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The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest crisis the world has had to face since World War II. It does not come as a surprise that it is also having an impact on language as our primary communication tool. In this short paper, we present three inter-connected resources that are designed to capture and illustrate these effects on a subset of the German language: An RSS corpus of German-language newsfeeds (with freely available untruncated frequency lists), a continuously updated HTML page tracking the diversity of the vocabulary in the RSS corpus and a Shiny web application that enables other researchers and the broader public to explore the corpus in terms of basic frequencies.
The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.
We present an empirical study addressing the question whether, and to which extent, lexicographic writing aids improve text revision results. German university students were asked to optimise two German texts using (1) no aids at all, (2) highlighted problems, or (3) highlighted problems accompanied by lexicographic resources that could be used to solve the specific problems. We found that participants from the third group corrected the largest number of problems and introduced the fewest semantic distortions during revision. Also, they reached the highest overall score and were most efficient (as measured in points per time). The second group with highlighted problems lies between the two other groups in almost every measure we analysed. We discuss these findings in the scope of intelligent writing environments, the effectiveness of writing aids in practical usage situations and teaching dictionary skills.
In a recent article, Meylan and Griffiths (Meylan & Griffiths, 2021, henceforth, M&G) focus their attention on the significant methodological challenges that can arise when using large-scale linguistic corpora. To this end, M&G revisit a well-known result of Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson (2011, henceforth, PT&G) who argue that average information content is a better predictor of word length than word frequency. We applaud M&G who conducted a very important study that should be read by any researcher interested in working with large-scale corpora. The fact that M&G mostly failed to find clear evidence in favor of PT&G's main finding motivated us to test PT&G's idea on a subset of the largest archive of German language texts designed for linguistic research, the German Reference Corpus consisting of ∼43 billion words. We only find very little support for the primary data point reported by PT&G.
This replication study aims to investigate a potential bias toward addition in the German language, building upon previous findings of Winter and colleagues who identified a similar bias in English. Our results confirm a bias in word frequencies and binomial expressions, aligning with these previous findings. However, the analysis of distributional semantics based on word vectors did not yield consistent results for German. Furthermore, our study emphasizes the crucial role of selecting appropriate translational equivalents, highlighting the significance of considering language-specific factors when testing for such biases for languages other than English.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of word formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DeReKo and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DEREKO and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.