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This study investigates cross-language differences in pitch range and variation in four languages from two language groups: English and German (Germanic) and Bulgarian and Polish (Slavic). The analysis is based on large multi-speaker corpora (48 speakers for Polish, 60 for each of the other three languages). Linear mixed models were computed that include various distributional measures of pitch level, span and variation, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. A classification experiment based on the relevant parameter measures (span, kurtosis and skewness values for pitch distributions for each speaker) succeeded in separating the language groups.
This study presents the results of a large-scale comparison of various measures of pitch range and pitch variation in two Slavic (Bulgarian and Polish) and two Germanic (German and British English) languages. The productions of twenty-two speakers per language (eleven male and eleven female) in two different tasks (read passages and number sets) are compared. Significant differences between the language groups are found: German and English speakers use lower pitch maxima, narrower pitch span, and generally less variable pitch than Bulgarian and Polish speakers. These findings support the hypothesis that inguistic communities tend to be characterized by particular pitch profiles.
In 2010, ISO published a standard for syntactic annotation, ISO 24615:2010 (SynAF). Back then, the document specified a comprehensive reference model for the representation of syntactic annotations, but no accompanying XML serialisation. ISO’s subcommittee on language resource management (ISO TC 37/SC 4) is working on making the SynAF serialisation ISOTiger an additional part of the standard. This contribution addresses the current state of development of ISOTiger, along with a number of open issues on which we are seeking community feedback in order to ensure that ISOTiger becomes a useful extension to the SynAF reference model.
The article investigates the conditions under which the w-relativizer was appears instead of the d-relativzer das in German relative clauses. Building on Wiese 2013, we argue that was constitutes the elsewhere case that applies when identification with the antecedent cannot be established by syntactic means via upward agreement with respect to phi-features. Corpuslinguistic results point to the conclusion that this is the case whenever there is no lexical nominal in the antecedent that, following Geach 1962 and Baker 2003, supplies a criterion of identity needed to establish sameness of reference between the antecedent and the relativizer.
Speakers’ dialogical orientation to the particular others they talk to is implemented by practices of recipient-design. One such practice is the use of negation as a means to constrain interpretations of speaker’s actions by the partner. The paper situates this use of negation within the larger context of other recipient-designed uses of negation which negate assumptions the speaker makes about what the addressee holds to be true (second-order assumptions) or what the addressee assumes the speaker holds to be true (third- order assumptions). The focus of the study is on the ways in which speakers use negation to disclaim interpretations of their turns which partners have displayed or may possibly arrive at. Special emphasis is given to the positionally sensitive uses of negation, which may occur before, after or inserted between the nucleus actions whose interpretation is constrained by the negation. Interactional motivations and rhetorical potentials of the practice are pointed out, partly depending on the position of the negation vis-à-vis the nucleus action. The analysis shows that the concept of ‘recipient design’ is in need of distinctions which have not been in focus in prior research.
This paper describes a first version of an integrated e-dictionary translating possessive constructions from English to Zulu. Zulu possessive constructions are difficult to learn for non-mother tongue speakers. When translating from English into Zulu, a speaker needs to be acquainted with the nominal classification of nouns indicating possession and possessor. Furthermore, (s)he needs to be informed about the morpho-syntactic rules associated with certain combinations of noun classes. Lastly, knowledge of morpho-phonetic changes is also required, because these influence the orthography of the output word forms. Our approach is a novel one in that we combine e-lexicography and natural language processing by developing a (web) interface supporting learners, as well as other users of the dictionary to produce Zulu possessive constructions. The final dictionary that we intend to develop will contain several thousand nouns which users can combine as they wish. It will also translate single words and frequently used multiword expressions, and allow users to test their own translations. On request, information about the morpho-syntactic and morpho-phonetic rules applied by the system are displayed together with the translation. Our approach follows the function theory: the dictionary supports users in text production, at the same time fulfilling a cognitive function.
So far, there have been few descriptions on creating structures capable of storing lexicographic data, ISO 24613:2008 being one of the latest. Another one is by Spohr (2012), who designs a multifunctional lexical resource which is able to store data of different types of dictionaries in a user-oriented way. Technically, his design is based on the principle of a hierarchical XML/OWL (eXtensible Markup Language/Web Ontology Language) representation model. This article follows another route in describing a model based on entities and relations between them; MySQL (usually referred to as: Structured Query Language) describes a database system of tables containing data and definitions of relations between them. The model was developed in the context of the project "Scientific eLexicography for Africa" and the lexicographic database to be built thereof will be implemented with MySQL. The principles of the ISO model and of Spohr's model are adhered to with one major difference in the implementation strategy: we do not place the lemma in the centre of attention, but the sense description — all other elements, including the lemma, depend on the sense description. This article also describes the contained lexicographic data sets and how they have been collected from different sources. As our aim is to compile several prototypical internet dictionaries (a monolingual Northern Sotho dictionary, a bilingual learners' Xhosa–English dictionary and a bilingual Zulu–English dictionary), we describe the necessary microstructural elements for each of them and which principles we adhere to when designing different ways of accessing them. We plan to make the model and the (empty) database with all graphical user interfaces that have been developed, freely available by mid-2015.
Designing a Bilingual Speech Corpus for French and German Language Learners: a Two-Step Process
(2014)
We present the design of a corpus of native and non-native speech for the language pair French-German, with a special emphasis on phonetic and prosodic aspects. To our knowledge there is no suitable corpus, in terms of size and coverage, currently available for the target language pair. To select the target L1-L2 interference phenomena we prepare a small preliminary corpus (corpus1), which is analyzed for coverage and cross-checked jointly by French and German experts. Based on this analysis, target phenomena on the phonetic and phonological level are selected on the basis of the expected degree of deviation from the native performance and the frequency of occurrence. 14 speakers performed both L2 (either French or German) and L1 material (either German or French). This allowed us to test, recordings duration, recordings material, the performance of our automatic aligner software. Then, we built corpus2 taking into account what we learned about corpus1. The aims are the same but we adapted speech material to avoid too long recording sessions. 100 speakers will be recorded. The corpus (corpus1 and corpus2) will be prepared as a searchable database, available for the scientific community after completion of the project.
Recent work suggests that concreteness and imageability play an important role in the meanings of figurative expressions. We investigate this idea in several ways. First, we try to define more precisely the context within which a figurative expression may occur, by parsing a corpus annotated for metaphor. Next, we add both concreteness and imageability as “features” to the parsed metaphor corpus, by marking up words in this corpus using a psycholinguistic database of scores for concreteness and imageability. Finally, we carry out detailed statistical analyses of the augmented version of the original metaphor corpus, cross-matching the features of concreteness and imageability with others in the corpus such as parts of speech and dependency relations, in order to investigate in detail the use of such features in predicting whether a given expression is metaphorical or not.
We discovered several recurring errors in the current version of the Europarl Corpus originating both from the web site of the European Parliament and the corpus compilation based thereon. The most frequent error was incompletely extracted metadata leaving non-textual fragments within the textual parts of the corpus files. This is, on average, the case for every second speaker change. We not only cleaned the Europarl Corpus by correcting several kinds of errors, but also aligned the speakers’ contributions of all available languages and compiled every- thing into a new XML-structured corpus. This facilitates a more sophisticated selection of data, e.g. querying the corpus for speeches by speakers of a particular political group or in particular language combinations.