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Poetic diction routinely involves two complementary classes of features: (i) parallelisms, i.e. repetitive patterns (rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.) that enhance the predictability of upcoming words, and (ii) poetic deviations that challenge standard expectations/predictions regarding regular word form and order. The present study investigated how these two prediction-modulating fundamentals of poetic diction affect the cognitive processing and aesthetic evaluation of poems, humoristic couplets and proverbs. We developed quantitative measures of these two groups of text features. Across the three text genres, higher deviation scores reduced both comprehensibility and aesthetic liking whereas higher parallelism scores enhanced these. The positive effects of parallelism are significantly stronger than the concurrent negative effects of the features of deviation. These results are in accord with the hypothesis that art reception involves an interplay of prediction errors and prediction error minimization, with the latter paving the way for processing fluency and aesthetic liking.
This presentation deals with collaborative turn-sequences (Lerner 2004), a syntactically coherent unit of talk that is jointly formulated by at least two speakers, in Czech and German everyday conversations. Based on conversation analysis (e.g., Schegloff 2007) and a multimodal approach to social interaction (e.g., Deppermann/Streeck 2018), we aim at comparing recurrent patterns and action types within co-constructional sequences in both languages. The practice of co-constructing turns-at-talk has been described for typologically different languages, especially for English (e.g., Lerner 1996, 2004), but also for languages such as Japanese (Hayashi 2003) or Finnish (Helasvuo 2004). For German, various forms and functions of co-constructions have already been investigated (e.g., Brenning 2015); for Czech, a detailed, interactionally based description is still pending (but see some initial observations in, e.g., Hoffmannová/Homoláč/Mrázková (eds.) 2019). Although the existence of co-constructions in different languages points to a cross-linguistic conversational practice, few explicitly comparative studies exist (see, e.g., Lerner/Takagi 1999, for English and Japanese). The language pair Czech-German has mainly been studied with respect to language contact and without specifically considering spoken language or complex conversational sequences (e.g., Nekula/Šichová/Valdrová 2013). Therefore, our second aim is to sketch out a first comparison of co-constructional sequences in German and Czech, thereby contributing to the growing field of comparative and cross-linguistic studies within conversation analysis (e.g., Betz et al. (eds.) 2021; Dingemanse/Enfield 2015; Sidnell (ed.) 2009). More specifically, we will present three main sequential patterns of co-constructional sequences, focusing on the type of action a second speaker carries out by completing a first speaker’s possibly incomplete turn-at-talk, and on how the initial speaker then responds to
this suggested completion (Lerner 2004). Excerpts from video recordings of Czech and German ordinary conversations will illustrate these recurrent co-constructional sequence types, i.e., offering help during word searches (see example 1 above), displaying understanding, or claiming independent knowledge. The third objective of this paper is to underline the participants’ orientation to similar interactional problems, solved by specific syntactic and/or lexical formats in Czech and German. Considering the more recent focus on the embodied dimension of co-constructional practices (e.g., Dressel 2020), we will also investigate the multimodal formatting of a started utterance as more or less “permeable” (Lerner 1996) for co-participant completion, the participants’ mutual embodied orientation, and possible embodied responses to others’ turn-completions (such as head nods or eyebrow flashes, cf. De Stefani 2021). More generally, this contribution reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a cross-linguistic comparison of complex multimodal sequences.
Datensatz Schwache Maskulina
(2023)
Der Datensatz enthält eine Sammlung von 1.156 Substantiven (mit wenigen Ausnahmen Maskulina), die sich im Korpusgrammatik-Untersuchungskorpus (Bubenhofer et al. 2014), basierend auf dem Deutschen Referenzkorpus DeReKo (Kupietz et al. 2010, 2018), Release 2017-II, unmittelbar nach einem Beleg für die Akkusativ- oder Dativform des unbestimmten Artikels ( einen / einem ) mindestens einmal mit der “schwachen” Endung -(e)n belegen lassen (z.B. einen Aktivisten , einem Autoren ). Einzelheiten zur Datenerhebung in Weber & Hansen (2023).
Besides English, Afrikaans is considered “the [Germanic] language which deviates grammatically the farthest from the others” (Harbert 2007: 17). But how exactly do we measure “grammatical deviation”, and how deviant is Afrikaans really if we compare it not just to other standard languages but also to non-standard varieties? The present contribution aims to address those questions combining functional-typological and dialectometric perspectives. We first select data for 28 Germanic varieties showing vastly different speaker numbers, grades of standardisation and amounts of language contact. Based on 48 (micro)typological variables from syntax, morphology and phonology, we perform cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling and present ways of visualizing and interpreting the results. Inter alia, the analyses show a major divide between Continental West Germanic and North Germanic (as might be expected) and they also identify a number of outliers, including English and pidgin and creole languages such as Russenorsk or Rabaul Creole German. Afrikaans appears to cluster with the other West Germanic languages rather than the outliers. Within West Germanic, however, it does indeed emerge as rather deviant and, according to our metric, it is, for example, typologically closer to other high-contact varieties such as Yiddish than it is to Dutch.
Funktionsverbgefüge stehen seit jeher in der Sprachkritik, die sich nun auch auf digitale Räume ausbreitet. Vertreten wird dort die These, Funktionsverbgefüge und ihre entsprechenden Basisverben seien äquivalent und könnten in allen Kontexten durch die verbalen Entsprechungen ersetzt werden. Dies kann durch die vorliegende korpusbasierte und textlinguistische Studie am Beispiel des Gefüges Frage stellen widerlegt werden. Anhand eines extensiven Datenmaterials aus den Wikipedia-Artikel-Korpora des IDS zeige ich die semantischen, grammatischen und textlinguistischen Unterschiede zwischen dem Basisverb und dem Funktionsverbgefüge im Gebrauch auf, die sich in der Anreicherung, Verdichtung, Perspektivierung, Gewichtung und Wiederaufnahme von Informationen im Text manifestieren.
Dieser Werkstattbericht zeigt anhand verschiedener korpusbasierter Ressourcen, wie Fragen zu sprachlichen Phänomenen, die für Sprachlernende nicht oder nur unzureichend dokumentiert sind, empirisch beantwortet werden können. Besonderes Augenmerk wird dabei auf OWIDplusLIVE gelegt. Hierbei handelt es sich um ein Werkzeug zur tagesaktuellen Analyse von Token (einzelne Wortformen/Lemmata) und Bi-/Trigrammen (zwei bzw. drei direkt aufeinander folgende Token). Über eine Anbindung an KorAP können zudem Belege aus dem DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) abgerufen und analysiert werden.
‘Can’ and ‘must’-type modal verbs in the direct sanctioning of misconduct across European languages
(2023)
Deontic meanings of obligation and permissibility have mostly been studied in relation to modal verbs, even though researchers are aware that such meanings can be conveyed in other ways (consider, for example, the contributions to Nuyts/van der Auwera (eds.) 2016). This presentation reports on an ongoing project that examines deontic meaning but takes as its starting point not a type of linguistic structure but a particular kind of social moment that presumably attracts deontic talk: The management of potentially ‚unacceptable‘ or untoward actions (taking the last bread roll at breakfast, making a disallowed move during a board game, etc.). Data come from a multi-language parallel video corpus of everyday social interaction in English, German, Italian, and Polish. Here, we focus on moments in which one person sanctions another’s behavior as unacceptable. Using interactional-linguistic methods (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018), we examine similarities and differences across these four languages in the use of modal verbs as part of such sanctioning attempts. First results suggest that modal verbs are not as common in the sanctioning of misconduct as one might expect. Across the four languages, only between 10%–20% of relevant sequences involve a modal verb. Most of the time, in this context, speakers achieve deontic meaning in other ways (e.g., infinitives such as German nicht so schmatzen, ‚no smacking‘). This raises the question what exactly modal verbs, on those relatively rare occasions when they are used, contribute to the accomplishment of deontic meaning. The reported study pursues this question in two ways: 1) By considering similarities across languages in the ways that modal verbs interact with other (verbal) means in the sanctioning of misconduct.; 2) By considering differences across languages in the use of modal verbs. Here, we find that the relevant modal verbs are used similarly in some activity contexts (enforcing rules during board games), but less so in other activity contexts (mundane situations with no codified rules). In sum, the presented study adds to cross-linguistically grounded knowledge about deontic meaning and its relationships to linguistics structures.
It is well known that the distribution of lexical and grammatical patterns is size- and register-sensitive (Biber 1986, and later publications). This fact alone presents a challenge to many corpus-oriented linguistic studies focusing on a single language. When it comes to cross-linguistic studies using corpora, the challenge becomes even greater due to the lack of high-quality multilingual corpora (Kupietz et al. 2020; Kupietz/Trawiński 2022), which are comparable with respect to the size and the register. That was the motivation for the creation of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo, an initiative started in 2013 at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) together with several European partners (Kupietz et al. 2020). EuReCo is an emerging federated corpus, with large virtual comparable corpora across various languages and with an infrastructure supporting contrastive research. The core of the infrastructure is KorAP (Diewald et al. 2016), a scalable open-source platform supporting the analysis and visualisation of properties of texts annotated by multiple and potentially conflicting information layers, and supporting several corpus query languages. Until recently, EuReCo consisted of three monolingual subparts: the German Reference Corpus DeReKo (Kupietz et al. 2018), the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (Barbu Mititelu/Tufiş/Irimia 2018), and the Hungarian National Corpus (Váradi 2002). The goal of the present submission is twofold. On the one hand, it reports about the new component of EuReCo: a sample of the National Corpus of Polish (Przepiórkowski et al. 2010). On the other hand, it presents the results of a new pilot study using the newly extended EuReCo. This pilot study investigates selected Polish collocations involving light verbs and their prepositional / nominal complements (Fig. 1) and extends the collocation analyses of German, Romanian and Hungarian (Fig. 2) discussed in Kupietz/Trawiński (2022).
Our everyday lives in any social community are shaped by rules (e.g., Roughley 2019; Schmidt/Rakoczy 2019). Rules (in a broad sense) are interactionally negotiated, monitored, enforced, and serve as an ‘orientation value‘ in social life. If someone‘s behavior is treated as norm-violating or problematic in certain way, it may be therefore confronted. Confronting interlocutors can immediately stop, modify, or retrospectively reprimand the misconduct of others in a moralizing manner. Such confrontations of a problem behavior occur commonly in informal interactions. On the basis of our corpus, specifically in informal interactions at the table, I observed that, for example, in Polish, German and British English, direct confrontations occur on average at least once every three minutes. Participants design these actions in a variety of ways, but like everything in interaction, the design is not arbitrary (Sacks 1984; Enfield/Sidnell 2019). A recurrent feature of such turns is connecting misconduct to some more general concepts. It is evident from the data that e.g. speakers of German and Polish use ‘generally valid statements’ in problematic moments (cf. Küttner/Vatanen/Zinken 2022) to reach the closure of the problem sequence, also specifically dealing there with distribution of deontic and epistemic rights (Rogowska in prep.). I ask, when and for what purpose generality, that is, abstracting from a concrete behaviour, is used as a tool while confronting others. The focus is on sequential and linguistic features of abstracting in confronting moments in language comparison. What are the methods to achieve abstraction: i) defocusing the confronted, specific agent (cf. Zinken et al. 2021; Siewierska 2008), e.g. nur derjenige der dran ist der darf die bedingungen für den handel stellen (only the one whose turn it is may set the conditions for the trade); using ii) extreme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986), e.g. na siostrę zawsze można liczyć (you can always count on a sister); iii) referring to stable character traits, e.g. Matylda bardzo chetne by podala. (.) Ona jest taka skora do pomocy (Matylda would be very happy to pass (it to you). (.) She is so eager to help); or iv) broader categorizing of the given referent, e.g. do not build (.) do do not build do not build swastikas (when a) German guy is filming us? Sometimes, even several locus of abstraction are combined in the same turn. Can we identify language-specific and cross-linguistic patterns? What are the interactional consequences: enforcing a compliant behavior in the future, eliciting an apology or cognitively simplifying complex problems? From a comparative perspective, I ask whether going beyond the here-and-now while confronting others is a practice that unites speakers across languages and is thus a human cognitive strategy to display normativity. This ongoing study is based on new comparable data from four European languages from informal interaction during activities around the table (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. in prep.). The phenomenon was coded systematically in each of the four languages as part of a larger, quantitatively oriented study with different questions (Küttner et al. submitted). In the talk, I will show exemplarily Polish and German evidence. I use the methods of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2012) and Interactional Linguistics (Imo/Lanwer 2019).