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Recently, a claim was made, on the basis of the German Google Books 1-gram corpus (Michel et al., Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science 2010; 331: 176–82), that there was a linear relationship between six non-technical non-Nazi words and three ‘explicitly Nazi words’ in times of World War II (Caruana-Galizia. 2015. Politics and the German language: Testing Orwell’s hypothesis using the Google N-Gram corpus. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities [Online]. http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/fqv011 (accessed 15 April 2015)). Here, I try to show that apparent relationships like this are the result of misspecified models that do not take into account the temporal aspect of time-series data. The main point of this article is to demonstrate why such analyses run the risk of incorrect statistical inference, where potential effects are both meaningless and can potentially lead to wrong conclusions.
Basic grammatical categories may carry social meanings irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs—a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages—are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension of social perception. In an archival analysis of actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and older people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not with communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and an integral part of social perception.
Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.
We present a supervised machine learning AND system which tackles semantic similarity between publication titles by means of word embeddings. Word embeddings are integrated as external components, which keeps the model small and efficient, while allowing for easy extensibility and domain adaptation. Initial experiments show that word embeddings can improve the Recall and F score of the binary classification sub-task of AND. Results for the clustering sub-task are less clear, but also promising and overall show the feasibility of the approach.
This chapter investigates policies which shape the role of the German language in contemporary Estonia. Whereas German played for many centuries an important role as the language of the economic and cultural elite in Estonia, it severely declined in importance throughout the twentieth century. Mirrored on this historical background, the paper provides an overview of the current functions of German and attitudes towards it and it discusses how these functions and attitudes are influenced by policies of various actors from inside and outside Estonia. The paper argues that German continues to play a significant role: while German is no longer a lingua franca, it still enjoys a number of functions and prestige in clearly defined niches involving communication within German-speaking circles or between Estonians and Germans. The interplay of language policies of the Estonian and the German-speaking states as well as by semi-state and private institutions succeed in maintaining German as an additional language in contemporary Estonia.
Language Change
(2017)
The present chapter outlines a research program for historical linguistics based on the idea that the object of the formal study of language change should be defined as grammar change, that is, a set of discrete differences between the target grammar and the grammar acquired by the learner (Hale 2007). This approach is shown to offer new answers to some classical problems of historical linguistics (Weinreich et al. 1968), concerning, specifically, the actuation of changes and the observation that the transition from one historical state to another proceeds gradually. It is argued that learners are highly sensitive to small fluctuations in the linguistic input they receive, making change inevitable, while the impression of gradualness is linked to independent factors (diffusion in a speech community, and grammar competition). Special attention is paid to grammaticalization phenomena, which offer insights into the nature of functional categories, the building blocks of clause structure.
There are a number of recent replicas of Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine. Although all of them are explicitly based on Kempelen's own description nearly none of them are identical in construction and sound. In this paper we want to illustrate some of these differences and their reasons for five replicas built by ourselves.
In this paper we present work in developing a computerized grammar for the Latin language. It demonstrates the principles and challenges in developing a grammar for a natural language in a modern grammar formalism. The grammar presented here provides a useful resource for natural language processing applications in different fields. It can be easily adopted for language learning and use in language technology for Cultural Heritage like translation applications or to support post-correction of document digitization.