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We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.
Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology
(2020)
It has often been argued that argument structure in spoken discourse is less complex than in written discourse. This paper argues that lean argument structure, in particular, argument omission, gives evidence of how the production and understanding of linguistic structures is adapted to the interactive, material, and temporal ecology of talk-in-interaction. It is shown how lean argument structure builds on participants' ongoing bodily conduct, joint perceptual salience, joint attention, and their Orientation to expectable next actions within a joint project. The phenomena discusscd in this paper are verb-derived discourse markers and tags, analepsis in responsive actions, and ellipsis in first actions, such as requests and instructions. The study draws from transcripts and audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in German from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK).
Instruction practices in German driving lessons: Differential uses of declaratives and imperatives
(2018)
Building on а corpus of 70 hours of German driving lessons, this paper studies the use of declaratives vs. imperatives for instruction. It shows how these linguistic resources are adapted to different praxeological, temporal and participant-related environments. Declaratives are used for first instructions, task-setting and post- trial discussions. They exhibit complex syntax and do not call for immediate compliance. Their high degree of explicitness conveys how the action is to be carried out. Imperative instructions overwhelmingly correct ongoing actions of students or respond to their failure to produce expected actions. They exhibit minimal argument structure. They are reminders which presuppose that the student monitors the scene and can perform the action unproblematically. They index that requests have to be complied with immediately or even urgently.
This article deals with narratives of traumatic experiences of parental violence in childhood, told by adult narrators in the context of clinical adult attachment interviews. The study rests on a corpus of interviews with 20 patients suffering from fibromyalgia, who were interviewed in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Nine of the patients reported repeated experiences of parental violence. The article focuses on extracts from two interviews, which provide for a maximal contrast concerning the practices of telling experiences of violence and which are ‘clear cases’ of the practices that are characteristic of the whole corpus. The main differences between the different ways of telling concern:
• With respect to the ascription of guilt and responsibility, parental violence is portrayed as legitimate pedagogic action versus as being evil-minded and guilty without rational justification.
• With respect to the process of the telling, we find narrative trajectories over which an initial vague gloss is increasingly unpacked by reports of highly violent actions versus narratives in which violence is overtly stated and morally ascribed from its very first mention.
This paper asks whether and in which ways managing coordination tasks in traffic involve the accomplishment of intersubjectivity. Taking instances of coordinating passing an obstacle with oncoming traffic as the empirical case, four different practices were found.
1. Intersubjectivity can be presupposed by expecting others to stick to the traffic code and other mutually shared expectations.
2. Intersubjective solutions emerge step by step by mutual responsive-anticipatory adaptation of driving decisions.
3. Intersubjectivity can be accomplished by explicit interactive negotiation of passages.
4. Coordination problems can be solved without relying on intersubjectivity by unilateral, responsive-anticipatory adaptation to others’ behaviors.
This paper studies how the turn-design of a highly recurrent type of action changes over time. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of German driving lessons, we consider one type of instructions and analyze how the same instructional action is produced by the same speaker (the instructor) for the same addressee (the student) in consecutive trials of a learning task. We found that instructions become increasingly shorter, indexical and syntactically less complex; interactional sequences become more condensed and activities designed to secure mutual understanding become rarer. This study shows how larger temporal frameworks of interpersonal interactional histories which range beyond the interactional sequence impinge on the recipient-design of turns and the deployment of multimodal resources in situ.
Mock fiction is a genre of humorous, fictional narratives. It is pervasive in adolescents’ peer-group interaction. Building on a corpus of informal peer-group interaction among 14 to 17 year-old German adolescents, it is shown how mock fiction is used to sanction identity-claims of peer-group co-members that are taken to be inadequate by the teller of a mock fiction. Mock fiction exposes and ridicules those claims by fictional exaggeration. Mock fiction is an indirect, yet sometimes even highly abusive means for criticizing and negotiating identities and statuses of peer-group members. The analysis shows how mock fiction is collaboratively produced, how it is used to convey criticism and to negotiate social norms indirectly, and how, in addition, it allows for performative self-positioning of the tellers as skilled, entertaining tellers and socio-psychological diagnosticians.
Recipient design is a key constituent of intersubjectivity in interaction. Recipient design of turns is informed by prior knowledge about and shared experience with recipients. Designing turns in order to be maximally effective for the particular recipient(s) is crucial for accomplishing intersubjectively coordinated action. This paper reports on a specific pragmatic structure of recipient design, i.e. counter-factual recipient design, and how it impinges on intersubjectivity in interaction. Based on an analysis of video-recordings data from driving school lessons in German, two kinds of counterfactual recipient design of instructors' requests are distinguished: pedagogic and egocentric turn-design. Counterfactual, pedagogic turn-design is used strategically to diagnose student skills and to create opportunities for corrective instructions. Egocentric turn-design rests on private, non-shared knowledge of the instructor. Egocentrically designed turns imply expectations of how to comply with requests which cannot be recovered by the student and which lead to a breakdown of intersubjective cooperation. This paper identifies practices, sources and interactional consequences of these two kinds of counterfactual recipient design. In addition, the study enhances our understanding of recipient design in at least three ways. It shows that recipient design does not only concern referential and descriptive practices, but also the indexing intelligible projections of next actions; it highlights the productive, other-positioning effects of recipient design; it argues that recipient design should be analyzed in terms of temporally extended interactional trajectories, linking turn-constructional practices to interactional histories and consecutive trajectories of joint action.
Positioning
(2015)
Over the last two decades, “positioning” has become an established concept used to elucidate how identities are deployed and negotiated in narratives. This chapter first locates positioning in the larger field of research on identities and discourse. Commonalities and differences in conceptions of positioning are highlighted. In the following, the historical development of theoretical approaches to positioning and their methodological implications are reviewed in more detail. The article closes by taking up two current lines of debate concerning the future development of the concept of positioning.
This paper shows how understanding in interaction is informed by temporality, and in particular, by the workings of retrospection. Understanding is a temporally extended, sequentially organized process. Temporality, namely, the sequential relationship of turn positions, equips participants with default mechanisms to display understandings and to expect such displays. These mechanisms require local management of turn-taking to be in order, i.e., the possibility and the expectation to respond locally and reciprocally to prior turns at talk. Sequential positions of turns in interaction provide an infrastructure for displaying understanding and accomplishing intersubjectivity. Linguistic practices specialized in displaying particular kinds of (not) understanding are adapted to the individual sequential positions with respect to an action-to-be-understood.
Social actions
(2021)
Social actions are recipient-designed actions that occur in the context of interaction sequences. This chapter focuses on sources and practices for the formation and ascription of social actions. While linguists stress the relevance of linguistic social action formats, conversation analysts highlight the relevance of the sequential position of an action, and sociolinguists point to the influence of social identities for action-formation and -ascription. The combination of these three approaches helps us to solve the analytic problem of indirectness, which, however, only rarely becomes a problem for the participants in an interaction themselves. Social properties which recurrently apply when using verbal and bodily resources of action-formation, i.e. the social actions themselves, inferred meanings, projected next actions, the participation framework, the activity type, speaker’s stance, participants’ identities, etc. lead to stable pragmatic connotations of those forms, i.e. action-meanings, which become idiomatic and part of our common-sense competence. Still, social actions are multi-layered and can be ambiguous at times. Therefore, their meaning can be open for negotiation. Intersubjectivity of action ascription is ultimately secured neither by conventions nor by speaker’s intentions, but is accomplished by their treatment in subsequent discourse.
This paper argues that conversation analysis has largely neglected the fact that meaning in interaction relies on inferences to a high degree. Participants treat each other as cognitive agents, who imply and infer meanings, which are often consequential for interactional progression. Based on the study of audio- and video-recordings from German talk-in-interaction, the paper argues that inferences matter to social interaction in at least three ways. They can be explicitly formulated; they can be (conventionally) indexed, but not formulated; or they may be neither indexed nor formulated yet would be needed for the correct understanding of a turn. The last variety of inferences usually remain tacit, but are needed for smooth interactional progression. Inferences in this case become an observable discursive phenomenon if misunderstandings are treated by the explication of correct (accepted) and wrong (unaccepted) inferences. The understanding of referential terms, analepsis, and ellipsis regularly rely on inferences. Formulations, third-position repairs, and fourth-position explications of erroneous inferences are practices of explicating inferences. There are conventional linguistic means like discourse markers, connectives, and response particles that index specific kinds of inferences. These practices belong to a larger class of inferential practices, which play an important role for indexing and accomplishing intersubjectivity in talk in interaction.
In social interaction, different kinds of word-meaning can become problematic for participants. This study analyzes two meta-semantic practices, definitions and specifications, which are used in response to clarification requests in German implemented by the format Was heißt X (‘What does X mean?’). In the data studied, definitions are used to convey generalizable lexical meanings of mostly technical terms. These terms are either unknown to requesters, or, in pedagogical contexts, requesters ask in order to check the addressee’s knowledge. Specifications, in contrast, clarify aspects of local speaker meanings of ordinary expressions (e.g., reference, participants in an event, standards applied to scalar expressions). Both definitions and specifications are recipient-designed with respect to the (presumed) knowledge of the addressee and tailored to the topical and practical relevancies of the current interaction. Both practices attest to the flexibility and situatedness of speakers’ semantic understandings and to the systematicity of using meta-semantic practices differentially for different kinds of semantic problems. Data are come from mundane and institutional interaction in German from the public corpus FOLK.
This article examines a recurrent format that speakers use for defining ordinary expressions or technical terms. Drawing on data from four different languages - Flemish, French, German, and Italian - it focuses on definitions in which a definiendum is first followed by a negative definitional component (‘definiendum is not X’), and then by a positive definitional component (‘definiendum is Y’). The analysis shows that by employing this format, speakers display sensitivity towards a potential meaning of the definiendum that recipients could have taken to be valid. By negating this meaning, speakers discard this possible, yet unintended understanding. The format serves three distinct interactional purposes: (a) it is used for argumentation, e.g. in discussions and political debates, (b) it works as a resource for imparting knowledge, e.g. in expert talk and instructions, and (c) it is employed, in ordinary conversation, for securing the addressee's correct understanding of a possibly problematic expression. The findings contribute to our understanding of how epistemic claims and displays relate to the turn-constructional and sequential organization of talk. They also show that the much quoted ‘problem of meaning’ is, first and foremost, a participant's problem.
Meaning in interaction
(2024)
This editorial to the Special Issue on “Meaning in Interaction” introduces to the approach of Interactional Semantics, which has been developed over the last years within the framework of Interactional Linguistics. It discusses how “meaning” is understood and approached in this framework and lays out that Interactional Semantics is interested in how participants clarify and negotiate the meanings of the expressions that they are using in social interaction. Commonalities and differences of this approach with other approaches to meaning are flagged, and the intellectual origins and precursors of Interactional Semantics are introduced. The contributions to the Special Issue are located in the larger field of research.
How do people’s interactional practices change over time? Can conversation analysis identify those changes, and if so, how? In this introductory article, we scrutinize the novel insights that can be gained from examining interactional practices over time and discuss the related methodological challenges for longitudinal CA. We first retrace CA’s interest in the temporality of social interaction and then review three lines of current CA work on change over time: developmental studies, studies of sociohistorical change, and studies of joint interactional histories. Existing work shows how the execution of locally coordinated actions and their meanings change over time; how prior actions inform future actions; and how resources, practices, and structures of joint action emerge over people’s repeated interactional encounters. We conclude by arguing that the empirical analysis of the microlevel organization of social interaction, which is the hallmark of CA, can elucidate the fine-grained situated interactional infrastructure that provides for the larger-scale social dynamics that have been of interest to other lines of research.
Research on multimodal interaction has shown that simultaneity of embodied behavior and talk is constitutive for social action. In this study, we demonstrate different temporal relationships between verbal and embodied actions. We focus on uses of German darf/kann ich? (“may/can I?”) in which speakers initiate, or even complete the embodied action that is addressed by the turn before the recipient’s response. We argue that through such embodied conduct, the speaker bodily enacts high agency, which is at odds with the low deontic stance they express through their darf/kann ich?-TCUs. In doing so, speakers presuppose that the intersubjective permissibility of the action is highly probable or even certain. Moreover, we demonstrate how the speaker’s embodied action, joint perceptual salience of referents, and the projectability of the action addressed with darf/kann ich? allow for a lean syntactic design of darf/kann ich?-TCUs (i.e., pronominalization, object omission, and main verb omission). Our findings underscore the reflexive relationship between lean syntax, sequential organization and multimodal conduct.
Schegloff (1996) has argued that grammars are “positionally-sensitive”, implying that the situated use and understanding of linguistic formats depends on their sequential position. Analyzing the German format Kannst du X? (corresponding to English Can you X?) based on 82 instances from a large corpus of talk-in-interaction (FOLK), this paper shows how different action-ascriptions to turns using the same format depend on various orders of context. We show that not only sequential position, but also epistemic status, interactional histories, multimodal conduct, and linguistic devices co-occurring in the same turn are decisive for the action implemented by the format. The range of actions performed with Kannst du X? and their close interpretive interrelationship suggest that they should not be viewed as a fixed inventory of context-dependent interpretations of the format. Rather, the format provides for a root-interpretation that can be adapted to local contextual contingencies, yielding situated action-ascriptions that depend on constraints created by contexts of use.
The authors establish a phenomenological perspective on the temporal constitution of experience and action. Retrospection and projection (i.e. backward as well as forward orientation of everyday action), sequentiality and the sequential organization of activities as well as simultaneity (i.e. participants’ simultaneous coordination) are introduced as key concepts of a temporalized approach to interaction. These concepts are used to capture that every action is produced as an inter-linked step in the succession of adjacent actions, being sensitive to the precise moment where it is produced. The adoption of a holistic, multimodal and praxeological perspective additionally shows that action in interaction is organized according to several temporal orders simultaneously in operation. Each multimodal resource used in interaction has its own temporal properties.
Action ascription can be understood from two broad perspectives. On one view, it refers to the ways in which actions constitute categories by which members make sense of their world, and forms a key foundation for holding others accountable for their conduct. On another view, it refers to the ways in which we accountably respond to the actions of others, thereby accomplishing sequential versions of meaningful social experience. In short, action ascription can be understood as matter of categorisation of prior actions or responding in ways that are sequentially fitted to prior actions, or both. In this chapter, we review different theoretical approaches to action ascription that have developed in the field, as well as the key constituents and resources of action ascription that have been identified in conversation analytic research, before going on to discuss how action ascription can itself be considered a form of social action.
While the role of intentions in the constitution of actions gives rise to complex and heavily controversial questions, it appears to be indisputable that action ascription in interaction mostly does without any overt ascription of intention. Yet, sometimes participants explicitly ascribe intentions to their interlocutors in order to make sense of their prior actions. The chapter examines intention ascriptions in response to a partner’s adjacent prior turn using the German modal verb construction willst du/wollen Sie (do you want). The analysis focuses on the aspect of the prior action the intention ascription addresses (action type, projected next action, motive etc.), the action the intention ascription performs itself, and the next action they make relevant from the prior speaker. It was found that intention ascriptions are used to clarify and intersubjectively ground the meaning of the prior turn, which seems otherwise underspecified, ambiguous or puzzling. Yet, they are also used to adumbrate criticism, e.g., that the prior turn projects a course of future actions which is considered to be inadequate, or to expose a concealed, problematic allegedly “real” meaning of the prior turn.
Metalinguistic awareness of standard vs standard usage. The case of determiners in spoken German
(2015)
Overtaking as an interactional achievement : video analyses of participants' practices in traffic
(2018)
In this article we pursue a systematic and extensive study of overtaking in traffic as an interactional event. Our focus is on the accountable organisation and accomplishment of overtaking by road users in real-world traffic situations. Data and analysis are drawn from multiple research groups studying driving from an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective. Building on multimodal and sequential analyses of video recordings of overtaking events, the article describes the shared practices which overtakers and overtaken parties use in displaying, recognizing and coordinating their manoeuvres. It examines the three sequential phases of an overtaking event: preparation and projection; the overtaking proper; the re-alignment post-phase including retrospective accounts and assessments. We identify how during each of these phases drivers and passengers organize intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle practices: driving and non-driving related talk between vehicle- occupants, the emerging spatiotemporal ecology of the road, and the driving actions of other road users. The data is derived from a two camera set-up recording the road ahead and car interior. The recordings are from three settings: daily commuting, driving lessons, race-car coaching. The events occur on a variety of road types (motorways, country roads, city streets, a race track, etc.), in six languages (English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Swedish) and in seven countries (Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). From an exceptionally diverse collection of video data, the study of which is made possible thanks to the innovative collaboration of multiple researchers, the article exhibits the range of practical challenges and communicative skills involved in overtaking.
In this chapter, we overview the specificity of comparisons made within the perspective of Conversation Analysis (CA), and we position them in relation to other fields. We introduce the analytical mentality, methodology, and procedures of CA, and we show how we used it for the analysis of OKAY in this volume.
This special issue investigates early responses—responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early responses possible? What do such responses tell us about the complex interplay between syntax, prosody, and embodied conduct? And what sorts of actions do participants accomplish by means of such early responses? By addressing these questions, the special issue seeks to offer new advances in the systematic analysis of temporal organization in interaction, contributing to broader discussions in the language and cognitive sciences as to the social coordination of human conduct. In this introductory article, we discuss the role of temporality and sequentiality in social interaction, specifically focusing on projective and anticipatory mechanisms and the interplay between multiple semiotic resources, which are crucial for making early responses possible.
This paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units with ich dachte ('I thought') in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in which ich dachte is used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has) held contrasts with some other, contextually salient assumption. We show that practices which have been studied for English I thought are also routinely used in German: ich dachte is a means to manage epistemic incongruencies and to contrast an incorrect with a correct assumption in narratives. In addition, ich dachte is also used to account for the speaker's own prior actions which may have looked problematic because they built on misunderstandings which the speaker only discovered later. Moreover, ich dachte-practices may also be used to create comic effects by reporting an earlier, absurd assumption. The practices are discussed with regard to their role in regaining common ground, in managing relationships, in maintaining the identity of a rational actor, and in terms of their exploitation for other conversational interests. Special attention is paid to how co-occurring linguistic features, and sequential and pragmatic factors, account for local interpretations of ich dachte.
According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self is usually much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, enacted self. In contrast to everyday interaction, psychotherapists regularly topicalize the performative self explicitly. In our paper, we study how therapists respond to clients' narratives by interpretations of the client's conduct, shifting from the autobiographical identity of the told self, which is the focus of the client's story, to the present performative self of the client. Drawing on video recordings from three psychodynamic therapies (tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Psychotherapie) with 25 sessions each, we will analyze in detail five extracts of therapists' shifts from the representational to the performative self. We highlight four findings:
• Whereas, clients' narratives often serve to support identity claims in terms of personal psychological and moral characteristics, therapists rather tend to focus on clients' feelings, motives, current behavior, and ways of interacting.
• In response to clients' stories, therapists first show empathy and confirm clients' accounts, before shifting to clients' performative self.
• Therapists ground the shift to clients' performative self by references to clients' observable behavior.
• Therapists do not simply expect affiliation with their views on clients' performative self. Rather, they use such shifts to promote the clients' self-exploration. Yet, if clients resist to explore their selves in more detail, therapists more explicitly ascribe motives and feelings that clients do not seem to be aware of. The shift in positioning levels thus seems to have a preparatory function for engendering therapeutic insights.
Taking the use of the esthetic term wabi sabi (Japanese compound noun) in a series of German- and English-language theater rehearsals as an example, this article studies the emergence of shared meanings and uses of an expression over an interactional history. We track how shared understandings and uses of wabi sabi develop over the course of a series of theater rehearsals. We focus on the practices by which understandings of wabi sabi are displayed, adopted, and negotiated. We discuss complexities and intransparencies of the manifestation of common ground in multiparty interactions and its relationship to the emergence of routine uses of the expression. Data are in English and German with English translation.
Our study deals with early bodily responses to directives (requests and instructions, i.e., second pair parts [SPPs]) produced before the first pair part (FPP) is complete. We show how early bodily SPPs build on the properties of an emerging FPP. Our focus is on the successive incremental coordination of components of the FPP with components of the SPP. We show different kinds of micro-sequential relationships between FPP and SPP: successive specification of the SPP building on the resources that the FPP makes available, the readjustment or repair of the SPP in response to the emerging FPP, and reflexive micro sequential adaptions of the FPP to an early SPP. This article contributes to our understanding of the origins of projection in interaction and of the relationship between sequentially and simultaneity in interaction. Data are video-recordings from interaction in German.
This paper presents an algorithm and an implementation for efficient tokenization of texts of space-delimited languages based on a deterministic finite state automaton. Two representations of the underlying data structure are presented and a model implementation for German is compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The presented solution is faster than other tools while maintaining comparable quality.
The user interfaces for corpus analysis platforms must provide a high degree of accessibility for ordinary users and at the same time provide the possibility to answer complex research questions. In this paper, we present the design concepts behind the user interface of KorAP, a corpus analysis platform that has evolved into the main gateway to CoRoLa, the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language. Based on established principles of user interface design, we show how KorAP addresses the challenge of providing a user-friendly interface for heterogeneous corpus data to a wide range of users with different research questions.
When comparing different tools in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the quality of their results usually has first priority. This is also true for tokenization. In the context of large and diverse corpora for linguistic research purposes, however, other criteria also play a role – not least sufficient speed to process the data in an acceptable amount of time. In this paper we evaluate several state of the art tokenization tools for German – including our own – with regard to theses criteria. We conclude that while not all tools are applicable in this setting, no compromises regarding quality need to be made.
When comparing different tools in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the quality of their results usually has first priority. This is also true for tokenization. In the context of large and diverse corpora for linguistic research purposes, however, other criteria also play a role – not least sufficient speed to process the data in an acceptable amount of time. In this paper we evaluate several state-ofthe-art tokenization tools for German – including our own – with regard to theses criteria. We conclude that while not all tools are applicable in this setting, no compromises regarding quality need to be made.
In this paper, we present our experiences and decisions in dealing with challenges in developing, maintaining and operating online research software tools in the field of linguistics. In particular, we highlight reproducibility, dependability, and security as important aspects of quality management – taking into account the special circumstances in which research software
is usually created.
To improve grammatical function labelling for German, we augment the labelling component of a neural dependency parser with a decision history. We present different ways to encode the history, using different LSTM architectures, and show that our models yield significant improvements, resulting in a LAS for German that is close to the best result from the SPMRL 2014 shared task (without the reranker).
We propose a new type of subword embedding designed to provide more information about unknown compounds, a major source for OOV words in German. We present an extrinsic evaluation where we use the compound embeddings as input to a neural dependency parser and compare the results to the ones obtained with other types of embeddings. Our evaluation shows that adding compound embeddings yields a significant improvement of 2% LAS over using word embeddings when no POS information is available. When adding POS embeddings to the input, however, the effect levels out. This suggests that it is not the missing information about the semantics of the unknown words that causes problems for parsing German, but the lack of morphological information for unknown words. To augment our evaluation, we also test the new embeddings in a language modelling task that requires both syntactic and semantic information.
This chapter will present lessons learned from CLARIN-D, the German CLARIN national consortium. Members of the CLARIN-D communities and of the CLARIN-D consortium have been engaged in innovative, data-driven, and community-based research, using language resources and tools in the humanities and neigh-bouring disciplines. We will present different use cases and users’ stories that demonstrate the innovative research potential of large digital corpora and lexical resources for the study of language change and variation, for language documentation, for literary studies, and for the social sciences. We will emphasize the added value of making language resources and tools available in the CLARIN distributed research infrastructure and will discuss legal and ethical issues that need to be addressed in the use of such an infrastructure. Innovative technical solutions for accessing digital materials still under copyright and for data mining such materials will be presented. We will outline the need for close interaction with communities of interest in the areas of curriculum development, data management, and training the next generation of digital humanities scholars. The importance of community-supported standards for encoding language resources and the practice of community-based quality control for digital research data will be presented as a crucial step toward the provisioning of high quality research data. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of impor-tant directions for innovative research and for supporting infrastructure development over the next decade and beyond.
This article examines the language contact situation as well as the language attitudes of the Caucasian Germans, descendants of German-born inhabitants of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union who emigrated in 1816/17 to areas of Transcaucasia. After deportations and migrations, the group of Caucasian Germans now consists of those who have since emigrated to Germany and those who still live in the South Caucasus. It’s the first time that sociolinguistic methods have been used to record data from the generation who experienced living in the South Caucasus and in Germany as well as from two succeeding generations. Initial results will be presented below with a focus on the language contact constellations of German varieties as well as on consequences of language contact and language repression, which both affect language attitudes.
CLARIAH-DE cross-service search - prospects and benefits of merging subject-specific services
(2021)
CLARIAH-DE combines services and offerings of CLARIN-D and DARIAH-DE. This includes various search applications which are made directly available to researchers. These search applications are presented in this working paper based on their main characteristics and compared with a focus on possible harmonizations. Opportunities and risks of different forms of technical integration are highlighted. Identified challenges can be explained in particular considering the background of different organizational and technical frameworks as well as highly specific and discipline-dependent requirements. The integration work that has already been carried out and the experiences gained with regard to future work and possible integration of further applications are also discussed. The experiences made in CLARIAH-DE can especially be of interest for other projects in the field of digital research infrastructures.
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience a variety of symptoms sometimes including atypicalities in language use. The study explored diferences in semantic network organisation of adults with ASD without intellectual impairment. We assessed clusters and switches in verbal fuency tasks (‘animals’, ‘human feature’, ‘verbs’, ‘r-words’) via curve ftting in combination with corpus-driven analysis of semantic relatedness and evaluated socio-emotional and motor action related content. Compared to participants without ASD (n=39), participants with ASD (n=32) tended to produce smaller clusters, longer switches, and fewer words in semantic conditions (no p values survived Bonferroni-correction), whereas relatedness and content were similar. In ASD, semantic networks underlying cluster formation appeared comparably small without afecting strength of associations or content.
L’article intitulé «Traitement de l’information: Spinfo, HKI et humanités numériques - l’expérience de Cologne» présente l’histoire du développement des humanités numériques au sein de l’Université de Cologne. L'institutionnalisation des humanités numériques a commencé encore à l’époque où dans le monde germanophone le périmètre de la discipline était en train d’être défini par les travaux de quelques pionniers. Parmi eux, il convient de souligner le rôle d’Elisabeth Burr, active notamment à Tubingue, Duisbourg, Brême et Leipzig.L’article retrace le développement des humanités numériques à Cologne à partir de leurs débuts dans les années soixante du 20ème siècle, en passant par leur consolidation dans les années quatre-vingt-dix, jusqu’aux deux dernières décennies, quand Cologne est devenu un centre important de cette discipline. Le processus illustre comment une nouvelle discipline scientifique peut s’institutionnaliser au sein d’une université allemande. L’article décrit la perspective de deux domaines fondateurs: le traitement linguistique de l’information (en allemand: Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung, Spinfo) et le traitement historico-culturel de l’information (en allemand: Historisch Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung, HKI) et leur synthèse, qui a abouti en 2017 à la création de l’Institut des Humanités Numériques (Digital Humanities), qui aujourd’hui est - du point de vue interne - une composante de la Faculté de Philosophie de l’Université de Cologne et - du point de vue externe - une partie intégrante de la communauté internationale des humanités numériques.
Theories of lexical decomposition assume that lexical meanings are complex. This complexity is expressed in structured meaning representations that usually consist of predicates, arguments, operators, and other elements of propositional and predicate logic. Lexical decomposition has been used to explain phenomena such as argument linking, selectional restrictions, lexical-semantic relations, scope ambiguities, and the inference behavior of lexical items. The article sketches the early theoretical development from noun-oriented semantic feature theories to verb-oriented complex decompositions. It also deals with a number of theoretical issues, including the controversy between decompositional and atomistic approaches to meaning, the search for semantic primitives, the function of decompositions as definitions, problems concerning the interpretability of decompositions, and the debate about the cognitive status of decompositions.
Starting from early approaches within Generative Grammar in the late 1960s, the article describes and discusses the development of different theoretical frameworks of lexical decomposition of verbs. It presents the major subsequent conceptions of lexical decompositions, namely, Dowty’s approach to lexical decomposition within Montague Semantics, Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics, the LCS decompositions emerging from the MIT Lexicon Project, Pustejovsky’s Event Structure Theory, Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wunderlich’s Lexical Decompositional Grammar, Hale and Kayser’s Lexical Relational Structures, and Distributed Morphology. For each of these approaches, (i) it sketches their origins and motivation, (ii) it describes the general structure of decompositions and their location within the theory, (iii) it explores their explanative value for major phenomena of verb semantics and syntax, (iv) and it briefly evaluates the impact of the theory. Referring to discussions in article 7 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Engelberg) Lexical decomposition, a number of theoretical topics are taken up throughout the paper concerning the interpretation of decompositions, the basic inventory of decompositional predicates, the location of decompositions on the different levels of linguistic representation (syntactic, semantic, conceptual), and the role they play for the interfaces between these levels.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strat egies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strategies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
In the lexicon of pidgin and creole languages we can see an important part of these languages’ history of origin and of language contact. The current paper deals with the lexical sources of Tok Pisin and, more specifically, with words of German origin found in this language. During the period of German colonial domination of New Guinea and a number of insular territories in the Pacific (ca. 1885–1915), German words entered the emerging Tok Pisin lexicon. Based on a broad range of lexical and lexicographic data from the early 20th century up until today, we investigate the actual or presumed German origin of a number of Tok Pisin words and trace different lexical processes of integration that are linked to various, often though not always colonially determined, contact settings and sociocultural interactions.
The present paper outlines the projected second part of the Corpus Query Lingua Franca (CQLF) family of standards: CQLF Ontology, which is currently in the process of standardization at the International Standards Organization (ISO), in its Technical Committee 37, Subcommittee 4 (TC37SC4) and its national mirrors. The first part of the family, ISO 24623-1 (henceforth CQLF Metamodel), was successfully adopted as an international standard at the beginning of 2018. The present paper reflects the state of the CQLF Ontology at the moment of submission for the Committee Draft ballot. We provide a brief overview of the CQLF Metamodel, present the assumptions and aims of the CQLF Ontology, its basic structure, and its potential extended applications. The full ontology is expected to emerge from a community process, starting from an initial version created by the authors of the present paper.
Question Answering Systems for retrieving information from Knowledge Graphs (KG) have become a major area of interest in recent years. Current systems search for words and entities but cannot search for grammatical phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to present our research on developing a QA System that answers natural language questions about German grammar.
Our goal is to build a KG which contains facts and rules about German grammar, and is also able to answer specific questions about a concrete grammatical issue. An overview of the current research in the topic of QA systems and ontology design is given and we show how we plan to construct the KG by integrating the data in the grammatical information system Grammis, hosted by the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS). In this paper, we describe the construction of the initial KG, sketch our resulting graph, and demonstrate the effectiveness of such an approach. A grammar correction component will be part of a later stage. The paper concludes with the potential areas for future research.
This contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts.
We evaluate a graph-based dependency parser on DeReKo, a large corpus of contemporary German. The dependency parser is trained on the German dataset from the SPMRL 2014 Shared Task which contains text from the news domain, whereas DeReKo also covers other domains including fiction, science, and technology. To avoid the need for costly manual annotation of the corpus, we use the parser’s probability estimates for unlabeled and labeled attachment as main evaluation criterion. We show that these probability estimates are highly correlated with the actual attachment scores on a manually annotated test set. On this basis, we compare estimated parsing scores for the individual domains in DeReKo, and show that the scores decrease with increasing distance of a domain to the training corpus.
Language resources are often compiled for the purpose of variational analysis, such as studying differences between genres, registers, and disciplines, regional and diachronic variation, influence of gender, cultural context, etc. Often the sheer number of potentially interesting contrastive pairs can get overwhelming due to the combinatorial explosion of possible combinations. In this paper, we present an approach that combines well understood techniques for visualization heatmaps and word clouds with intuitive paradigms for exploration drill down and side by side comparison to facilitate the analysis of language variation in such highly combinatorial situations. Heatmaps assist in analyzing the overall pattern of variation in a corpus, and word clouds allow for inspecting variation at the level of words.
Distributional models of word use constitute an indispensable tool in corpus based lexicological research for discovering paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic patterns (Belica et al. 2010). Recently, word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013) have revived the field by allowing to construct and analyze distributional models on very large corpora. This is accomplished by reducing the very high dimensionality of word cooccurrence contexts, the size of the vocabulary, to few dimensions, such as 100-200. However, word use and meaning can vary widely along dimensions such as domain, register, and time, and word embeddings tend to represent only the most prevalent meaning. In this paper we thus construct domain specific word embeddings to allow for systematically analyzing variations in word use. Moreover, we also demonstrate how to reconstruct domain specific co-occurrence contexts from the dense word embeddings.
We present the use of count-based and predictive language models for exploring language use in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. For collocation analysis along the syntagmatic axis we employ traditional association measures based on co-occurrence counts as well as predictive association measures derived from the output weights of skipgram word embeddings. For inspecting the semantic neighbourhood of words along the paradigmatic axis we visualize the high dimensional word embeddings in two dimensions using t-stochastic neighbourhood embeddings. Together, these visualizations provide a complementary, explorative approach to analysing very large corpora in addition to corpus querying. Moreover, we discuss count-based and predictive models w.r.t. scalability and maintainability in very large corpora.
Telephone-based remote interpreting has come into widespread use in multilingual encounters, all the more so in times of refugee crises and the large influx of asylum-seekers into Europe. Nevertheless, the linguistic practices in this mode of communication have not yet been examined comprehensively. This article therefore investigates selected aspects of turn-taking and clarification sequences during semi-authentic telephone-interpreted counselling sessions for refugees (Arabic–German). A quantitative analysis reveals that limited audibility makes it more difficult for interpreters to claim their turn successfully; in most cases, however, turn-taking occurs smoothly. The trouble sources that trigger queries are mainly content-related and interpreters vary greatly in the ways they deal with such difficulties. Contrary to what one might expect, the study shows that coordination fails only rarely during telephone-based remote interpreting.
“Die Sprach-Checker” (Eng. “Language Checkers”) are young citizen scientists from Mannheim’s highly diverse district Neckarstadt-West. Together with linguists, they investigate a tremendous treasure: their own multilingualism. They are exploring and (re)discovering their own languages and the other languages used in their environment while documenting and reflecting on their everyday experiences in and with different linguistic practices. Our aim is to raise awareness of their strengths and to promote appreciation for their language biographies, thus fostering a sense of identification with one’s own linguistic surroundings. Such a joint research endeavour offers empirical opportunities to address (linguistic) issues of societal relevance by collecting authentic data from the multicultural district and involving its residents and local stakeholders. In this paper, we will provide insights regarding the project’s background, conception, and outcomes. We address everyone who is planning or conducting a citizen science project with young people, especially children and adolescents, or who works at the interface between science and society.
The first International Summer Institute for Interactional Linguistics (henceforth ISIIL) took place from July 18 to 23 at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The local organizers, Arnulf Deppermann and Alexandra Gubina, collaborated with five other facilitators in preparing this Summer Institute: Emma Betz (University of Waterloo), Elwys De Stefani (University of Heidelberg & KU Leuven), Barbara A. Fox (University of Colorado), Chase Raymond (University of Colorado) and Jörg Zinken (Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim). The goal of ISIIL was to bring together both early-career researchers and established scholars from the fields of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interactional Linguistics (IL) in order to foster the development of new skills for doing research using IL. The participants and organizers had diverse backgrounds, both in terms of their research interests (e.g., classroom interaction, second language acquisition, cross-linguistic comparison, particles, grammar-in-interaction) and institutional affiliations, with many participants from institutions from around Europe (i.e., Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland) as well as overseas (Canada, U.S.A., South Africa). Because of the compact nature of the Institute, the advanced topics covered, as well as the original research projects the participants would engage in, participation was limited to 24 participants, selected on the basis of their prior training and experience in CA/IL.
We present web services which implement a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following the TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 “Language resource management – Transcription of spoken language”. The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.
We present web services implementing a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 "Language resource management - Transcription of spoken language". The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.
Preface
(2022)
Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying ‘thank you’ as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.
This investigation targets a syntactic phenomenon of German which is commonly referred to as the absentive construction. The absentive is considered a universal grammatical category denoting absence. Its syntax is characterised by the occurrence of an auxiliary or copula verb accompanied by a non‐finite VP containing a main verb. The expression of absence, predicated over the clausal subject, is assumed to be based on a constructional meaning. Reviewing a wide range of syntactic and interpretive properties of this structure in German, we will demonstrate that certain empirical claims about the construction are not well founded and that its seemingly idiosyncratic properties are indeed available for compositional analyses. We will propose a structural analysis of its core syntactic and interpretive properties: The predication expresses the localisation of the subject at the location of the event, denoted by the infinitival verb. The interpretation of absence, then, can be explained by an implicature.
In this paper, we address two problems in indexing and querying spoken language corpora with overlapping speaker contributions. First, we look into how token distance and token precedence can be measured when multiple primary data streams are available and when transcriptions happen to be tokenized, but are not synchronized with the sound at the level of individual tokens. We propose and experiment with a speaker based search mode that enables any speaker’s transcription tier to be the basic tokenization layer whereby the contributions of other speakers are mapped to this given tier. Secondly, we address two distinct methods of how speaker overlaps can be captured in the TEI based ISO Standard for Spoken Language Transcriptions (ISO 24624:2016) and how they can be queried by MTAS – an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying text with multilevel annotations. We illustrate the problems, introduce possible solutions and discuss their benefits and drawbacks.
As a part of the ZuMult-project, we are currently modelling a backend architecture that should provide query access to corpora from the Archive of Spoken German (AGD) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS). We are exploring how to reuse existing search engine frameworks providing full text indices and allowing to query corpora by one of the corpus query languages (QLs) established and actively used in the corpus research community. For this purpose, we tested MTAS - an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying on text with multilevel annotations. We applied MTAS on three oral corpora stored in the TEI-based ISO standard for transcriptions of spoken language (ISO 24624:2016). These corpora differ from the corpus data that MTAS was developed for, because they include interactions with two and more speakers and are enriched, inter alia, with timeline-based annotations. In this contribution, we report our test results and address issues that arise when search frameworks originally developed for querying written corpora are being transferred into the field of spoken language.
Language Change
(2017)
The present chapter outlines a research program for historical linguistics based on the idea that the object of the formal study of language change should be defined as grammar change, that is, a set of discrete differences between the target grammar and the grammar acquired by the learner (Hale 2007). This approach is shown to offer new answers to some classical problems of historical linguistics (Weinreich et al. 1968), concerning, specifically, the actuation of changes and the observation that the transition from one historical state to another proceeds gradually. It is argued that learners are highly sensitive to small fluctuations in the linguistic input they receive, making change inevitable, while the impression of gradualness is linked to independent factors (diffusion in a speech community, and grammar competition). Special attention is paid to grammaticalization phenomena, which offer insights into the nature of functional categories, the building blocks of clause structure.
In recent years, the availability of large annotated and searchable corpora, together with a new interest in the empirical foundation and validation of linguistic theory and description, has sparked a surge of novel and interesting work using corpus-based methods to study the grammar of natural languages. However, a look at relevant current research on the grammar of the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages reveals a variety of different theoretical approaches and empirical foci, which can be traced back to different philological and linguistic traditions. Still, this current state of affairs should not be seen as an obstacle but as an ideal basis for a fruitful exchange of ideas between different research paradigms.
Complement phrases are essential for constructing well-formed sentences in German. Identifying verb complements and categorizing complement classes is challenging even for linguists who are specialized in the field of verb valency. Against this background, we introduce an ML-based algorithm which is able to identify and classify complement phrases of any German verb in any written sentence context. We use a large training set consisting of example sentences from a valency dictionary, enriched with POS tagging, and the ML-based technique of Conditional Random Fields (CRF) to generate the classification models.
Introducing Interactive Grammar: How to Develop Language Competence with Research-based Learning
(2023)
We present the implementation of an interactive e-learning platform for both classroom study and self-study, that helps developing German language competence – vocabulary, spelling, and grammar – on various levels and for everyday life applications. The LernGrammis portal addresses school and highschool students, (prospective) teachers, and L2 learners of German equally, each with appropriate educational content and interactive components. It thus offers the digital networking infrastructure for education a unique, freely available and scientifically based learning resource. Applying the innovative concept of „Research-based Learning (RBL)“, LernGrammis provides teachers with ideas for lesson planning, and learners with dedicated modules to develop new skills through exploring authentic language resources and by this means answering customised low-threshold research questions. Using proven practical examples, we demonstrate the approach, its strengths and possibilities, as well as initial user feedback evaluation results.
This article reports about the on-going work on a new version of the metadata framework Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI), central to the CLARIN infrastructure. Version 1.2 introduces a number of important changes based on the experience gathered in the last five years of intensive use of CMDI by the digital humanities community, addressing problems encountered, but also introducing new functionality. Next to the consolidation of the structure of the model and schema sanity, new means for lifecycle management have been introduced aimed at combatting the observed proliferation of components, new mechanism for use of external vocabularies will contribute to more consistent use of controlled values and cues for tools will allow improved presentation of the metadata records to the human users. The feature set has been frozen and approved, and the infrastructure is now entering a transition phase, in which all the tools and data need to be migrated to the new version.
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
Speech islands are historically and developmentally unique and will inevitably disappear within the next decades. We urgently need to preserve their remains and exploit what is left in order to make research on language-in-contact and historical as well as current comparative language research possible.
The Archive for Spoken German (AGD) at the Institute for German Language collects, fosters and archives data from completed research projects and makes them available to the wider research community.
Besides large variation corpora and corpora of conversational speech, the archive already contains a range of collections of data on German speech minorities. The latter will be outlined in this chapter. Some speech island data is already made available through the personal service of the AGD, or the database of spoken German (DGD), e.g. data on Australian German, Unserdeutsch, or German in North America. Some corpora are still being prepared for publication, but still important to document for potentially interested research projects. We therefore also explain the current problems and efforts related to the curation of speech island data, from the digitization of recordings and the collection of metadata, to the integration of transcriptions, annotations and other ways of accessing and sharing data.
Coaching outcome research convincingly argues that coaching is effective and facilitates change in clients. While coaching practice literature depicts questions as key vehicle for such change, empirical findings as regards the local and global change potential of questions are so far largely missing in both (psychological) outcome research and (linguistic and psychological) process research on coaching. The local change potential of questions refers to a turn-by-turn transformation as a result of their sequentiality, the global change potential is related to the power of questions to initiate, process and finalize established phases of change. This programmatic article on questions, or rather questioning sequences, in executive coaching pursues two goals: firstly, it takes stock of available insights into questions in coaching and advocates for Conversation Analysis as a fruitful methodological framework to assess the local change potential of questioning sequences. Secondly, it points to the limitations of a local turn-by-turn approach to unravel the overall change potential of questions and calls for an interdisciplinary approach to bring both local and global effectiveness into relation. Such an approach is premised on conversational sequentiality and psychological theories of change and facilitates research on questioning sequences as both local and global agents of change across the continuum of coaching sessions. We present the TSPP Model as a first result of such an interdisciplinary cooperation.
We discuss the modal uses of the Hausa exclusive particle sai (≈ only). We argue that the distribution of sai in modal environments provides evidence for the following claims on the composition of modal meaning that have been independently made in the literature: i) Future-oriented modality involves a prospective aspect operator that can be realized covertly in some languages (e.g. English, Kratzer 2012b) and overtly in others (e.g. Gitksan, Matthewson 2012, 2013). ii) Necessity interpretations arise from exhaustifying possibilities, i.e. an exhaustivity operator applying to existential modality (e.g. Kaufmann 2012 for the case of imperatives and Leffel 2012 for a relevant analysis of necessity meaning in Masalit). We show that future-oriented necessity in Hausa decomposes into EXH((PROSP)), with sai contributing exhaustivity.
This study builds on a large body of work on the use of linguistic forms for requests in social interaction. Using Conversation Analysis / Interactional Linguistics, this study explores the use of two recurrent linguistic formats for requesting in spoken German – simple interrogatives ('do you do ..?') and kannst du VP? ('can you do..?') interrogatives. Based on a corpus of video-recorded, naturally occurring data of mundane data, this study demonstrates one of the interactional factors that is relevant for the choice between alternative interrogative request formats in spoken German – recipient's embodied availability before and during the request initiation. It is shown that simple interrogatives are used to request an action from a recipient who is either available or involved in their own project, which, however, does not have to be suspended or interrupted for the compliance with the request. In contrast, kannst du VP? interrogatives occur in environments in which the recipient is already engaged in a project that must be suspended in order to grant the request.
This conversation analytic study compares the use of negation particles in spoken German and Persian, namely nein/nee and na. While these particles have a range of functions in both languages (Ghaderi 2022; Imo 2017), their use in response to news remains understudied. We focus on nein/nee and na in two sequential contexts: (i) after prior disconfirmations (Extract (a)) and (ii) in response to either solicited or unsolicited informings (see Extracts (b) and (c), respectively). In both contexts, nein/nee and na mark unexpectedness and open up an opportunity space for more, but they do so in different ways and with different outcomes. Nein/nee- and na-turns after disconfirming, often minimal responses to first-position confirmable turns mark the prior as unexpected (or even contrasting with the nein/nee/na-speaker’s expectations) and thus as expandable/accountable (cf. Ford 2001; Gubina/Betz 2021). Nein/nee/na-turns after informings (e.g., announcements that display a story teller’s negative emotional stance) differ not only in sequential position but also in prosodic realization. They can be either falling or rising, but all are characterized by marked prosody, i.e., lengthening, very low onset, smiling or breathy voice, or high overall pitch. Through position and turn design features, such nein/nee- and na-turns not only mark a prior turn as counter to (normative) expectations, but may also display the speaker’s affective stance and affiliate with the affective stance of the prior interactant. By comparing the use of nein/nee and na in German and Persian in the two functions illustrated in Extracts (a) and (b/c), we will show (i) how nein/nee- and na-turns shape interactional trajectories after responsive actions and (ii) what role the particles play in managing news and stance-taking as well as epistemic and affective positioning. Apart from revealing similarities in the use of German and Persian negation particles, the results of our crosslinguistic comparison will demonstrate that even if different languages have similar practices for specific actions, the use of these practices is language- and culture-specific. This means that even similar practices in different languages have their own “collateral effects” (Sidnell/Enfield 2012), linguistic and prosodic characteristic features, and, at least sometimes, consequences for social actions accomplished in the specific language (e.g., Dingemanse/Blythe/Dirksmeyer 2014; Evans/Levinson 2009; Floyd/Rossi/Enfield (eds.) 2020; Fox et al. 2009). Our study uses the method of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2013) and draws on more than 80 hours of audio and video recordings of spontaneous interactions (co-present, via video link, and on the telephone) in everyday and institutional contexts.
Rejecting the validity of inferred attributions of incompetence in German talk-in-interaction
(2024)
This paper deals with pragmatic inference from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. In particular, we examine a specific variety of inferences - the attribution of incompetence which Self constructs on the basis of Other's prior action, hearable as positioning Self as incompetent (e.g., instructions, offers of assistance, advice); this attribution of incompetence concerns Self's execution of some practical task. This inference is indexed in Self's response, which highlights Self's expertise, or competence concerning the task at hand. We focus on two recurrent types of such responses in our data: (i) accounting for competence through formulations of prior experience with carrying out a practical action and (ii) explicit claims of competence for accomplishing this action. We analyze the interactional environments in which these responses occur, the ways in which the two practices index Self's understanding of being positioned as incompetent and the interactional work they do. Finally, we discuss how through rejecting and inferred attribution of incompetence, Self implicitly seeks to restore their face and defend their autonomy as an agent, yet, without entering an explicit identity-negotiation. Findings rest on the analysis of 20 cases found in video-recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in German from the corpus FOLK.
This paper analyses the variation we find in the realization of finite clausal complements in the position of prepositional objects in a set of Germanic languages. The Germanic languages differ with respect to whether prepositions can directly select a clause (North Germanic) or not and instead need a prepositional proform (Continental West Germanic). Within the Continental West Germanic languages, we find further differences with respect to the constituent structures. We propose that German strong vs. weak prepositional proforms (e.g. drauf vs. darauf) differ with respect to their syntax, while this is not the case for the Dutch forms (ervan vs. daarvan). What the Germanic languages under consideration share is that the prepositional element can be covert, except in English. English shows only limited evidence for the presence of P with finite clauses in the position of prepositional objects generally, but only with a selected set of verbs. This investigation is a first step towards a broader study of the nature of clauses in prepositional object positions and the implications for the syntax of clausal complementation.
The issue: We discuss (declarative) prepositional object clauses (PO-clauses) in the West Germanic languages Dutch (NL), German (DE), and English (EN). In Dutch and German, PO-clauses occur with a prepositional proform (=PPF, Dutch: ervan, erover, etc.; German: drauf/darauf, drüber/darüber, etc.). This proform is optional with some verbs (1). In English, by contrast, P embeds a clausal complement in the case of gerunds or indirect questions (2), however, P is obligatorily absent when the embedded CP is a that-clause in its base positionv(3a). However, when the that-clause is passivized or topicalized, the stranded P is obligatory (3b). Given this scenario, we will address the following questions: i) Are there structural differences between PO-clauses with a P/PPF and those in which the P/PPF is optionally or obligatorily omitted? ii) In particular, do PO-clauses without P/PPF structurally coincide with direct object (=DO) clauses? iii) To what extent are case and nominal properties of clauses relevant? We use wh-extraction as a relevant test for such differences.
Previous research: Based on pronominalization and topicalization data in German and Dutch, PO-clauses are different from DO-clauses independent of the presence of the PPF (see, e.g., Breindl 1989; Zifonun/Hoffmann/Strecker 1997; Berman 2003; Broekhuis/Corver 2015 and references therein) (4,5). English pronominalization and topicalization data (3b) appear to point in the same direction (Fischer 1997; Berman 2003; Delicado Cantero 2013). However, the obligatory absence of P before that-clauses in base position indicates a convergence with DO-clauses.
Experimental evidence: To provide further evidence to these questions we tested PO-clauses in all three languages for long wh-extraction, which is usually possible for DO-clauses in English and Dutch, and in German for southern regional varieties. For German and Dutch we conducted rating studies using the thermometer method (Featherston 2008). Each study contained two sets of sentences: the first set tested long wh-extraction with regular DO-clauses (6). The second set tested wh-extraction from PO-clauses with and without PPFs (7), respectively. The results show no significant difference in extraction with PO-clauses whether or not the PPF was present even for those speakers who otherwise accept long-distance extraction in German. This supports a uniform analysis of PO-clauses with and without the PPF in contrast to DO-clauses. For English we tested extraction with verbs that select for PP-objects in two configurations: V+that-clause and V+P-gerund (8) in comparison to sentences without extraction. Participants rated sentences on a scale of 1 (unnatural) to 7 (natural). We included the gerund for English as this is a regular alternative for such objects. The results show that extraction is licit in both configurations. This suggests that English PO-clauses are different from German and Dutch PO-clauses: They rather behave as DO-clauses allowing for extraction. Note though, that the availability of extraction from P+gerund also shows that PPs are not islands for extraction in English. Overall, this shows that there is a split between English vs. German/Dutch PO-clauses when the P/PPF is absent. While these clauses behave like PO-clauses in the latter languages, extraction does not show a difference between DO- and PO-clauses in English. We will discuss the results in relation to the questions i)–iii) above.
This paper will address the challenge of creating a knowledge graph from a corpus of historical encyclopedias with a special focus on word sense alignment (WSA) and disambiguation (WSD). More precisely, we examine WSA and WSD approaches based on article similarity to link messy historical data, utilizing Wikipedia as aground-truth component – as the lack of a critical overlap in content paired with the amount of variation between and within the encyclopedias does not allow for choosing a ”baseline” encyclopedia to align the others to. Additionally, we are comparing the disambiguation performance of conservative methods like the Lesk algorithm to more recent approaches, i.e. using language models to disambiguate senses.
Twenty-two historical encyclopedias encoded in TEI: a new resource for the Digital Humanities
(2020)
This paper accompanies the corpus publication of EncycNet, a novel XML/TEI annotated corpus of 22 historical German encyclopedias from the early 18th to early 20th century. We describe the creation and annotation of the corpus, including the rationale for its development, suggested methodology for TEI annotation, possible use cases and future work. While many well-developed annotation standards for lexical resources exist, none can adequately model the encyclopedias at hand, and we therefore suggest how the TEI Lex-0 standard may be modified with additional guidelines for the annotation of historical encyclopedias. As the digitization and annotation of historical encyclopedias are settling on TEI as the de facto standard, our methodology may inform similar projects.
Using video-recordings from one day of a theater project for young adults, this paper investigates how the meaning of novel verbal expressions is interactionally constituted and elaborated over the interactional history of a series of activities. We examine how the theater director introduces and instructs the group in the Chekhovian technique of acting, which is based on “imagining with the body,” and how the imaginary elements of the technique are “brought into existence” in the language of the instructions. By tracking shifts in the instructor’s use of the key expressions invisible/imaginary/inner body or movement through a series of exercises, we demonstrate how they are increasingly treated as real and perceivable bodily conduct. The analyses focus on the instructor’s attribution of factual and agentive properties to these expressions, and the changes that these properties undergo over the series of instructions. This case demonstrates the significance of longitudinal processes for the establishment of shared meaning in social interaction. The study thereby contributes to the field of interactional semantics and to longitudinal studies of social interaction.
Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate how novices learning the “inner body” acting technique in the context of a community theater project share their experiences of the bodily exercises through verbal and embodied conduct. We focus on how verbal description and bodily enactment of the experience mutually elaborate each other, and how the experienced sensorimotor and affective qualities are made to be witnessed and recognized by the others. Participants describe their experiences without naming qualities. Instead, a display of the experienced qualities is made accessible to others through coordinating the unfolding talk and bodily conduct. In particular, we show how grammatical and action projection is fulfilled by interconnected verbal and embodied conduct, with body movement and posture giving off ineffable experiential qualities. The moving body appears both as a source of the experience and as a resource for depicting perceived qualities to others; additional resources (non-specific person reference and gaze aversion) contribute to organizing the subjective and intersubjective layers of the reflection of the experiences. The study contributes to and extends recent research on sensoriality in interaction by focusing on phenomena of proprioception and interoception. The data are two cases drawn from 60 h of video-recordings made in the context of a devised community theater project. The data are in Finnish with English translations.
This paper explores the syntax of agreement in Insular Scandinavian in copular clauses with two potential goals for agreement. Data from three production experiments - one in Faroese and two in Icelandic - establish several new facts. First, in both languages agreement with the second nominal (DP2) is possible/preferred. Second, there is considerable variation (both within and between languages, and indeed speakers) in the patterns observed. Third, Icelandic shows a surprising pattern of “partial” agreement with DP2 - agreement in number but not person. We discuss the implications for current theorising about agreement, proposing that in these languages, at least, agreement is downwards, and that the available agreement options depend in part on the syntactic position of DPI when agreement is established.
Agreement between the verb and its arguments as a predominant phenomenon in language has received major attention in the theoretical literature. One specific aspect under discussion concerns differences between number and person agreement, with the latter being the more restricted one (restricted by Baker’s 2008 SCOPA, by variants of the Person Licensing Condition of Béjar & Rezac 2003, or by multiple agreement see Schütze 2003; Ackema & Neeleman 2018). In this paper we address the restrictions on person agreement with a nominative noun phrase in a low position by investigating a relatively little-discussed configuration, namely specificational copular constructions in Dutch such as dat de inspiratie voor deze roman niet jij %bent / ??is. We provide data from both a production and a rating study comparing 3/2 person agreement and show that what initially looks like a “person effect” in Dutch turns out to be a pronoun effect.
In this paper we discuss a type of copular clause – specificational copular clauses – in which subject properties may be split between two nominative noun phrases. In particular, while the first noun phrase occupies the canonical preverbal subject position, in some languages the finite verb can agree with the postverbal nominative. Such agreement might be expected, on some theoretical assumptions, to show person restrictions. We discuss this phenomenon in two SVO Germanic languages – Icelandic and Faroese – and present new data from Faroese showing that the person effect here follows from the existence of distinct probes for Number and Person agreement.