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One of the fundamental questions about human language is whether all languages are equally complex. Here, we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. We present a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections consisting of ~ 3.5 billion words or ~ 9.0 billion characters and covering 2069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of what we call average prediction complexity. We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. In addition, we show that speaker population size predicts entropy. We argue that both results constitute evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective.
In this paper, we address issues of inconsistencies of dictionary information and how different corpus methods and computer tools can assist in providing systematic cross-referencing. The question is raised how hyperlinking in an electronic reference work can be approached systematically in order to warrant consistent symmetrical links between synonyms or antonyms. Firstly, it is argued that working with a comprehensive corpus does not account for consistent cross-referencing. It is shown that a top-down corpus-driven linguistic analysis also does not guarantee the lexicographic documentation of binary lexico-semantic relations covered by corpus data, as proposed by Paradis/Willners (2006a, b). Secondly, with the help of dictionary examples taken from elexiko (an online dictionary of contemporary German) we demonstrate how a combination of both corpus-driven and corpus-based procedures enables lexicographers to systematically exploit corpus material in more depth than by using only one of these methods. It is also discussed where and why lexicographers are still prone to inconsistencies in the editing processes, irrespective of their underlying corpus methodologies. Finally, we introduce a cross-reference management tool that has been developed for elexiko and we explain its technological prerequisites and implications. This software supports lexicographers in detecting existing and missing references from and to a specific headword. It also offers options to automatically and comfortably correct discrepancies. Overall, we suggest a method that includes linguistic competence, complementary corpus approaches and additional software in order to ensure that links or references between synonymic and antonymic pairings are given in both directions.
According to a widespread conception, quantitative linguistics will eventually be able to explain empirical quantitative findings (such as Zipf’s Law) by deriving them from highly general stochastic linguistic ‘laws’ that are assumed to be part of a general theory of human language (cf. Best (1999) for a summary of possible theoretical positions). Due to their formal proximity to methods used in the so-called exact sciences, theoretical explanations of this kind are assumed to be superior to the supposedly descriptive-only approaches of linguistic structuralism and its successors. In this paper I shall try to argue that on close inspection such claims turn out to be highly problematic, both on linguistic and on science-theoretical grounds.
Am 12. Mai 1965 nahmen der Staat Israel und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland offiziell diplomatische Beziehungen auf. Damit kam über 15 Jahre nach der Konstitution der beiden Länder und 20 Jahre nach dem Ende der Shoah ein komplexer Prozess der langsamen politischen Annäherung zu einem keineswegs selbstverständlichen Abschluss. Das fünfzigjährige Jubiläum dieses Ereignisses im Jahr 2015 war weltweit, vor allem aber in Israel und Deutschland, Anlass für zahlreiche Veranstaltungen, über die eine offizielle bilaterale Webseite <www.de50il.org/> (Stand: 6.11.2017) Auskunft gibt. Im Rahmen des Jubiläums wurde am 30. September 2015 in einer feierlichen Abendveranstaltung im Jüdischen Museum Berlin offiziell das „Wörterbuch deutscher Lehnwörter im Hebräischen“ von Uriel Adiv in einer ersten Fassung im „Lehnwortportal Deutsch“ des IDS freigeschaltet. Eine von Koautor Jakob Mendel erheblich überarbeitete und verbesserte zweite Version ging im Mai 2017 online. Der vorliegende Beitrag möchte einige Hintergründe zum deutschen Lehnwortschatz im modernen Hebräischen darstellen sowie die Entstehungsgeschichte des Werks und seinen Platz in der lehnwortlexikografischen Publikationsplattform „Lehnwortportal Deutsch“ <http://lwp.ids-mannheim.de/> (Stand: 6.11.2017) beleuchten.
The present study examines the dynamics of the kanji combinations that form common (or general) and proper nouns in Japanese. The following three results were obtained. First, the degree of distribution results from two similar processes which are based on a steady-state of birth-and-death processes with different birth and death rates, resulting in a positive negative binomial distribution with the proper nouns and in a positive Waring distribution with common nouns. Second, all rank-frequency distributions follow the negative hypergeometric distribution used very frequently in ranking problems. Third, the building of kanji compounds follows a dissortative strategy. The higher the outdegree of a kanji, the more it prefers kanji with lower indegrees. A linear dependence can be observed with common nouns, whereas the relationship between compounded kanji is rather curvilinear with proper nouns. The actual analytical expression is not yet known.