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The present investigation targets the phenomenon commonly called control. Many languages including German and Polish employ non-finite clauses (besides finite clauses) as propositional complements. The subject of these complement clauses is left unexpressed and must generally be interpreted co-referentially with the subject or object of the matrix clause (subject or object control). However. there are also infinitive-selecting verbs that do not allow for a co- referential interpretation of the embedded subject - semantically, the embedded infinitives of these anti-control verbs are thus less dependent on or less unifiable with the matrix proposition. In Polish anti-control constructions, non-finite complements are overtly marked with the complementizer zeby, suggesting that they are structurally more complex (namely. containing a C-projection) than the non-finite complements in control constructions lacking zeby (modulo special contexts. viz. 'control switch'). In a comparative perspective, the paper brings corpuslinguistic and experimental evidence to bear on the question whether surface appearances notwithstanding, the infinitival complements of anti-control verbs in German should similarly be analyzed as truly sentential, i.e., C-headed structures.
The 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).
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).
This study investigates high vowel laxing in the Louisiana French of the Lafourche Basin. Unlike Canadian French, in which the high vowels /i, y, u/ are traditionally described as undergoing laxing (to [I, Y, U]) in word-final syllables closed by any consonant other than a voiced fricative (see Poliquin 2006), Oukada (1977) states that in the Louisiana French of Lafourche Parish, any coda consonant will trigger high vowel laxing of /i/; he excludes both /y/ and /u/ from his discussion of high vowel laxing. The current study analyzes tokens of /i, y, u/ from pre-recorded interviews with three older male speakers from Terrebonne Parish. We measured the first and second formants and duration for high vowel tokens produced in four phonetic environments, crossing syllable type (open vs. closed) by consonant type (voiced fricative vs. any consonant other than a voiced fricative). Results of the acoustic analysis show optional laxing for /i/ and /y/ and corroborate the finding that high vowels undergo laxing in word-final closed syllables, regardless of consonant type. Data for /u/ show that the results vary widely by speaker, with the dominant pattern (shown by two out of three speakers) that of lowering and backing in the vowel space of closed syllable tokens. Duration data prove inconclusive, likely due to the effects of stress. The formant data published here constitute the first acoustic description of high vowels for any variety of Louisiana French and lay the groundwork for future study on these endangered varieties.
Aktuelle Änderungen des Rats für deutsche Rechtschreibung 2016 - Hintergründe und Begründungen
(2016)
A model of grammar needs to reconcile the undesirability inherent to allomorphy, the apparent extra burden on learning and memory, with its occurrence and possible stability. OT approaches this task by positing an anti-allomorphy constraint, henceforth referred to as "OO-correspondence", which requires leveling (i.e. sameness of sound structure) in related word forms (Benua 1997). The occurrence of allomorphy then indicates crucial domination of OO-correspondence by other constraints. To assess the adequacy of this proposal it is necessary to establish the level of abstractness at which OO-correspondence applies and to examine the consequences of this decision for ranking order. While proponents of OT tacitly assume the level in question to be rather concrete, the notion of allomorphy as originally envisioned in Structuralism was defined by distinctness at a more abstract level referred to as "phonemic" (Harris 1942; Nida 1944). The basic intuition here is that the defining property of subphonemic sound properties, their conditionedness by context, entails that whatever burden they put on learning and memory is of a fundamentally different nature than that entailed by phonemic distinctness. The evidence from German supports that intuition in that leveling can be shown to target phonemic sound structure to the exclusion of subphonemic properties. Allomorphy, defined by phonemic alterna-tion, tends to serve phonological optimization in closed class items (function words, affixes) while serving to express morphological distinctions in open class items. The key to demonstrating the correlations in question lies in the discernment of phonemic structure, which is therefore at the core of the article.
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.
Im Verlauf der Geschehnisse in der arabischen Welt seit 2011 gewann der Begriff Arabischer Frühling an Bedeutung und avancierte zum Leitausdruck des Diskurses. Der Beitrag geht den Fragen nach, wie der Begriff Arabischer Frühling in der deutschsprachigen Öffentlichkeit sprachlich realisiert, mit welchen sprachlichen Mitteln er konstruiert und mit welchen Ereignissen – zuweilen auch Katastrophen – er identifiziert wurde bzw. wird. Dabei wird auf die symbolische Funktion des Frühlings sowohl aus historischer Perspektive der Vormärzzeit als auch aus heutiger Sicht eingegangen. Im Blickfeld der Untersuchung stehen darüber hinaus die Jahreszeitenbezeichnungen Winter, Herbst und Sommer und ihr symbolisches Verhältnis zu den arabischen Revolutionen.
In their analysis of methods that participants use to manage the realization of practical courses of action, Kendrick and Drew (2016/this issue) focus on cases of assistance, where the need to be addressed is Self’s, and Other lends a helping hand. In our commentary, we point to other forms of cooperative engagement that are ubiquitously recruited in interaction. Imperative requests characteristically expect compliance on the grounds of Other’s already established commitment to a wider and shared course of actions. Established commitments can also provide the engine behind recruitment sequences that proceed nonverbally. And forms of cooperative engagement that are well glossed as assistance can nevertheless be demonstrably oriented to established commitments. In sum, we find commitment to shared courses of action to be an important element in the design and progression of certain recruitment sequences, where the involvement of Other is best defined as contribution. The commentary highlights the importance of interdependent orientations in the organization of cooperation. Data are in German, Italian, and Polish.
Smiling individuals are usually perceived more favorably than non-smiling ones—they are judged as happier, more attractive, competent, and friendly. These seemingly clear and obvious consequences of smiling are assumed to be culturally universal, however most of the psychological research is carried out in WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and the influence of culture on social perception of nonverbal behavior is still understudied. Here we show that a smiling individual may be judged as less intelligent than the same non-smiling individual in cultures low on the GLOBE’s uncertainty avoidance dimension. Furthermore, we show that corruption at the societal level may undermine the prosocial perception of smiling—in societies with high corruption indicators, trust toward smiling individuals is reduced. This research fosters understanding of the cultural framework surrounding nonverbal communication processes and reveals that in some cultures smiling may lead to negative attributions.
Bericht über die 19. Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung vom 16. bis 18. März 2016 in Mannheim
(2016)
Bericht über die 19. Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung vom 16. bis 18. März 2016 in Mannheim
(2016)
Comparaison de deux marqueurs d’affirmation dans des séquences de co-construction: voilà et genau
(2016)
This contribution investigates the German response particle genau and the French response particle voilà within collaborative turn sequences in videotaped ordinary conversations. Adopting a conversation analytic approach to cross-linguistic comparison, I will show that the basic epistemic value of both particles allows them to be used in similar sequential environments. When a co-participant formulates a candidate conclusion in environments where it can be easily inferred from previous talk, first speakers may confirm the adequacy of the pre-emptive completion by voilà or genau. These particles may then also be followed by self- or other-repeats. The analyses aim to illustrate that participants rely on a variety of practices in order to positively assess a pre-emptive completion, and to refute a supposed binary opposition of refusal vs. acceptance in the receipt slot.
This paper is about the workflow for construction and dissemination of FOLK (Forschungs - und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch – Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German), a large corpus of authentic spoken interaction data, recorded on audio and video. Section 2 describes in detail the tools used in the individual steps of transcription, anonymization, orthographic normalization, lemmatization and POS tagging of the data, as well as some utilities used for corpus management. Section 3 deals with the DGD (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch - Database of Spoken German) as a tool for distributing completed data sets and making them available for qualitative and quantitative analysis. In section 4, some plans for further development are sketched.
Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht die Syntax und Semantik sogenannter Postponierer, d.h. konjunktionaler Konnektoren, die den von ihnen eingeleiteten Nebensatz dem Hauptsatz stets nachstellen. Anhand von sodass und zumal werden die Kerneigenschaften solcher Konnektoren im Deutschen vorgestellt. Am Beispiel der italienischen Konjunktionen cosicché, tanto più che und perché wird diskutiert, ob der Begriff des Postponierers für den Sprachvergleich genutzt werden kann. In einem nächsten Schritt werden die Postponierer des Deutschen unter Beiziehung sprachgeschichtlicher Argumente präziser beschrieben und im Übergangsfeld zwischen Adverbkonnektoren und Subjunktoren verortet. Es zeigt sich, dass die untersuchten Konnektoren sich letztlich sehr unterschiedlich verhalten, sodass es fraglich erscheint, ob ihre Zusammenfassung zu einer gemeinsamen Klasse gerechtfertigt ist.
In dem Beitrag wird das 2014 erschienene "Deutsch-russische Neologismenwörterbuch" vorgestellt, das besonders dem russischsprachigen Benutzer den neuen Wortschatz im Deutschen präsentiert, den er in Gesamtwörterbüchern meist vergeblich sucht. Auf einige Datentypen, d. h. Typen lexikografischer Informationen, wird genauer eingegangen, so auf die typischen Verwendungen der Stichwörter, auf die verschiedenartigen Verknüpfungen zwischen den Stichwörtern, auf die obligatorische Bedeutungserklärung und - ausführlich - auf die russischen Äquivalente.
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.
Dieser Beitrag fasst die wesentlichen Aussagen und Ergebnisse eines Workshops zusammen, der sieben Perspektiven auf die Untersuchung der Rolle des Deutschen im öffentlichen Raum zusammengebracht hat. Einige der vorgestellten Studien folgten dem seit Beginn der 2000er Jahre rasant an Popularität gewonnenen Ansatz der ‚Linguistic Landscapes‘. In anderen Beiträgen standen praktische Überlegungen zum Suchen von Beispielen der deutschen Sprache im Mittelpunkt, um diese im Kontext von DaF und Auslandsgermanistik sowie der Werbung für die deutsche Sprache einzusetzen. Ziel des Workshops war es, Gemeinsamkeiten und Perspektiven von diesen unter dem Schlagwort ‚Spot German‘ verorteten Studien mit der Linguistic Landscape-Tradition zu eruieren. Länder, aus denen Studien vorgestellt wurden, waren Estland, Lettland, Dänemark, Tschechien, Deutschland, Zypern und Malta.
Editorial
(2016)
Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and in particular, language acquisition in robots. Thus, we include research pertaining to developmental robotics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as practical computer science and engineering. The different studies are not at this stage all connected into a cohesive whole; rather, they are presented to illuminate the need for multiple different approaches that complement each other in the pursuit of understanding cognitive development in robots. Extensive experiments involving the humanoid robot iCub are reported, while human learning relevant to developmental robotics has also contributed useful results.
Disparate approaches are brought together via common underlying design principles. Without claiming to model human language acquisition directly, we are nonetheless inspired by analogous development in humans and consequently, our investigations include the parallel co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction. Though these different approaches need to ultimately be integrated into a coherent, unified body of knowledge, progress is currently also being made by pursuing individual methods.
Current theories of the syntax-semantics interface associate aspects of meaning that cannot be traced to visible structure with empty projecting heads or constructions as wholes. We present an alternative compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal or comparative meaning of inchoative, middle, excessive and directional complement constructions. Accord-ingly, the hidden meaning results from a repair mechanism that passes on a locally problematic meaning component to the next higher derivational cycle. The meaning component in question is one half of the logical form of Difference as contributed by certain functional elements or by syntactically transitive (nominative-accusative) configurations.
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.
When becoming integrated into the German vocabulary, foreign words reflect paradigmatic changes regarding orthography, grammar as well as semantics. In this context,German orthography is also highly determined by orthographic codification, which continues to influence the development of spelling to the present day. This study compares digital linguistically annotated corpora containing texts written by professional as well as non-professional writers; these corpora contain several billion foreign words (of Greek, Latin and French origin, and in the second part of the study of English/American and Italian origin), studied over a period of 20 years following the German orthographic reform of 1996. The results may potentially help the official regulations to adapt to the spelling practices observed – either by describing the rules more precisely or by proposing possible spelling variants or eliminating those which are not in common use. The study may also help to support correct lexicographic codification in dictionaries.
The paper presents practices in the compilation of FOLK, the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German, a large collection of spontaneous verbal interaction from diverse discourse domains. After introducing the aims and organisational circumstances of the construction of FOLK, the general idea discussed is that good practices cannot be developed without considering methodological, technological and organisational aspects on equal footing. Starting from this idea, this paper inspects more closely some actual practices in FOLK, namely the handling of legal (especially privacy protection) issues, the decisions taken for the transcription and annotation workflow, and the question of how to best disseminate a corpus like FOLK. The final section sketches some possible future improvements for practices in FOLK.
Leibnizʼ Interesse an sprachlichen Fragen steht in unterschiedlichen Kontexten. So geht es ihm bei der Beschäftigung mit dem Deutschen um die Möglichkeit das theoretische Wissen an die Praxis und die Praktiker einer aufgeklärt modernen Gesellschaft heranzubringen. Bei der Beschäftigung mit der Entwicklung einer auf der klassischen Wissenschaftssprache Latein basierenden, aber vereinfacht-internationalisierten wissenschaftlichen Universalsprache ebenfalls darum, aber auch um eine übereinzelsprachliche Internationalisierung. Bei seinen abstrakteren universalsprachlichen Überlegungen leitet ihn das Interesse an einer möglichen Universalität der auszudrückenden Relationen – wie in einer mathematischen Modellierung – wie an der Frage möglicherweise universaler Bestandteile des einzelsprachlich („monadisch“) gebrochenen Blicks auf die Welt. Im Hinblick auf beide Aspekte dieser dritten Ebene stellte die chinesische Sprache als altes und im Vergleich zur europäischen Sprachenwelt alternatives Kodierungsmodell eine probate Möglichkeit zur Schärfung seiner eigenen Überlegungen und Konzepte dar.
Sentence and construction types generally have more than one pragmatic function. Impersonal deontic declaratives such as ‘it is necessary to X’ assert the existence of an obligation or necessity without tying it to any particular individual. This family of statements can accomplish a range of functions, including getting another person to act, explaining or justifying the speaker’s own behavior as he or she undertakes to do something, or even justifying the speaker’s behavior while simultaneously getting another person to help. How is an impersonal deontic declarative fit for these different functions? And how do people know which function it has in a given context? The authors address these questions using video recordings of everyday interactions among speakers of Italian and Polish.
Die Erforschung der historischen Entwicklung des Deutschen in Luxemburg, vor allem im 19. Jahrhundert, ist ein Desiderat und sollte immer den Mehrsprachigkeitskontext berücksichtigen. Der vorliegende Beitrag entstammt dem Projekt "Standardization in Diversity. The case of German in Luxembourg (1795-1920)" und betrachtet den Gegenstand aus zwei Perspektiven: Einerseits wird ein umfangreiches Korpus von zweisprachigen öffentlichen Bekanntmachungen der Stadt Luxemburg sprachsystematisch exemplarisch anhand von zwei Phänomenen analysiert. Dabei lässt sich feststellen, dass grundsätzlich die Variation abnimmt, eine Annäherung an das reichsdeutsche Deutsche stattfindet und Hinweise auf die Mehrsprachigkeit verschwinden. Andererseits werden die für die Statusentwicklung
relevanten Dimensionen Sprachgebrauch, Sprachenpolitik sowie Sprachideologien auf der Basis von Protokollen der Parlamentsdebatten untersucht. Hier ist eher eine Präferenz der Frankophonie zu beobachten. Außerdem stellen Sprachwechsel zwischen Deutsch, Französisch und Luxemburgisch keine Seltenheit dar, sodass eine Zunahme mehrsprachiger
Praktiken konstatiert werden kann.
Wiktionary is increasingly gaining influence in a wide variety of linguistic fields such as NLP and lexicography, and has great potential to become a serious competitor for publisher-based and academic dictionaries. However, little is known about the "crowd" that is responsible for the content of Wiktionary. In this article, we want to shed some light on selected questions concerning large-scale cooperative work in online dictionaries. To this end, we use quantitative analyses of the complete edit history files of the English and German Wiktionary language editions. Concerning the distribution of revisions over users, we show that — compared to the overall user base — only very few authors are responsible for the vast majority of revisions in the two Wiktionary editions. In the next step, we compare this distribution to the distribution of revisions over all the articles. The articles are subsequently analysed in terms of rigour and diversity, typical revision patterns through time, and novelty (the time since the last revision). We close with an examination of the relationship between corpus frequencies of headwords in articles, the number of article visits, and the number of revisions made to articles.
The present study uses electromagnetic articulography, by which the position of tongue and lips during speech is measured, for the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze the articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation of dozens of speakers. Our results show that two Dutch dialects show clear differences in their articulatory settings, with generally a more anterior tongue position in the dialect from Ubbergen in the southern half of the Netherlands than in the dialect of Ter Apel in the northern half of the Netherlands. A comparison with formant-based acoustic measurements further reveals that articulography is able to reveal interesting structural articulatory differences between dialects which are not visible when only focusing on the acoustic signal.
Cet article étudie les définitions en contexte d’instructions dans les leçons d’auto-école. Les observations s’appuient sur un corpus de 70 heures de leçons enregistrées par vidéo en Allemagne. Le moniteur utilise des définitions pour introduire des nouvelles expressions techniques qui sont étroitement liées aux buts de l’apprentissage de conduite. Pour leur production, l’emploi des ressources multimodales est fondamental. La définition ostensive par pointage et une assertion existentielle (ça/ici c’est X) est complétée par des définitions descriptives et des démonstrations gestuelles du maniement des objets. L’objectif des actes de définition ici n’est pas de délivrer une définition de l’expression en soi, qui soit valable pour tous les contextes possibles, mais de produire une définition qui soit efficace dans le contexte pratique concerné. Les définitions donc sont plutôt fragmentées, indexicales et situées, et elles sont adaptées aux pré-connaissances de l’interlocuteur.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz plädiert in seinen der deutschen Sprache gewidmeten Schriften „Unvorgreiffliche Gedancken“ (1697) sowie „Ermahnung an die Teutsche“ (1682) für den konsequenten Ausbau des Deutschen zu einer nationalen als auch internationalen Wissenschaftssprache. Eines seiner Hauptargumente ist dabei die Möglichkeit einer Teilhabe aller Gesellschaftsschichten am wissenschaftlichen Diskurs im Interesse einer Steigerung der allgemeinen Wohlfahrt. Der Aufsatz untersucht einerseits Leibniz’ Argumente für den Gebrauch, die Entwicklung und die Verbreitung der Wissenschaftssprache Deutsch und spannt andererseits einen Bogen zur gegenwärtigen spiegelbildlichen Debatte, die Leibniz führte, des Deutschen als Wissenschaftssprache und seiner Rolle im internationalen wissenschaftlichen Diskursraum und diskutiert bereits offensichtliche wie mögliche Folgen der aktuellen Entwicklung.
Menschenrechte für Wörter
(2016)
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).
Nachruf auf Siegfried Grosse
(2016)
Names in competition: A corpus-based quantitative investigation into the use of colonial place names
(2016)
Referentially equivalent toponyms occur very often in colonial and postcolonial contexts. These names are in competition, and this competition is reflected in language use and in changing frequencies of use in large corpora. The main theoretical and methodological assumption of this paper is that corpus frequencies of referentially equivalent toponyms change according to particular patterns, and that the Google Ngram Corpora and Google Ngram Viewers can be used to detect these patterns. The aims of this paper are twofold: firstly, a corpus-linguistic method for investigations into the use of names will be presented, applied, and critically evaluated; secondly, it will be shown that the correlation between patterns of frequency changes and patterns of socio-historical colonial and postcolonial events gives rise to cross-linguistic generalizations, for example, that an increase in public interest in a place strongly promotes one of the referenlially equivalent names, or that in renaming scenarios colonial toponyms in relation to new toponyms remain in stronger use in the language of the former colonial power than in languages of other colonial powers.
This paper attempts a critique of the notion of 'dialogue' in dialogue theory as espoused by Linell, Markova, and others building on Bakhtin’s writings. According to them, human communication, culture, language, and even cognition are dialogical in nature. This implies that these domains work by principles of other-orientation and interaction. In our paper, we reject accepting other-orientation as an a priori condition of every semiotic action. Instead, we claim that in order to be an empirically useful concept for the social sciences, it must be shown if and how observable action is other-oriented. This leads us to the following questions: how can we methodically account for other-orientation of semiotic action? Does other-orientation always imply interaction? Is every human expression oriented towards others? How does the other, as s/he is represented in semiotic action, relate to the properties which the other can be seen to exhibit as indexed by their observable behavior? We study these questions by asking how the orientation towards others becomes evident in different forms of communication. For this concern, we introduce ‘recipient design’, ‘positioning’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ as concepts which allow us to inquire how semiotic action both takes the other into account and, reflexively, shapes him/her as an addressee having certain properties. We then specifically focus on actions and situations in which other-orientation is particularly problematic, such as interactions with children, animals, machines, or communication with unknown recipients via mass media. These borderline cases are scrutinized in order to delineate both limits and constitutive properties of other-orientation. We show that there are varieties of meaningful actions which do not exhibit an orientation towards the other, which do not rest on (the possibility of) interaction with the other or which even disregard what their producer can be taken to know about the other. Available knowledge about the other may be ignored in order to reach interactional goals, e. g. in strategical interactions or for concerns of socialization. If semiotic action is otherorientated, its design depends on how the other is available to and matters for their producer. Other-orientation may build on shared biographical experiences with the other, knowledge about the other as an individual and close attention to their situated conduct. However, other-orientation may also rest on (stereo-)typification with respect to institutional roles or group membership. In any case, others as they are represented in semiotic action can never be just others-as-such, but only othersas-perceived-by-the-actor. We conclude that the strong emphasis which dialogue theories put on otherorientation obscures that other-orientation is neither universal in semiotic action, that it must be distinguished from an interactive relationship, and that the ways in which the other figures in semiotic actions is not homogeneous in any of its most general properties. Instead, there is a huge variation in the ways in which the other can be taken into account. Therefore close scrutiny of how the other precisely figures in a certain kind of semiotic action is needed in order to lend the concept of ‘other-orientation’ empirical substance and a definite sense.
This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of past interpretation in Medumba (Grassfields Bantu), a graded tense language. Based on original fieldwork, the study explores the empirical behavior and meaning contribution of graded past morphemes in Medumba and relates these to the account of the phenomenon proposed in Cable (Nat Lang Semant 21:219–276, 2013) for Gĩkũyũ. Investigation reveals that the behavior of Medumba gradedness markers differs from that of their Gĩkũyũ counterparts in meaningful ways and, more broadly, discourages an analysis as presuppositional eventuality or reference time modifiers. Instead, the Medumba markers are most appropriately analyzed as quantificational tenses. It also turns out that Medumba, though belonging to the typological class of graded tense languages, shows intriguing similarities to genuinely tenseless languages in allowing for temporally unmarked sentences and exploiting aspectual and pragmatic cues for reference time resolution. The more general cross-linguistic implication of the study is that the set of languages often subsumed under the label “graded tense” does not in fact form a natural class and that more case-by-case research is needed to refine this category.
The article investigates the ways in which organic-medical metaphors were used to set the boundary of discourse between the economy and politics. The successful establishment of organic-medical metaphors for the economy is mainly explained by their connectivity to different political views. Concepts such as ‘Wirtschaftsleben’ or perceptions of the economy as an ‘organism’ laid the foundation for diagnosing sick or healthy conditions. From the end of the 19th to beyond the mid-20th century typical statements illustrate that the use of such metaphors supported the naturalization and stabilization of the boundary-setting discourse, insofar as it seemed natural that the relation between the two spheres should be formulated in terms of health and disease. Within liberal economic discourse in particular, politics was on the one hand targeted as a potential cause for economic disease, while on the other, it was claimed that politics had the task of keeping economic forces healthy.
In order to demonstrate why it is important to correctly account for the (serial dependent) structure of temporal data, we document an apparently spectacular relationship between population size and lexical diversity: for five out of seven investigated languages, there is a strong relationship between population size and lexical diversity of the primary language in this country. We show that this relationship is the result of a misspecified model that does not consider the temporal aspect of the data by presenting a similar but nonsensical relationship between the global annual mean sea level and lexical diversity. Given the fact that in the recent past, several studies were published that present surprising links between different economic, cultural, political and (socio-)demographical variables on the one hand and cultural or linguistic characteristics on the other hand, but seem to suffer from exactly this problem, we explain the cause of the misspecification and show that it has profound consequences. We demonstrate how simple transformation of the time series can often solve problems of this type and argue that the evaluation of the plausibility of a relationship is important in this context. We hope that our paper will help both researchers and reviewers to understand why it is important to use special models for the analysis of data with a natural temporal ordering.
Dieser Beitrag stellt nach einer kurzen allgemeinen Einführung die Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD) und das Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) als Instrumente speziell für gesprächsanalytisches Arbeiten vor. Anhand des Beispiels sprich als Diskursmarker für Reformulierungen werden Schritt für Schritt die Ressourcen und Tools für systematische korpus- und datenbankgesteuerte Recherchen illustriert: Nutzungsmöglichkeiten der Token-, Kontext-, Metadaten- und Positionssuche werden gezeigt, jeweils in Bezug auf und im wechselseitigen Verhältnis mit qualitativen Fallanalysen, auch mit Belegannotationen nach analyserelevanten (strukturellen und funktionalen) Kategorien. Schließlich wird das heißt als weiterer Reformulierungsindikator für eine vergleichende Analyse herangezogen. Dieser Beitrag stellt eine detailliertere Ausarbeitung einer kürzeren, eher technisch-didaktischen Online-Handreichung (Kaiser/ Schmidt 2016) zu diesem Thema dar, und hat einen stärker inhaltlich-analytischen Fokus.
Im Folgenden werten wir Daten zu jeweils zehn Lexemen von mehreren hundert Sprechern aus, um die Realisierungspraxis von hiatfähigen Silbengrenzen im Gebrauchsstandard empirisch aus regionaler und sozialer Perspektive darzustellen. Wir stellen die Ergebnisse in Zusammenhang mit der Entstehung des Neuhochdeutschen unter Substratwirkung des Niederdeutschen und zeigen, was dies für die Hypothese eines typologischen Wandels des Deutschen von einer Silben- zu einer Wortsprache nach sich zieht.
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.
Der Beitrag stellt ein interdisziplinär durchgeführtes Lehr-Lern-Projekt als Best-Practice-Beispiel vor. Ziel des vom Lehrinnovationspool der Universität Passau geförderten Projekts war es, Studierende der Sprachwissenschaft und Geographie sowie Schülerinnen und Schüler der FOS/BOS an digitales, selbstständiges und forschendes Lernen im thematischen Kontext der „Sprachdynamik im deutsch-österreichischen Grenzraum“ heranzuführen. Der Aufsatz zeigt, wie Studierenden verschiedene Rollen als Lernende, Forschende und auch als Lehrende einnehmen, indem sie die Schülerinnen und Schüler als Lernpaten bei der Planung, Durchführung und Auswertung von gemeinsamen Forschungsvorhaben unterstützen. Exemplarisch wird ein Projekt für Schülerinnen und Schüler näher vorgestellt. Weiterhin reflektiert der Beitrag das Lehrhandeln der Dozierenden.
Stress that spills over into one's intimate relationship (Repetti, 1989) can increase negative behavior between partners (Repetti, 1989; Schulz et al., 2004), which in turn can negatively affect relationship outcomes, such as satisfaction (Karney and Bradbury, 1995; Randall and Bodenmann, 2016). This negative stress spillover process may, however, be mitigated if couples help each other cope with the experienced stress (i.e., dyadic coping). Although theoretical assumptions, such as the systematic-transactional model of stress and dyadic coping (Bodenmann, 2005), suggest that the association between coping behavior and relationship satisfaction is determined by cultural influences (e.g., gender roles), findings from a recent meta-analysis shows that this association is stable across nations and gender (Falconier et al., 2015). Despite the significant findings, the samples used in the meta-analysis nearly exclusively relied on couples living in Western culture (Falconier et al., 2015), which leaves an unanswered question about how culture may affect the association between dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction. The goal of the current paper was to examine the cultural influence in dyadic coping processes based on 7973 married individuals across 35 nations.
We present an empirical study addressing the question whether, and to which extent, lexicographic writing aids improve text revision results. German university students were asked to optimise two German texts using (1) no aids at all, (2) highlighted problems, or (3) highlighted problems accompanied by lexicographic resources that could be used to solve the specific problems. We found that participants from the third group corrected the largest number of problems and introduced the fewest semantic distortions during revision. Also, they reached the highest overall score and were most efficient (as measured in points per time). The second group with highlighted problems lies between the two other groups in almost every measure we analysed. We discuss these findings in the scope of intelligent writing environments, the effectiveness of writing aids in practical usage situations and teaching dictionary skills.
The Social Perception of Heroes and Murderers: Effects of Gender-Inclusive Language in Media Reports
(2016)
The way media depict women and men can reinforce or diminish gender stereotyping. Which part does language play in this context? Are roles perceived as more gender-balanced when feminine role nouns are used in addition to masculine ones? Research on gender-inclusive language shows that the use of feminine-masculine word pairs tends to increase the visibility of women in various social roles. For example, when speakers of German were asked to name their favorite “heroine or hero in a novel,” they listed more female characters than when asked to name their favorite “hero in a novel.” The research reported in this article examines how the use of gender-inclusive language in news reports affects readers’ own usage of such forms as well as their mental representation of women and men in the respective roles. In the main experiment, German participants (N = 256) read short reports about heroes or murderers which contained either masculine generics or gender-inclusive forms (feminine-masculine word pairs). Gender-inclusive forms enhanced participants’ own usage of gender-inclusive language and this resulted in more gender-balanced mental representations of these roles. Reading about “heroines and heroes” made participants assume a higher percentage of women among persons performing heroic acts than reading about “heroes” only, but there was no such effect for murderers. A post-test suggested that this might be due to a higher accessibility of female exemplars in the category heroes than in the category murderers. Importantly, the influence of gender-inclusive language on the perceived percentage of women in a role was mediated by speakers’ own usage of inclusive forms. This suggests that people who encounter gender-inclusive forms and are given an opportunity to use them, use them more themselves and in turn have more gender-balanced mental representations of social roles.
In conversation, interlocutors rarely leave long gaps between turns, suggesting that next speakers begin to plan their turns while listening to the previous speaker. The present experiment used analyses of speech onset latencies and eye-movements in a task-oriented dialogue paradigm to investigate when speakers start planning their responses. German speakers heard a confederate describe sets of objects in utterances that either ended in a noun [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad (“I have a door and a bicycle”)] or a verb form [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad besorgt (“I have gotten a door and a bicycle”)], while the presence or absence of the final verb either was or was not predictable from the preceding sentence structure. In response, participants had to name any unnamed objects they could see in their own displays with utterances such as Ich habe ein Ei (“I have an egg”). The results show that speakers begin to plan their turns as soon as sufficient information is available to do so, irrespective of further incoming words.
Tollpatschig interviewen oder interviewt werden – Kurzvideos im ukrainischen und deutschen Fernsehen
(2016)
Kurzinterviews im Fernsehen stellen nicht nur für die kontrastive Medienlinguistik, sondern auch für die Gesprächsanalyse, Textsortenlinguistik und Pragmatik einen aufschlussreichen Gegenstand dar, besonders wenn es sich um kommunikative Abweichungen handelt. Der Beitrag stellt die Klassifizierung der Abweichungen bzw. der Deviationen in den Fernsehinterviews in Bezug auf die Kommunikation und die Sprache vor. Dabei werden die Kommunikationsdeviationen vom Standpunkt des Adressanten, des Kommunikationsprozesses, des gegenseitigen Verständnisses und des Adressaten sowie sprachliche Abweichungen betrachtet. Im Beitrag werden gemeinsame und unterschiedliche Merkmale der Deviationen in ukrainischen und deutschen Kurzinterviews im Fernsehen festgestellt, was zur Erarbeitung eines Modells der Deviationen und zu einer tieferen kontrastiven Untersuchung beider Sprachen verhilft.
Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) ist nach heutigem Kenntnisstand die einzige deutschbasierte Kreolsprache der Welt. Sie entstand zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts an einer katholischen Missionsstation in der damaligen Kolonie Deutsch-Neuguinea im melanesischen Pazifik. Die Sprache selbst und ihre Entstehungsumstände sind in mehrfacher Hinsicht bemerkenswert. Trotzdem wäre die Chance zur Dokumentation und Erforschung von Unserdeutsch beinahe verpasst worden: Nur noch rund 100 Sprecher, alle in fortgeschrittenem Alter, leben heute verstreut in Ostaustralien und Papua-Neuguinea.
Der hier vorliegende Blickpunkt informiert über die Entstehung, Bedeutung, Forschung und Aktualität der Sprache „Unserdeutsch“ im Pazifik.
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.
Dieser Aufsatz präsentiert Ergebnisse, die im Rahmen des binationalen Forschungsprojekts SDiv erarbeitet wurden 1. Im vorliegenden Text mit seinem Schwerpunkt auf den Textsorten innerhalb des Korpus Öffentliche Bekanntmachungen geht es im ersten Schritt um die Bestimmung der kommunikativen Merkmale, den historischen Rahmen, die quantitative Verteilung der Textsorten sowie ihre Klassifikation innerhalb des betreffenden Korpus 2. Im zweiten Schritt wird eine Analyse der sprachlichen Strukturen und Routinen durchgeführt. Das Ziel der textlinguistischen Analyse ist die Rekonstruktion der „Kommunikationsbedürfnisse und Kommunikationsbedingungen“ (Mattheier, 1998: 4), so wie sie im Zusammenhang mit den Öffentlichen Bekanntmachungen im 19. Jh. wirksam gewesen sind. Textsorten und Textsortengeschichte(n) haben den Vorzug, dass sie als „Schaltstellen zwischen Geschichte der Sprache und der Geschichte der Sprachgemeinschaft“ (Mattheier, 1998: 4) fungieren können, insofern leistet die hier realisierte Studie zu den Textsorten innerhalb der Öffentlichen Bekanntmachungen auch einen Beitrag zur Geschichte des Deutschen sowie zur Sozialgeschichte der mehrsprachigen Sprecher des Deutschen in Luxemburg. Der nachfolgende Aufsatz gliedert sich in sechs Abschnitte: 1. Einleitung, 2. Historischer Rahmen, 3. Korpus, 4. Theoretische Einbettung, 5. Sprachexterne Faktoren, 6. Sprachinterne Faktoren (z. B. grammatische Merkmale) sowie 7. Bilanz
The following paper is aimed to demonstrate that a grammar from above („Grammatik von oben“), i.e. a top-down grammar is better suited for the purposes of contrastive linguistic descriptions than the contrary approach, i.e. a bottom-up grammar. Furthermore, it will be argued that sentences should be understood and explained from a textual point of view.
When translating narrative texts from French into German, translators mostly choose the German simple tense “Präteritum” as an equivalent for French simple tenses and the German perfect tense “Plusquamperfekt” as an equivalent for French perfect tenses. There are common cases
however when the translator expresses anteriority where French is underspecified. On the other hand, sometimes the translator (or the editor) decides not to express anteriority by a verb tense
even if there is a perfect tense in the French source text. This is the surprising result of this study based on a small corpus of contemporary novel translations.
Weihnachten erzählen
(2016)
Zum Geleit
(2016)
Dieser Band ist in mehrerlei Hinsicht außergewöhnlich. Einerseits ist er die diesjährige und damit 21. Ausgabe des seit 1994 erscheinenden Jahrbuches Triangulum und steht damit in der Tradition, der Germanistik im Baltikum ein Sprachrohr zu geben. Im Gegensatz zu früheren Jahren ist dieser Band jedoch noch viel mehr: Als Dokumentation des 10. Nordisch-Baltischen Germanistentreffens (NBGT), das vom 10. bis zum 13. Juni 2015 von der Germanistik der Universität Tallinn ausgerichtet wurde, bündelt er eine Vielzahl der Vorträge, die im Rahmen der Tagung gehalten wurden.
У статті представлено розвиток девіатологічних ідей в Україні. Встановлено міждисциплінарний і спеціалізований підходи, запропоновано перспективи розвитку девіатологічних досліджень. Міждисциплінарний підхід знайшов відображення девіатологічних студій у філософії, психології, педагогіці, міжкультурній комунікації та журналістиці, а спеціалізований – у системно-теоретичному, когнітивному, дискурсно-текстовому, комунікативному, дидактичному і контрастивному напрямах досліджень. Така тенденція становить спробу комплексного комунікативнофункціонального підходу до явища девіацій.