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Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology
(2020)
It has often been argued that argument structure in spoken discourse is less complex than in written discourse. This paper argues that lean argument structure, in particular, argument omission, gives evidence of how the production and understanding of linguistic structures is adapted to the interactive, material, and temporal ecology of talk-in-interaction. It is shown how lean argument structure builds on participants' ongoing bodily conduct, joint perceptual salience, joint attention, and their Orientation to expectable next actions within a joint project. The phenomena discusscd in this paper are verb-derived discourse markers and tags, analepsis in responsive actions, and ellipsis in first actions, such as requests and instructions. The study draws from transcripts and audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in German from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK).
This paper explores speakers’ notions of the situational appropriacy of linguistic variants. We conducted a web-based survey in which we collected ratings of the appropriacy of variants of linguistic variables in spoken German. A range of quantitative methods (cluster analysis, factor analysis and various forms of visualization techniques) is applied in order to analyze metalinguistic awareness and the differences in the evaluation of written vs. spoken stimuli. First, our data show that speakers’ ratings of the appropriacy of linguistic variants vary reliably with two rough clusters representing formal and informal speech situations and genres. The findings confirm that speakers adhere to a notion of spoken standard German which takes genre and register-related variation into account. Secondly, our analysis reveals a written language bias: metalinguistic awareness is strongly influenced by the physical mode of the presentation of linguistic items (spoken vs. written).