or their constituent words – over time.
In our edited volume, we aim to answer the following research questions: - Which properties characterize MWE meaning interpretation at their time of emergence? - What is the common ground (temporal and contextual) for MWE emergence? - Why is an MWE chosen at the time of emergence, in contrast to a simplex or complex alternative with the same or a similar interpretation? - How do MWE interpretations and degrees of transparency change over time or across domains? - What are useful and reliable MWE representations (in cognitive and/or computational models), especially regarding sparse-data conditions and sub-word tokenization? - What are useful and reliable cognitive and/or computational models for MWE meaning characterization and changes?
HOW TO CONTRIBUTE If you are interested in contributing, please send your finalized, anonymized article (as a .pdf or .docx document) to the following email address: mwe-volume@ims.uni-stuttgart.de The article will undergo a double-blind peer-review process, with at least two reviewers. At the same time, by submitting an article, you also commit to providing up to two reviews for other contributions. We welcome inquiries ahead of submission time regarding the target topic areas or any other questions you may have.
IMPORTANT DATES Deadline for chapter submission: April 15, 2026 Deadline for reviews: June 15, 2026 Deadline for revised chapter submission: August 15, 2026
If you have any questions, please let us know. We look forward to your contributions!
Filip Miletić (Universität Stuttgart) Fritz Günther (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Wei He (University of Exeter) Aline Villavicencio (University of Exeter) Sabine Schulte im Walde (Universität Stuttgart)