Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (21)
- Article (16)
- Part of a Book (8)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (38)
- German (5)
- Portuguese (2)
- Spanish (1)
Keywords
- German (46) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (31)
- Postprint (6)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (4)
Reviewstate
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.
We present a fine-grained NER annotations scheme with 30 labels and apply it to German data. Building on the OntoNotes 5.0 NER inventory, our scheme is adapted for a corpus of transcripts of biographic interviews by adding categories for AGE and LAN(guage) and also adding label classes for various numeric and temporal expressions. Applying the scheme to the spoken data as well as a collection of teaser tweets from newspaper sites, we can confirm its generality for both domains, also achieving good inter-annotator agreement. We also show empirically how our inventory relates to the well-established 4-category NER inventory by re-annotating a subset of the GermEval 2014 NER coarse-grained dataset with our fine label inventory. Finally, we use a BERT-based system to establish some baselines for NER tagging on our two new datasets. Global results in in-domain testing are quite high on the two datasets, near what was achieved for the coarse inventory on the CoNLLL2003 data. Cross-domain testing produces much lower results due to the severe domain differences.
Entity framing is the selection of aspects of an entity to promote a particular viewpoint towards that entity. We investigate entity framing of political figures through the use of names and titles in German online discourse, enhancing current research in entity framing through titling and naming that concentrates on English only. We collect tweets that mention prominent German politicians and annotate them for stance. We find that the formality of naming in these tweets correlates positively with their stance. This confirms sociolinguistic observations that naming and titling can have a status-indicating function and suggests that this function is dominant in German tweets mentioning political figures. We also find that this status-indicating function is much weaker in tweets from users that are politically left-leaning than in tweets by right leaning users. This is in line with observations from moral psychology that left-leaning and right-leaning users assign different importance to maintaining social hierarchies.
We present a new resource for German causal language, with annotations in context for verbs, nouns and adpositions. Our dataset includes 4,390 annotated instances for more than 150 different triggers. The annotation scheme distinguishes three different types of causal events (CONSEQUENCE, MOTIVATION, PURPOSE). We also provide annotations for semantic roles, i.e. of the cause and effect for the causal event as well as the actor and affected party, if present. In the paper, we present inter-annotator agreement scores for our dataset and discuss problems for annotating causal language. Finally, we present experiments where we frame causal annotation as a sequence labelling problem and report baseline results for the prediciton of causal arguments and for predicting different types of causation.
This contribution deals with right-dislocated complement clauses with the subordinating conjunction dass (‘that’) in German talk-in-interaction. The bi-clausal construction we analyze is as follows: The first clause, in which one argument is realized by the demonstrative pronoun das (‘this/that’), is syntactically and semantically complete; the reference of the pronoun is (re-)specified by adding a dass-complement clause after a point of possible completion (e.g., aber das hab ich nich MITbekommen. (0.32) dass es da so YOUtubevideos gab. (‘But I wasn’t aware of that. That there were videos about that on YouTube.’). The first clause always performs a backward-oriented action (e.g., an assessment) and the second clause (re-)specifies the propositional reference of the demonstrative, allowing for a (strategic) perspective shift. Based on a collection of 93 cases from everyday conversations and institutional interactions, we found that the construction is used close to the turn-beginning for referring to and (re-)specifying (parts of) another speaker’s prior turn; turn-internal uses tie together parts of a speaker’s multi-unit turn. The construction thus facilitates an incremental constitution of meaning and reference.
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.
Smooth turn-taking in conversation depends in part on speakers being able to communicate their intention to hold or cede the floor. Both prosodic and gestural cues have been shown to be used in this context. We investigate the interplay of pitch movements and hand gestures at locations at which speaker change becomes relevant, comparing their use in German and Swedish. We find that there are some shared functions of prosody and gesture with regard to turn-taking in the two languages, but that these shared functions appear to be mediated by the different phonological demands on pitch in the two languages.
This paper deals with the creation of the first morphological treebank for German by merging two pre-existing linguistic databases. The first of these is the linguistic database CELEX which is a standard resource for German morphology. We build on its refurbished and modernized version. The second resource is GermaNet, a lexical-semantic network which also provides partial markup for compounds. We describe the state of the art and the essential characteristics of both databases and our latest revisions. As the merging involves two data sources with distinct annotation schemes, the derivation of the morphological trees for the unified resource is not trivial. We discuss how we overcome problems with the data and format, in particular how we deal with overlaps and complementary scopes. The resulting database comprises about 100,000 trees whose format can be chosen according to the requirements of the application at hand. In our discussion, we show some future directions for morphological treebanks. The Perl script for the generation of the data from the sources will be made publicly available on our website.
Instruction practices in German driving lessons: Differential uses of declaratives and imperatives
(2018)
Building on а corpus of 70 hours of German driving lessons, this paper studies the use of declaratives vs. imperatives for instruction. It shows how these linguistic resources are adapted to different praxeological, temporal and participant-related environments. Declaratives are used for first instructions, task-setting and post- trial discussions. They exhibit complex syntax and do not call for immediate compliance. Their high degree of explicitness conveys how the action is to be carried out. Imperative instructions overwhelmingly correct ongoing actions of students or respond to their failure to produce expected actions. They exhibit minimal argument structure. They are reminders which presuppose that the student monitors the scene and can perform the action unproblematically. They index that requests have to be complied with immediately or even urgently.
The naturalness of synthetic speech depends strongly on the prediction of appropriate prosody. For the present study the original annotation of the German speech database “Kiel Corpus of Read Speech” was extended automatically with syntactic features, word frequency, and syllable boundaries. Several classification and regression trees for predicting symbolic prosody features, postlexical phonological processes, duration, and F0 were trained on this database. The perceptual evaluation showed that the overall perceptual quality of the German text-to-speech system MARY can be significantly improved by training all models that contribute to prosody prediction on the same database. Furthermore, it showed that the error introduced by symbolic prosody prediction perceptually equals the error produced by a direct method that does not exploit any symbolic prosody features.