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Komposition als Element nominaler Integration passt zum Sprachtyp des Deutschen. Diese Technik wird in verschiedenen Texttypen in unterschiedlicher Weise genutzt und funktional ausdifferenziert. Zweigliedrige Komposita prägen den alltäglichen Wortschatz. Die Erfahrung damit und ihre formale Offenheit bilden den Grund für spezifische Ausweitungen des Gebrauchs. Das wird gezeigt an der die Öffnung der Muster im literarischen Bereich, dann an der Interaktion von Kompositionstypen im Hinblick auf größtmögliche Explizitheit in juristischen Texten und letztlich an der Mischung von alltäglicher Klassifikation in gängigen Komposita und textfunktionaler Kondensierung in einem Sachtext.
Klassische Namen der Offline-Welt sind bei weitem umfangreicher erforscht als die eher kurzlebigen und auch noch sehr jungen Namen der digitalen Welt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden virtuelle Namen als eigene Namenklasse postuliert und unter Verweis auf bestehende Namentypologien verortet. Anschließend werden drei unterschiedliche Typen frei wählbarer virtueller Namen in Videospielen am Beispiel des populären Browserspiels ‚Forge of Empires‘ graphematisch und semantisch analysiert: Gilden-, Städte- und Benutzernamen. Hierfür werden drei Korpora mit je 100 Namen des jeweiligen Typs auf unterschiedliche Muster zunächst hinsichtlich Sprachwahl, Zeichenverwendung und graphematischen Besonderheiten untersucht. Anschließend erfolgt eine Untersuchung der den Namen zugrundeliegenden Benennungsmotive durch induktiv-explorative Kategorienbildung. Zwischen den untersuchten Namentypen kristallisiert sich in der Analyse ein funktionaler Unterschied heraus: Gildennamen priorisieren eine kommunikativ-phatische Funktion, wohingegen Benutzernamen primär Individualität ausdrücken. Städtenamen nehmen dabei eine Zwischenposition ein. Insgesamt fügen sich die verschiedenen Teilergebnisse in das Bild der bisherigen spärlichen Studien zur Namenwahl in Videospielen ein und rufen zugleich zur weiteren Erforschung auf.
Die Untersuchung des Umgangs mit Klausuren in der Studieneingangsphase seitens internationaler Studierender stellt im Projekt Sprache und Studienerfolg bei Bildungsausländer/-innen (SpraStu) neben der Analyse des Mitschreibens in Vorlesungen eine zweite Annäherung an konkretes studientypisches Sprachhandeln dar. Ziel der überwiegend qualitativen Erhebungen rund um Klausuren in der Anfangsphase des Bachelorstudiums von Bildungsausländer:innen ist es hier, sich ein erstes Bild von subjektiv empfundenen Schwierigkeiten und von strategischen Vorgehensweisen bei der Klausurbearbeitung zu verschaffen; dazu wurden sowohl Dozierende als auch L2-Studierende in die Analysen einbezogen. In diesem Kapitel werden einige erste explorative qualitative Analysen der entsprechenden Daten präsentiert. Die Auswertungen beziehen sich auf zwei exemplarische Klausuren der Fächer Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Abschlussklausur zum Modul Lexikologie) und Wirtschaftswissenschaften (Klausur zur Vorlesung Bürgerliches Recht für Wirtschaftswissenschaftler (BGB)), die jeweils am Ende des ersten Studiensemesters geschrieben wurden, und auf mit sechs Bildungsausländer:innen durchgeführte Stimulated Recalls zu diesen Klausuren (vgl. Gass & Mackey, 2017; Heine & Schramm, 2016). Ferner werden Daten aus Interviews mit den Dozierenden ausgewertet, die für die beiden Klausuren verantwortlich waren. Die Analysen können also keinen Anspruch auf Generalisierbarkeit erheben, sondern illustrieren vielmehr einige exemplarische Hürden, die sich ganz spezifisch für L2-Studierende ergeben, aus deren subjektiver Sicht, und setzen sie ins Verhältnis zu den von den jeweiligen Dozierenden erwarteten Herausforderungen.
This paper investigates synchronic variation in the lexical and grammatical environments of the German lexical verb verdienen ‘earn’, ‘deserve’. In its lexical uses, verdienen co-occurs with an object noun phrase whose head is either concrete (e.g. Geld ‘money’) or, more commonly, abstract (e.g. Beachtung ‘attention’). When it is used more grammatically with deontic modal meaning, verdienen is followed by a passive or active infinitive. This paper uses collostructional analyses to contrast lexical and grammatical uses in terms of the most strongly attracted lexical items, which are grouped into semantic classes. The results reflect different degrees of host-class expansion (cf. Himmelmann 2004), whereby the collexemes of verdienen expand from concrete to abstract and their morpho-syntactic contexts from nominal to infinitival complement and subsequently from passive to active. Synchronic distribution can thus serve as a window on diachronic development (Kuteva 2001), in this case the rise of a deontic modality marker.
Coronaparty, Jo-jo-Lockdown und Mask-have – Wortschatzerweiterung während des Corona-Stillstands
(2021)
Oralität ist gegenüber Literalität historisch primär, und der Übergang hin zur Literalität ist sprach- wie kulturwissenschaftlich einschneidend. Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German), eine erst knapp über 100 Jahre junge, originär ausschließlich mündlich verwendete Kreolsprache, befindet sich gegenwärtig an der Schwelle hin zur Verschriftung. Eine Sammlung von rund 180 spontan schriftlich produzierten Äußerungen dieser noch auf allen Ebenen unnormierten Sprache zeigt von den Unserdeutsch-SchreiberInnen intuitiv zugrunde gelegte Graphem-Phonem-Korrespondenzen. Die Schriftbelege lassen dabei Rückschlüsse zu auf graphematische Kontakteinflüsse sowie auf die mentale Repräsentation von Wörtern bei den SprecherInnen. Diese Erkenntnisse sind, neben ihrer sprachtheoretischen Relevanz, vor allem auch für die noch ausstehende Erarbeitung einer Orthographie von Unserdeutsch von Bedeutung.
When searching large electronic corpora of the German language, one finds variation at structurally critical points of the grammatical system. Two examples from the grammar of the noun phrase show that in certain cases this variation helps to ensure the function of a standard language, so that a certain amount of variation belongs to a realistic idea of a standard language. This is shown on the one hand by techniques of expanding the central adjective vocabulary and on the other hand by the choice of morphological alternatives in the area between determiners and attributive adjectives
Our paper discusses family language policies among multilingual families in Latvia with Russian as home language. The presentation is based on three case studies, i.e. interviews conducted with Russophones who have chosen to send their children to Latvian-medium pre-schools and schools. The main aim is to understand practices and regards among such families “from below,” i.e. which family-internal and family-external factors influenced the choice of Latvian-medium education and what impact this choice has on linguistic practices.
The paper shows that there have been critical events which both encouraged and discouraged the choice of Latvian-medium education. The wish to integrate into mainstream society has been met by obstacles both from ethnic Russians and Latvians. Yet, the three families consider their choices to be the right ones for the future development of their children in a multiethnic Latvia in which Latvian serves as the unifying language of society.
Nonnative-accented speakers face prevalent discrimination. The assumption that people freely express negative sentiments toward nonnative speakers has also guided common research methods. However, recent studies did not consistently find downgrading, so that prejudice against nonnative accents might even be questioned at first sight. The present theoretical article will bridge these contradictory findings in three ways: (a) We illustrate that nonnative speakers with foreign accents frequently may not be downgraded in commonly used first-impression and employment scenario paradigms. It appears that relatively controlled responding may be influenced by norms and motivations to respond without prejudice, whereas negative biases emerge in spontaneous responding. (b) We present an integrative view based on knowledge on modern forms of prejudice to develop modern notions of accent-ism, which allow for predictions when accent biases are (not) likely to surface. (c) We conclude with implications for interventions and a tailored research agenda.
Blogg Dir deinen Urlaub nach Tunesien! Zur Erläuterung des Musters [VImp PROPReflexivDat NPAkk]
(2020)
In diesem Beitrag soll das Muster [VImp PROPReflexivDat NPAkk] semantisch und syntaktisch erläutert werden. Dieses Muster, das semantisch mit Verben des Erwerbens wie anschaffen korreliert, wird auch im Zusammenhang mit Kommunikationsverben wie bloggen und facebooken sowie mit dem Kontaktverb rubbeln belegt. Mithilfe des Konzeptes der Koerzion bzw. der semantischen Anpassung soll das Kovorkommen des erwänhten Musters mit diesen Verben beschrieben und erklärt werden. Als empirische Quelle dient das Korpus für das Deutsche 2012 und 2014 aus den Corpora from the Web. Die vorliegende Untersuchung ist im Rahmen meiner Dissertationsarbeit zum Thema Argumentstruktur und Bedeutung medialer Kommunikationsverben des Deutschen und des Spanischen im Sprachvergleich durchgeführt worden.
Als die Olympischen Sommerspiele 1968 im Oktober 1963 nach Mexico City vergeben wurden, machten sorgenvolle Befürchtungen aufgrund der Höhe des Austragungsorts und die dadurch auftretenden Belastungen der Athlet*innenkörper in den Medien die Runde. Sehr schnell gingen fast alle teilnehmenden Sportverbände zur höhenphysiologischen Vorbereitung unter Einbeziehung sportmedizinischer Expertise über. Auf der Basis von Archivbeständen des Deutschen Olympischen Sportbundes sowie zeitgenössischen sportmedizinischen Beiträgen beleuchtet der Aufsatz die Rolle der Sportmedizin in der Vorbereitungsphase auf die Olympischen Sommerspiele 1968. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, auf welche Weise der Leistungskörper der Athlet*innen ins biopolitische, sportmedizinische Blickfeld rückte, welche Tests und Untersuchungen mit ihm durchgeführt wurden und welche Bedeutung dies für das Zusammenspiel von Leistungssport und Sportmedizin hatte.
Kommunikative Misserfolge im Deutschen für ukrainische Deutschlerner aus interkultureller Sicht
(2020)
Begriffe, die meist als nulläquivalente Lexik (Lakunen) für ukrainische Deutschlerner gelten und somit Schwierigkeiten bereiten sowie im Allgemeinen zu Misserfolgen zwischen Kommunizierenden führen können, stehen im Mittelpunkt der folgenden Ausführungen. Um sie zu vermeiden, werden einige Themen und Aufgaben zur Erweiterung der sozial-kommunikativen und interkulturellen Kompetenzen vorgeschlagen.
Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic and statistical cues are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language.
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
Studies on the Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) investigate frequencies, functions, and power relations between languages and their speakers in public space. Research on the LL thereby aims to understand how the production and perception of signs reflect and simultaneously shape realities. In this sense, the LL is one of the most dynamic places where processes of minoritization take place: the (in)visibility of minority languages and the functional and symbolic relationships to majority languages are in direct relationship with negotiations of minorities’ place in society. This chapter looks at minority languages in the LL from two major perspectives. Firstly, it discusses language policies, focussing on which policy categories and which domains of language use are of particular relevance for understanding minority languages in the LL. Then, it turns to issues of conflict, contestation, and exclusion by providing examples from a range of geographically and typologically prototypical case studies, including Israel, Canada, Belgium, the Basque Country, and Friesland.
This chapter introduces readers to the context and concept of this volume. It starts by providing an historical overview of languages and multilingualism in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, highlighting the 100th anniversary of statehood which the three Baltic states are celebrating in 2018. Then, the chapter briefly presents important strands of research on multilingualism in the region throughout the past decades; in particular, questions about language policies and the status of the national languages (Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian) and Russian. It also touches on debates about languages in education and the roles of other languages such as the regional languages of Latgalian and Võro and the changing roles of international languages such as English and German. The chapter concludes by providing short summaries of the contributions to this book.
German subjectively veridical sicher sein ‘be certain’ can embed ob-clauses in negative contexts, while subjectively veridical glauben ‘believe’ and nonveridical möglich sein ‘be possible’ cannot. The Logical Form of F isn’t certain if M is in Rome is regarded as the negated disjunction of two sentences ¬(cf σ ∨ cf ¬σ) or ¬cf σ ∧ ¬cf ¬σ. Be certain can have this LF because ¬cf σ and ¬cf ¬σ are compatible and nonveridical. Believe excludes this LF because ¬bf σ and ¬bf ¬σ are incompatible in a question-under-discussion context. It follows from this incompatibility and from the incompatibility of bf σ and bf ¬σ that bf ¬σ and ¬bf σ are equivalent. Therefore believe cannot be nonveridical. Be possible doesn’t allow the LF either. Similar to believe, ¬pf σ and ¬pf ¬σ are incompatible. But unlike believe, pf σ and pf ¬σ are compatible.
The demo presents a minimalist, off-the-shelf AND tool which provides a fundamental AND operation, the comparison of two publications with ambiguous authors, as an easily accessible HTTP interface. The tool implements this operation using standard AND functionality, but puts particular emphasis on advanced methods from natural language processing (NLP) for comparing publication title semantics.
In diesem Beitrag geht es vor allem um die Frage, wie das Smartphone in der Alltagskommunikation als gemeinsamer Bezugspunkt relevant gemacht wird und wie sich die Reaktionen der Interagierenden zum auf dem Display Gezeigten gestalten. Es zeigt sich, dass diese in mehrere responsive Schritte unterteilt werden, in denen die Aufmerksamkeit gebündelt und das Display fokussiert wird sowie eine Abstimmung darüber erfolgt, wie das Gezeigte zu kontextualisieren ist.
The use of digital resources and tools across humanities disciplines is steadily increasing, giving rise to new research paradigms and associated methods that are commonly subsumed under the term digital humanities. Digital humanities does not constitute a new discipline in itself, but rather a new approach to humanities research that cuts across different existing humanities disciplines. While digital humanities extends well beyond language-based research, textual resources and spoken language materials play a central role in most humanities disciplines.
The transfer of research data management from one institution to another infrastructural partner is all but trivial, but can be required, for instance, when an institution faces reorganization or closure. In a case study, we describe the migration of all research data, identify the challenges we encountered, and discuss how we addressed them. It shows that the moving of research data management to another institution is a feasible, but potentially costly enterprise. Being able to demonstrate the feasibility of research data migration supports the stance of data archives that users can expect high levels of trust and reliability when it comes to data safety and sustainability.
Im Streit um Migration soll der Gebrauch von Disclaimern in erster Linie ein positives Bild des Produzenten liefern oder wenigstens Ansprüche auf die Berechtigung seiner kritischen Stellungnahme erheben, ohne dass der Produzent als Rassist abgestempelt wird. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die Ergebnisse einer Fallstudie über den Gebrauch eines solchen Disclaimers in Deutschland und in Italien zusammengefasst, nämlich von „Ich bin kein Rassist, aber“ und seiner italienischen Entsprechung „Non sono razzista, ma“. Es wird gezeigt, (i) wie diese Disclaimer zum Ausdruck ausländerkritischer Stellungnahmen verwendet werden und (ii) wie ihre Verwendung in der Öffentlichkeit wahrgenommen wird.
Mangelhafter Adressatenzuschnitt in ukrainischen und deutschen politischen Youtube-Interviews
(2019)
The article investigates Ukrainian and German YouTube interviews from the point of view of contrastive linguistics. The purpose of this paper is to separate out the interview as a communicative genre and to determine the main aspects of research on discrepancies in expectations among interview participants, in particular to clarify the role of poor recipient design as the cause of communication failures. Results indicate that poor recipient design is the most common source of communication failures in both languages.
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.
Latvia
(2019)
This chapter deals with current issues in bilingual education in the framework of language and educational policies in Latvia, and also outlines similarities or common tendencies in the two other Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania. As commonly understood in the 21st century, the term ‘bilingual education’ includes ‘multilingual education, as the umbrella term to cover a wide spectrum of practice and policy’ (García, 2009: 9).
Substantivdetermination im Deutschen und im Ungarischen. Eine sprachtypologisch-kontrastive Analyse
(2018)
Die Studie untersucht den Bereich der Substantivdetermination im deutschen und im Ungarischen aus einer typologisch-kontrastiven Perspektive. Ausgehend von den semantisch-pragmatischen Funktionen der Determinative wird ihr Gebrauch zum Ausdruck von Definitheit, Indefinitheit und Generizität in beiden Sprachen beschrieben. Grundlage der Darstellung bilden Belege aus elektronischen Korpora und gedruckten literarischen Texten. Besonderes Augenmerk wird dabei Fragen gewidmet, die in der bisherigen Forschung wenig Aufmerksamkeit erfahren haben, so z.B. die Optionalität des indefiniten Artikels im Ungarischen sowie der sogenannte anamnestische Gebrauch der Demonstrativa. Beide Phänomenbereiche erlauben Rückschlüsse zum Grammatikalisierungsgrad er betreffenden Elemente. Ferner wird auf syntaktische Eigenschaften der Determinative wie ihre Kombinierbarkeit eingegangen. Es wird gezeigt, dass die beiden Vergleichssprachen neben vielen Gemeinsamkeiten auch sprachspezifische Besonderheiten im Gebrauch der Determinative aufweisen, die sich erst in einem Vergleich herauskristallisieren. Das Buch richtet sich an Fachkollegen und Studierende aus den Bereichen der germanistischen und ungarischen Sprachwissenschaft, der kontrastiven Linguistik, der Sprachtypologie und des Fachs Deutsch als Fremdsprache.
Am Beispiel von zwei Fallstudien wird die Frage der Generalisierbarkeit von an einer Einzelsprache gewonnenen Erkenntnissen über Verknüpfungselemente (Konnektoren) und konnektorale Strukturen aufgeworfen. Empirisch geht es zum einen um die Topologie von Adverbkonnektoren, zum anderen um das Verhältnis zwischen Adverbkonnektoren, Subjunktoren (bzw. Untersatzeinleitern) und den ihnen zugrundeliegenden Präpositionen. Methodischer Ausgangspunkt sind jeweils die Analysen und Klassifikationen des HDK, also ein dezidiert auf das Deutsche bezogener Ansatz. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass die feinkörnige einzelsprachliche Analyse, wie sie das HDK bietet, mit Gewinn auch auf andere europäische Sprachen, hier Englisch, Französisch und am Rande auch Polnisch, adaptiert werden kann, wenn die Rahmenbedingungen stimmen, also zugrundeliegende funktionale komparative Konzepte und sprachspezifische Strukturprinzipien beachtet werden. Dann ist auch ein Zugewinn für die Beschreibung des Deutschen zu erwarten.
Just like most varieties of West Germanic, virtually all varieties of German use a construction in which a cognate of the English verb 'do' (standard German 'tun') functions as an auxiliary and selects another verb in the bare infinitive, a construction known as 'do'-periphrasis or 'do'-support. The present paper provides an Optimality Theoretic (OT) analysis of this phenomenon. It builds on a previous analysis by Bader and Schmid (An OT-analysis of 'do'-support in Modern German, 2006) but (i) extends it from root clauses to subordinate clauses and (ii) aims to capture all of the major distributional patterns found across (mostly non-standard) varieties of German. In so doing, the data are used as a testing ground for different models of German clause structure. At first sight, the occurrence of 'do' in subordinate clauses, as found in many varieties, appears to support the standard CP-IP-VP analysis of German. In actual fact, however, the full range of data turn out to challenge, rather than support, this model. Instead, I propose an analysis within the IP-less model by Haider (Deutsche Syntax - generativ. Vorstudien zur Theorie einer projektiven Grammatik, Narr, Tübingen, 1993 et seq.). In sum, the 'do'-support data will be shown to have implications not only for the analysis of clause structure but also for the OT constraints commonly assumed to govern the distribution of 'do', for the theory of non-projecting words (Toivonen in Non-projecting words, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2003) as well as research on grammaticalization.
Several studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In this study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty. Consistent with previous results from Wotschack and Kliegl, the question difficulty manipulation influenced the probability of regressing from late in sentences and re-reading earlier regions; readers who expected difficult comprehension questions were more likely to re-read. However, this manipulation had no reliable influence on eye movements during first-pass reading of earlier sentence regions. Moreover, for the subset of sentences that contained a plausibility manipulation, the disruption induced by implausibility was not modulated by the question manipulation. We interpret these results as suggesting that comprehension demands influence reading behavior primarily by modulating a criterion for comprehension that readers apply after completing first-pass processing.
Since Lerner coined the notion of delayed completion in 1989, this recurrent social practice of continuing one’s speaking turn while disregarding an intermediate co-participant’s utterance has not been investigated with regard to embodied displays and actions. A sequential approach to videotaped mundane conversations in German will explain the occurrence and use of delayed completions. First, especially in multi-party and multi-activity settings, delayed completions can result from reduced monitoring and coordinating activities. Second, recipients can use intra-turn response slots for more extended responsive actions than the current speaker initially projected, leading to delayed completion sequences. Finally, delayed completions are used for blocking possibly misaligned co-participant actions. The investigation of visible action illustrates that delayed completions are a basic practice for retrospectively managing co-participant response slots.
Psychological research has neglected people whose accent does not match their appearance. Most research on person perception has focused on appearance, overlooking accents that are equally important social cues. If accents were studied, it was often done in isolation (i.e., detached from appearance). We examine how varying accent and appearance information about people affects evaluations. We show that evaluations of expectancy-violating people shift in the direction of the added information. When a job candidate looked foreign, but later spoke with a native accent, his evaluations rose and he was evaluated best of all candidates (Experiment 1a). However, the sequence in which information was presented mattered: When heard first and then seen, his evaluations dropped (Experiment 1b). Findings demonstrate the importance of studying the combination and sequence of different types of information in impression formation. They also allow predicting reactions to ethnically mixed people, who are increasingly present in modern societies.
Aversion to loanwords may express itself in various ways: deliberate and motivated by ideology of linguistic purism or more implicit and motivated by the strength of one’s national identification and ethnolinguistic vitality. A study of Polish philology students assessed their tendency to choose loanwords versus synonymous native words. The results supported a two-path model of linguistic purism. Social identity (strength of identification) directly predicted avoidance of loanwords, whereas ideological concerns (conservative political views) predicted it indirectly, through purist ideology.
Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der Analyse des Zusammenspiels sprachlich-hörbarer und sichtbar-kinesischer Praktiken, die beim alltäglichen Erzählen eingesetzt werden. Im Rahmen einer konversationsanalytisch basierten Untersuchung von Videoaufnahmen deutscher Alltagsgespräche wird die Bandbreite alltäglicher narrativer Praktiken in der face-to-face-Kommunikation aufgezeigt. Dies erfolgt exemplarisch anhand zweier Beispiele, in denen Einstieg, Ausgestaltung sowie Beendigung der Erzählung unter unterschiedlichen sequentiellen und multimodalen Bedingungen vollzogen werden. Die Untersuchung unterstreicht einerseits die Indexikalität alltäglicher narrativer Praktiken, andererseits die Notwendigkeit einer interaktionalen Narratologie, die diese Praktiken als Produkt sprachlicher, verkörperter und räumlicher Ressourcen sowie der Zusammenarbeit mehrerer Teilnehmer analysiert und konzeptualisiert.
As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native–nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
Der Beitrag widmet sich den Besonderheiten der deutschen Phraseologismen mit Farbkomponenten (schwarz, weiß, rot, gelb, grün und blau), die ein lakunares Phänomen für die Ukrainer bilden, die Deutsch als Fremdsprache studieren. Diese Lücken führen zu kommunikativen Missverständnissen. Dabei wird die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Null-Äquivalenz der Phraseologismen und die falschen Freunde des Übersetzers gelenkt. Die Farbkomponenten kommen beim Übersetzen als identisch, verschieden oder nur in der deutschen Sprache vorhanden vor.
Der vorliegende, in das Themenheft einführende Text will einen Überblick über die Ursprünge, die wesentlichen Entwicklungen und die Perspektiven dieses jungen Forschungsgebietes geben. Er ist zunächst wissenschaftshistorisch angelegt, wird also zu Beginn auf einige Vorläuferstudien verweisen und dann versuchen, die Entwicklung der Auseinandersetzung mit den LL in ihren Grundlinien darzustellen und zentrale Themen und Anwendungsfelder, Methoden sowie Begriffe und Termini vorstellen. Im letzten Teil wird auf Forschungsdesiderate bzw. -perspektiven verwiesen. Dabei wird auch immer wieder die Relevanz dieses Ansatzes für den Deutschunterricht und andere Lehrsituationen angesprochen.
Dieser Beitrag vergleicht die Ansätze ,Linguistic Landscapes' (LL) und ,Spot German' (SG) in Hinblick auf ihr Potenzial für die Untersuchung des Vorkommens und der Funktionen der deutschen Sprache in Regionen außerhalb des deutschsprachigen Kerngebietes. Als Beispiele wurden eine LL-Studie im Baltikum sowie eine SG-Untersuchung auf Zypern gewählt. Der Vergleich zeigt, dass beide Methoden - trotz ihrer unterschiedlichen Präzision - ähnliche Aussagen zur Rolle des Deutschen erlauben: In beiden Ländern erscheint Deutsch als „Ergänzungssprache“ zu den gesellschaftlichen Hauptsprachen in bestimmten Nischen, z.B. im Tourismus und in Verbindung mit bestimmten Firmen und Produkten.
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.
Most research on ethnicity has focused on visual cues. However, accents are strong social cues that can match or contradict visual cues. We examined understudied reactions to people whose one cue suggests one ethnicity, whereas the other cue contradicts it. In an experiment conducted in Germany, job candidates spoke with an accent either congruent or incongruent with their (German or Turkish) appearance. Based on ethnolinguistic identity theory, we predicted that accents would be strong cues for categorization and evaluation. Based on expectancy violations theory we expected that incongruent targets would be evaluated more extremely than congruent targets. Both predictions were confirmed: accents strongly influenced perceptions and Turkish-looking German-accented targets were perceived as most competent of all targets (and additionally most warm). The findings show that bringing together visual and auditory information yields a more complete picture of the processes underlying impression formation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unterschiede bei Dialektübersetzungen in Abhängigkeit von schriftlichen und mündlichen Stimuli
(2016)
When collecting linguistic data using translation tasks, stimuli can be presented in written or in oral form. In doing so, there is a possibility that a systematic source of error can occur that can be traced back to the selected survey method and which can influence the results of the translation tasks. This contribution investigates whether and to what extent both of the aforementioned survey methods result in divergent results when using translation tasks. For this investigation, 128 informants provided linguistic data; each informant had to translate 25 Wenker sentences from Standard German into either East Swabian, Lechrain or West Central Bavarian dialect, as the case may be. The results show two tendencies. First, written stimuli lead to a slightly higher number of dialectal translation in segmental variables. Second, when oral stimuli are used, syntactic and lexical variables are translated significantly more often in such a manner that they diverge from the template. The results can be explained in terms of varying cognitive processing operations and the constraints of human working memory. When collecting data in the future, these tendencies should be taken into account.
Die Rolle der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation erweist sich in den Interviews aus dem Israelkorpus m. E. als besonders wichtig. Es wird von der Tatsache ausgegangen, dass es sich bei den Informanten um Personen mit besonders delikaten biographischen Hintergründen handele. Die Interviewerinnen müssen demzufolge mit der starken emotionalen Belastung rechnen, der die Interviewten während der Rekonstruktion ihrer Lebensgeschichte ausgesetzt sind. Ein sehr direkter Frage-Antwort-Stil könnte wegen dieser emotionalen Belastung als unangenehm empfunden werden. Der Einsatz von Verfahren antizipatorischer Verstehensdokumentation weist stattdessen m. E. eindeutig darauf hin, wie sich die Interviewerinnen offensichtlich um Empathie bemühen und im Sinne einer intersubjektiven Inreraktionskonstitution mit den Interviewten kooperieren. Ziel dieses Beitrages ist es zu zeigen, wie solche Verfahren der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation durch den systematischen Einsatz der Konnektoren und, also, dann realisiert werden können.
Linguistic Landscapes (LL) sind in der internationalen Soziolinguistik und verwandten Disziplinen in aller Munde. Seit Mitte der 2000er Jahre sind Studien, die sich als Teil dieses Ansatzes verstehen, wie Pilze aus dem Boden geschossen. Seit 2008 hat es in fast jährlichem Rhythmus gut besuchte Tagungen gegeben, die sich ausschließlich mit Linguistic Landscapes beschäftigen - sowohl mit Fallstudien aus aller Welt als auch mit theoretischen und methodologischen Fragen. Folgerichtig sind nicht nur eine Vielzahl von Einzelaufsätzen erschienen, es hat auch mehrere Sammelveröffentlichungen gegeben, und seit 2015 erscheint ein eigenes Journal unter dem Titel „Linguistic Landscapes“ (vgl. Gorter 2013 für einen Überblick über die Entwicklung des Ansatzes).
Obwohl auch Wissenschaftler, die im deutschsprachigen Raum tätig sind, sich in den letzten Jahren den Linguistic Landscapes gewidmet haben, hat die Methode in deutschsprachigen Publikationen jedoch bisher nur einen vergleichsweise geringen Stellenwert eingenommen. Dieser Beitrag möchte somit zum einen Grundlagenarbeit leisten, indem er die Idee der Linguistic Landscapes noch einmal vorstellt und seine Entwicklung der vergangenen Jahre nachzeichnet. Zum anderen soll im Kontext dieses Bandes der Nutzen des Ansatzes für die Analyse von Sprachen von Migrantengruppen diskutiert werden. Schließlich wird der Beitrag durch einige Bemerkungen dazu abgerundet, in welchem Maße die Untersuchung von LL einen Nutzwert haben kann, der über wissenschaftliche Kreise hinausgeht. Grundlage für diesen Beitrag sind internationale Veröffentlichungen der letzten Jahre, vor allem aber gehen Erfahrungen aus eigenen Studien mit ein, die wir seit 2007 mit unterschiedlichen Zielsetzungen im Baltikum und in Deutschland durchgeführt haben.
Objective: Discrimination against nonnative speakers is widespread and largely socially acceptable. Nonnative speakers are evaluated negatively because accent is a sign that they belong to an outgroup and because understanding their speech requires unusual effort from listeners. The present research investigated intergroup bias, based on stronger support for hierarchical relations between groups (social dominance orientation [SDO]), as a predictor of hiring recommendations of nonnative speakers.
Method: In an online experiment using an adaptation of the thin-slices methodology, 65 U.S. adults (54% women; 80% White; M[age] = 35.91, range = 18–67) heard a recording of a job applicant speaking with an Asian (Mandarin Chinese) or a Latino (Spanish) accent. Participants indicated how likely they would be to recommend hiring the speaker, answered questions about the text, and indicated how difficult it was to understand the applicant.
Results: Independent of objective comprehension, participants high in SDO reported that it was more difficult to understand a Latino speaker than an Asian speaker. SDO predicted hiring recommendations of the speakers, but this relationship was mediated by the perception that nonnative speakers were difficult to understand. This effect was stronger for speakers from lower status groups (Latinos relative to Asians) and was not related to objective comprehension.
Conclusions: These findings suggest a cycle of prejudice toward nonnative speakers: Not only do perceptions of difficulty in understanding cause prejudice toward them, but also prejudice toward low-status groups can lead to perceived difficulty in understanding members of these groups.
A polarity-sensitive item (PSI), as traditionally defined, is an expression that is restricted to either an affirmative or negative context. PSIs like ‘lift a finger’ and ‘all the time in the world’ sub-serve discourse routines like understatement and emphasis. Lexical–semantic classes are increasingly invoked in descriptions of the properties of PSIs. Here, we use English corpus data and the tools of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982, 1985) to explore Israel’s (2011) observation that the semantic role of a PSI determines how the expression fits into a contextually constructed scalar model. We focus on a class of exceptions implied by Israel’s model: cases in which a given PSI displays two countervailing patterns of polarity sensitivity, with attendant differences in scalar entailments. We offer a set of case studies of polaritysensitive expressions – including verbs of attraction and aversion like ‘can live without’, monetary units like ‘a red cent’, comparative adjectives and time-span adverbials – that demonstrate that the interpretation of a given PSI in a given polar context is based on multiple factors. These factors include the speaker’s perspective on and affective stance towards the described event, available inferences about causality and, perhaps most critically, particulars of the predication, including the verb or adjective’s frame membership, the presence or absence of an ability modal like can, the grammatical construction used and the range of contingencies evoked by the utterance.
The English language has taken advantage of the Digital Revolution to establish itself as the global language; however, only 28.6 %of Internet users speak English as their native language. Machine Trans-lation (MT) is a powerful technology that can bridge this gap. In devel-opment since the mid-20th century, MT has become available to every Internet user in the last decade, due to free online MT services. This paper aims to discuss the implications that these tools may have for the privacy of their users and how they are addressed by EU data protec-tion law. It examines the data-flows in respect of the initial processing (both from the perspective of the user and the MT service provider) and potential further processing that may be undertaken by the MT service provider.
Thomas Müntzer zählt zu den Persönlichkeiten der deutschen Geschichte, die bislang völlig kontrovers beurteilt wurden. Das demonstriert schon die Auflistung der Bezeichnungen, mit denen Müntzer in der Literatur charakterisiert wurde und wird: Reformator, Theologe, Priester, Prediger, Prophet, Mystiker, Spiritualist, Apokalyptiker, (Sozial-)Revolutionär, Rebell, Bauernführer, Terrorist. In der DDR wurde er als Kämpfer für eine bessere, gerechte, von Ausbeutung freie Gesellschaft verehrt. Er galt als Vertreter eines christlichen Sozialismus. Sein Porträt war seit 1971 auf der 5-Mark- Banknote zu finden. Die religiösen Aspekte seines Wirkens wurden allerdings stark vernachlässigt. Die frühere Bundesrepublik sah in Müntzer eher einen religiösen Sonderling und nahm ihn nur am Rande zur Kenntnis.
Seine theologischen Auffassungen äußerte Müntzer in wenigen, meist recht kurzen, aber äußerst eindringlich formulierten Texten, deren Druck oft mit Problemen verbunden war. Bei den Zeitgenossen wirkte er vor allem über seine Predigten, die allerdings nicht publiziert wurden. Erhalten blieb dagegen ein nicht unbeträchtlicher Teil seines Briefwechsels, der für die Entwicklung seiner Ideen aufschlussreich ist. Im Prager Manifest, einem ungedruckt gebliebenen frühen Text, formulierte Müntzer erstmals in groben Zügen seine zentralen reformatorischen Vorstellungen.
Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
Dieses Kapitel befasst sich mit dem Zusammenspiel von Raum und Interaktion und konzentriert sich auf die dynamischen Organisationsformen sozialer Handlungen unter Berücksichtigung verbaler und sichtbarer Ressourcen. Durch die Untersuchung eines spezifischen Settings – professionelle Interaktionen in einem Radiostudio – werden wir empirisch beschreiben und konzeptualisieren, wie ein gebauter bzw. stark architekturierter Raum im Rahmen institutioneller Praktiken genutzt und relevant gesetzt wird. So soll zu aktuellen Überlegungen zu Interaktionsraum und -architektur, zu Raum als Ressource sowie als materiellem Umfeld beigetragen werden. Unsere ethnomethodologische und konversationsanalytische Perspektive wird von aktuellen Debatten über den sogenannten spatial turn in der interaktionalen Forschung beeinflusst (Kap. 1.1). Auf Grundlage eines in einem Radiostudio erstellten Videokorpus (Kap. 1.2) wird zunächst die Verbindung zwischen einem architektonisch und technologisch komplexen Umfeld und dem interaktionalen Handeln der Teilnehmer skizziert (Kap. 2.1, Kap. 2.2). Es folgt die detaillierte Analyse eines Einzelfalls (Kap. 3), in dem die Radiomoderatoren einen Text für den nächsten Sendeabschnitt vorbereiten. Hier werden die räumlichen Charakteristika sichtbar, die bei der Arbeit nach und nach relevant gesetzt werden (Kap. 4).
When collecting linguistic data using translation tasks, stimuli can be presented in written or in oral form. In doing so, there is a possibility that a systematic source of error can occur that can be traced back to the selected survey method and which can influence the results of the translation tasks. This contribution investigates whether and to what extent both of the aforementioned survey methods result in divergent results when using translation tasks. For this investigation, 128 informants provided linguistic data; each informant had to translate 25 Wenker sentences from Standard German into either East Swabian, Lechrain or West Central Bavarian dialect, as the case may be. The results show two tendencies. First, written stimuli lead to a slightly higher number of dialectal translation in segmental variables. Second, when oral stimuli are used, syntactic and lexical variables are translated significantly more often in such a manner that they diverge from the template. The results can be explained in terms of varying cognitive processing operations and the constraints of human working memory. When collecting data in the future, these tendencies should be taken into account.
This article describes an English Zulu learners’ dictionary that is part of a larger set of information tools, namely an online Zulu course, an e-dictionary of possessives (which was implemented earlier) accompanied by training software offering translation tasks on several levels, and an ontology of morphemic items categorizing and describing all parts of speech of Zulu. The underlying lexicographic database contains the usual type of lexicographic data, such as translation equivalents and their respective morphosyntactic data, but its entries have been extended with data related to the lessons of the online course in order to enable the learner to link both tools autonomously. The ‘outer matter’ is integrated into the website in the form of several texts on additional web pages (how-to-use, typical outputs, grammar tables, information on morphosyntactic rules, etc.). The dictionary comprises a modular system, where each module fulfils one of the necessary functions.
Precise multimodal studies require precise synchronisation between audio and video signals. However, raw audio and audio from video recordings can be out of sync for several reasons. In order to re-synchronise them, a dynamic programming (DP) approach is presented here. Traditionally, DP is performed on the rectangular distance matrix comparing each value in signal A with each value in signal B. Previous work limited the search space using for example the Sakoe Chiba Band (Sakoe and Chiba, 1978). However, the overall space of the distance matrix remains identical. Here, a tunnel matrix and its according DP-algorithm are presented. The matrix contains merely the computed distance of two signals to a pre-specified bandwidth and the computational cost is equally reduced. An example implementation demonstrates the functionality on artificial data and on data from real audio and video recordings.
Digressions
(2015)
Der Beitrag von Bruno Strecker Digressions ist auf Französisch geschrieben (der Muttersprache von Jacqueline Kubczak) und handelt von unterschiedlichen Exkursen. Er macht die Verbindung zwischen Kommunikationssituation und Arten der Exkurse sichtbar und bietet eine darauf basierende Typologie der Exkurse an. In einem zweiten Schritt werden die formalen Möglichkeiten, einen Exkurs einzuleiten und zu formulieren, dargestellt (z. B. durch Appositionen, Parenthesen, festgelegte Ausdrucksformen wie A propos xxx, Ça me rappelle oder nicht eingebettete Phrasen). Schließlich zeigt er, wie man aus dem Exkurs wieder „in die Spur“ kommt.
This chapter analyses the impact of political decentralization in a state on the position of ethnic and linguistic minorities, in particular with regard to the role of parliamentary assemblies in the political system. It relates a number of typical functions of parliaments to the specific needs of minorities and their languages. The most important of these functions are the representation of the minority and responsiveness to the minority’s needs. The chapter then discusses six examples from the European Union (and Norway) which prototypically represent different types of parliamentary decentralization: the ethnically defined Sameting in Norway and its importance for the Sámi population, the Scottish Parliament and its role for speakers of Scottish Gaelic, the German regional parliaments of the Länder of Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony and their impact on the Frisian and Sorbian minorities respectively, the autonomy of predominantly German-speaking South Tyrol within the Italian state, and finally the situation of the speakers of Latgalian in Latvia, where a decentralized parliament is missing. The chapter also makes suggestions on comparisons of these situations with minorities in Russia. It finally argues that political decentralization may indeed empower minorities to gain a greater voice in their states, even if much ultimately depends on individual factors in each situation and the attitudes by the majority population and the political center.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, wie Konnektoren als sprachliche Mittel zur Aktualisierung von zwei Arten konversationeller Aktivitäten eingesetzt werden können, nämlich von intersubjektiven bzw. gesprächsorganisatorischen Verfahren. Auf intersubjektive Verfahren greift ein Sprecher zurück, um in Kooperation mit seinem Gesprächspartner einen gemeinsamen Wissenshintergrund (common ground) zu schaffen. Durch gesprächsorganisatorische Verfahren greift der Sprecher in die gesprächsthematische Struktur des Interaktionsgeschehens ein. In diesem Beitrag wird die Aktualisierung dieser beiden konversationellen Verfahren am Beispiel der kommunikativen Gattung autobiographisches Interview betrachtet. Diese Gattung ist für eine solche Analyse m. E. besonders geeignet, denn sie zeichnet sich durch eine relativ scharfe Trennung der Gesprächsrollen aus, die das Nachvollziehen des Interaktionsgeschehens erleichtert. An einem autobiographischen Interview sind zwei Subjekte beteiligt: der Interviewte, der als Wissensträger gilt, und der Interviewer, der durch seine Rolle als Gesprächsleiter die Wissensvermittlung begünstigen soll. Der Interviewer ist also mit einer zweifachen Aufgabe konfrontiert, denn er muss die anfängliche Wissensasymmetrie ausgleichen und ist zugleich für die Gesprächsorganisation zuständig. Im Folgenden soll am Beispiel des Konjunktors und veranschaulicht werden, wie der Gebrauch von Konnektoren zur Bewältigung dieser beiden kommunikativen Aufgaben beitragen kann.
In this article, we explore the feasibility of extracting suitable and unsuitable food items for particular health conditions from natural language text. We refer to this task as conditional healthiness classification. For that purpose, we annotate a corpus extracted from forum entries of a food-related website. We identify different relation types that hold between food items and health conditions going beyond a binary distinction of suitability and unsuitability and devise various supervised classifiers using different types of features. We examine the impact of different task-specific resources, such as a healthiness lexicon that lists the healthiness status of a food item and a sentiment lexicon. Moreover, we also consider task-specific linguistic features that disambiguate a context in which mentions of a food item and a health condition co-occur and compare them with standard features using bag of words, part-of-speech information and syntactic parses. We also investigate in how far individual food items and health conditions correlate with specific relation types and try to harness this information for classification.
Social perception studies have revealed that smiling individuals are perceived more favourably on many communion dimensions in comparison to nonsmiling individuals. Research on gender differences in smiling habits showed that women smile more than men. In our study, we investigated this phenomena further and hypothesised that women perceive smiling individuals as more honest than men. An experiment conducted in seven countries (China, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Republic of South Africa and USA) revealed that gender may influence the perception of honesty in smiling individuals. We compared ratings of honesty made by male and female participants who viewed photos of smiling and nonsmiling people. While men and women did not differ on ratings of honesty in nonsmiling individuals, women assessed smiling individuals as more honest than men did. We discuss these results from a social norms perspective.
Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related potential studies. However, previous research suggests that while frequency affects the N400 in single-word tasks, it may have little or no effect on the N400 when a word is presented with a preceding sentence context. The present study assessed this apparent dissociation between the results from the 2 methods using a coregistration paradigm in which the frequency and predictability of a target word were manipulated while readers’ eye movements and electroencephalograms were simultaneously recorded. We replicated the pattern of significant, and additive, effects of the 2 manipulations on eye fixation durations. We also replicated the predictability effect on the N400, time-locked to the onset of the reader’s first fixation on the target word. However, there was no indication of a frequency effect in the electroencephalogram record. We suggest that this pattern has implications both for the interpretation of the N400 and for the interpretation of frequency and predictability effects in language comprehension.
Content analysis provides a useful and multifaceted, methodological framework for Twitter analysis. CAQDAS tools support the structuring of textual data by enabling categorising and coding. Depending on the research objective, it may be appropriate to choose a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative and qualitative elements of analysis and plays out their respective advantages to the greatest possible extent while minimising their shortcomings. In this chapter, we will discuss CAQDAS speech act analysis of tweets as an example of software-assisted content analysis. We start with some elementary thoughts on the challenges of the collection and evaluation of Twitter data before we give a brief description of the potentials and limitations of using the software QDA Miner (as one typical example for possible analysis programmes). Our focus will lie on analytical features that can be particularly helpful in speech act analysis of tweets.
We continue the study of the reproducibility of Propp’s annotations from Bod et al. (2012). We present four experiments in which test subjects were taught Propp’s annotation system; we conclude that Propp’s system needs a significant amount of training, but that with sufficient time investment, it can be reliably trained for simple tales.
We present a technique called event mapping that allows to project text representations into event lists, produce an event table, and derive quantitative conclusions to compare the text representations. The main application of the technique is the case where two classes of text representations have been collected in two different settings (e.g., as annotations in two different formal frameworks) and we can compare the two classes with respect to their systematic differences in the event table. We illustrate how the technique works by applying it to data collected in two experiments (one using annotations in Vladimir Propp’s framework, the other using natural language summaries).
Communication of stereotypes in the classroom: biased language use of German and Turkish adolescents
(2014)
Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon of describing stereotypes more abstractly. The LIB is the tendency to use language abstraction for in-group protective reasons. Results revealed an unmoderated LEB, whereas the LIB only occurred when foreigners were in the numerical majority, the classroom composition was perceived as a learning disadvantage, or the interethnic conflict frequency was high. These findings provide first evidence for the use of both LEB and LIB in an interethnic classroom setting.
This paper analyses paramedic emergency interaction as multimodal multiactivity. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of emergency drills performed by professional paramedics during advanced training, the focus is on paramedics’ participation in multiple joint projects which become simultaneously relevant. Simultaneity and fast succession of multiactivity does not only characterise work on the team level, but also the work profile of the individual paramedic. Participants have to coordinate their own participation in more than one joint project intrapersonally. In the data studied, three patterns of allocating multimodal resources stood out as routine ways of coordinating participation in two simultaneous projects intrapersonally:
1. Talk and hearing vs. manual action monitored by gaze,
2. Talk and hearing vs. gazing (and pointing),
3. Manual action vs. gaze (and talk and hearing).
Prejudice against a social group may lead to discrimination of members of this group. One very strong cue of group membership is a (non)standard accent in speech. Surprisingly, hardly any interventions against accent-based discrimination have been tested. In the current article, we introduce an intervention in which what participants experience themselves unobtrusively changes their evaluations of others. In the present experiment, participants in the experimental condition talked to a confederate in a foreign language before the experiment, whereas those in the control condition received no treatment. Replicating previous research, participants in the control condition discriminated against Turkish-accented job candidates. In contrast, those in the experimental condition evaluated Turkish- and standard-accented candidates as similarly competent. We discuss potential mediating and moderating factors of this effect.
Growing globalisation of the world draws attention to cultural differences between people from different countries or from different cultures within the countries. Notwithstanding the diversity of people’s worldviews, current cross-cultural research still faces the challenge of how to avoid ethnocentrism; comparing Western-driven phenomena with like variables across countries without checking their conceptual equivalence clearly is highly problematic. In the present article we argue that simple comparison of measurements (in the quantitative domain) or of semantic interpretations (in the qualitative domain) across cultures easily leads to inadequate results. Questionnaire items or text produced in interviews or via open-ended questions have culturally laden meanings and cannot be mapped onto the same semantic metric. We call the culture-specific space and relationship between variables or meanings a ’cultural metric’, that is a set of notions that are inter-related and that mutually specify each other’s meaning. We illustrate the problems and their possible solutions with examples from quantitative and qualitative research. The suggested methods allow to respect the semantic space of notions in cultures and language groups and the resulting similarities or differences between cultures can be better understood and interpreted.
Feminine forms of job titles raise great interest in many countries. However, it is still unknown how they shape stereotypical impressions on warmth and competence dimensions among female and male listeners. In an experiment with fictitious job titles men perceived women described with feminine job titles as significantly less warm and marginally less competent than women with masculine job titles, which led to lower willingness to employ them. No such effects were observed among women.
Diese Studie untersucht kontrastiv deutsche und englische Satzstrukturen und entwirft eine Typologie ihrer Textrealisierungen. Im Mittelpunkt steht der Valenzaspekt der Satzstruktur. Es werden aber nicht nur die deutschen und englischen Ausdrucksmittel (einfache Ergänzungen und Ergänzungssätze) vorgestellt und kontrastiert, sondern sie werden in einer Korpusanalyse quantifiziert. Hierzu wird ein deutsch-englisches bzw. englisch-deutsches Übersetzungskorpus definiert und ausgewertet. Die beobachteten Kontraste werden im Zusammenhang typologischer Tendenzen und bevorzugter Vertextungsstrategien bewertet. Ziel der Untersuchung ist die Überprüfung der einflussreichen typologischen These von John A. Hawkins, das Deutsche sei semantisch transparenter als das Englische. Die Einzelanalysen sind für alle, die sich theoretisch oder praktisch für Übersetzung und Spracherwerb interessieren, von Interesse.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
"Standard language" is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers. This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed "standard usage". It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project "Variation in Spoken German", Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of "standard usage" in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of "standard usage" inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.
This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analysis. An interactional episode involving mock stories to reveal and reproach an inadequate identity-claim of a co-participant is analysed both in terms of practices of membership categorization and positioning. It is concluded that membership categorization is a core element of positioning. Still, positioning goes beyond membership categorization in a) revealing biographical dimensions accomplished by narration and b) by uncovering implicit performative claims of identity, which are not established by categorization or description.
Contemporary studies on the characteristics of natural language benefit enormously from the increasing amount of linguistic corpora. Aside from text and speech corpora, corpora of computer-mediated communication (CMC) Position themselves between orality and literacy, and beyond that provide in- sight into the impact of "new", mainly intemet-based media on language beha- viour. In this paper, we present an empirical attempt to work with annotated CMC corpora for the explanation of linguistic phenomena. In concrete terms, we implement machine leaming algorithms to produce decision trees that reveal rules and tendencies about the use of genitive markers in German.
Sexual harassment severely impacts the educational system in the West African country Benin and the progress of women in this society that is characterized by great gender inequality. Knowledge of the belief systems rooting in the sociocultural context is crucial to the understanding of sexual harassment. However, no study has yet investigated how sexual harassment is related to fundamental beliefs in Benin or West African countries. We conducted a field study on 265 female and male students from several high schools in Benin to investigate the link between sexual harassment and measures of ambivalent sexism, gender identity, and rape myth acceptance. Almost half of the sample reported having experienced sexual harassment personally or among peers. Levels of sexism and rape myth acceptance were very high compared to other studies. These attitudes appeared to converge in a sexist belief system that was linked to personal experiences, the perceived probability of experiencing and fear of sexual harassment. Results suggest that sexual harassment is a societal problem and that interventions need to address fundamental attitudes held in societies low in gender equality.
Automatic recognition of speech, thought, and writing representation in German narrative texts
(2013)
This article presents the main results of a project, which explored ways to recognize and classify a narrative feature—speech, thought, and writing representation (ST&WR)—automatically, using surface information and methods of computational linguistics. The task was to detect and distinguish four types—direct, free indirect, indirect, and reported ST&WR—in a corpus of manually annotated German narrative texts. Rule-based as well as machine-learning methods were tested and compared. The results were best for recognizing direct ST&WR (best F1 score: 0.87), followed by indirect (0.71), reported (0.58), and finally free indirect ST&WR (0.40). The rule-based approach worked best for ST&WR types with clear patterns, like indirect and marked direct ST&WR, and often gave the most accurate results. Machine learning was most successful for types without clear indicators, like free indirect ST&WR, and proved more stable. When looking at the percentage of ST&WR in a text, the results of machine-learning methods always correlated best with the results of manual annotation. Creating a union or intersection of the results of the two approaches did not lead to striking improvements. A stricter definition of ST&WR, which excluded borderline cases, made the task harder and led to worse results for both approaches.
In this article, we examine the effectiveness of bootstrapping supervised machine-learning polarity classifiers with the help of a domain-independent rule-based classifier that relies on a lexical resource, i.e., a polarity lexicon and a set of linguistic rules. The benefit of this method is that though no labeled training data are required, it allows a classifier to capture in-domain knowledge by training a supervised classifier with in-domain features, such as bag of words, on instances labeled by a rule-based classifier. Thus, this approach can be considered as a simple and effective method for domain adaptation. Among the list of components of this approach, we investigate how important the quality of the rule-based classifier is and what features are useful for the supervised classifier. In particular, the former addresses the issue in how far linguistic modeling is relevant for this task. We not only examine how this method performs under more difficult settings in which classes are not balanced and mixed reviews are included in the data set but also compare how this linguistically-driven method relates to state-of-the-art statistical domain adaptation.
Reformulating place
(2013)
This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk, and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action.
Pseudoclefts in Hungarian
(2013)
Based on novel data from Hungarian, this paper makes the case that in at least some languages specificational pseudocleft sentences must receive a ‘what-you- see-is-what-you-get’ syntactic analysis. More specifically, it is argued that the clefted constituent is the subject of predication (underlyingly base-generated in Spec, Pr), whereas the cleft clause acts as a predicate in the structure. Alongside connectivity effects characteristic of specificational pseudoclefts, we also discuss a range of anti-connectivity effects, which we show to receive a straightforward explanation under the proposed analysis. It follows that attested connectivity effects, in turn, require a semantic, rather than a syntactic account, along the lines of Jacobson (1994) and Sharvit (1999).
The authors compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The finding shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.
Drawing on naturalistic video and audio recordings of international meetings, and within the framework of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and interactional linguistics, this chapter studies how multilingual resources are mobilized in social interactions among professionals, how available linguistic and embodied resources are identified and used by the participants, which solutions are locally elaborated by them when they are confronted with various languages spoken but not shared among them, and which definition of multilingualism they adopt for all practical purposes. Focusing on the multilingual solutions emically elaborated in international professional meetings, we show that the participants orient to a double principle: on the one hand, they orient to the progressivity of the interaction, adopting all the possible resources that enable them to go on within the current activity; on the other hand, they orient to the intersubjectivity of the interaction, treating, preventing and repairing possible troubles and problems of understanding. Specific multilingual solutions can be adopted to keep this difficult balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity; they vary according to the settings, the competences at hand, the linguistic and embodied resources locally defined by the participants as publicly available, the multilingual resources treated as totally or partially shared, as transparent or opaque, and as needing repair or not. The paper begins by sketching the analytical framework, including the methodology and the data collected; it then presents some general findings, before offering an analysis of various ways in which participants keep the balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity in different multilingual interactional contexts.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
Dropping out of overlap is a frequent practice for overlap resolution (Schegloff, 2000, Jefferson, 2004) in interaction, as it re-establishes the “one-at-a-time” principle of the turn-taking system (Sacks et al., 1974). While it is appropriate to analyze the practice of dropping out of overlap as a verbal and thus audible phenomenon, a close look at video data reveals that withdrawing from an action trajectory is also an embodied practice. Based on a fine-grained multimodal analysis (C. Goodwin, 1981, Mondada, 2007a, Mondada, 2007b) of videotaped interactions in French, this paper illustrates how overlapped speakers organize the momentary suspension of their action trajectory in visible ways. Indeed, participants do not instantly withdraw from their action trajectory when they stop talking. By using bodily resources, they are able to display continuous monitoring of the availability of their co-participants and of the next possible slot for resuming their suspended action. I therefore suggest analyzing the drop out of overlap as the first step of withdrawal, as definitive, embodied withdrawal can occur later, or, in case of resumption, not at all. Consequently, my paper analyzes withdrawal as a good example of strengthening the analytic concept of embodiment with regard to turn-taking practices in interaction.
Die Veränderung der individuellen politischen Kommunikation ist ein wesentliches Element des Konzepts der Mediatisierung des Politischen. Immer mehr Politikerinnen und Politiker sowie Bürgerinnen und Bürger nutzen digitale Plattformen, um sich politisch auszutauschen und zu informieren. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, inwiefern Politiker/-innen selbst Austauschmöglichkeiten im Netz bieten und somit direkt Kommunikation fördern. Für die vorliegende Studie wurde die Nutzung des Microblogging-Dienstes Twitter durch Politiker/-innen während ausgewählter Landtagswahlkämpfe des Jahres 2011 auf partizipationsermöglichende Elemente hin untersucht. Diese Elemente wurden mithilfe des „Funktionalen Operatorenmodells“ systematisiert und kategorisiert. Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen nicht nur eine individuell ausgeprägte Nutzungsfrequenz der einzelnen Politiker/-innen, sondern auch unterschiedliche Stile der Twitternutzung, die sich als „persönlich-interaktiv“ und „thematisch-informativ“ klassifizieren lassen. In Einblick auf deliberative Strukturen ist die Twitterkommunikation im Politiker-Bürger-Dialog hingegen noch ausbaufähig.
Vor dem Hintergrund einer neuen linguistischen Betrachtungsweise, die wissenschaftliche Präsentationen als eine eigenständige, komplexe, multimodale Textsorte auffasst, wird in diesem Beitrag zunächst der Aspekt der Multimodalität von Präsentationen fokussiert. Die analytische Beschäftigung mit wissenschaftlichen Präsentationen wird dann um erste Ergebnisse unserer Rezeptionsexperimente ergänzt, in denen unter anderem Erhebungen zur Wissensvermittlung unterschiedlicher wissenschaftlicher Präsentationen durchgeführt wurden.