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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.
Morphophonological asymmetries in affixation concern systematic correlations between morphological properties of affixes (e.g. combination with bound versus free stems, position relative to stem (suffixes versus prefixes)) and their phonological properties (e.g. stress behaviour). The arguably most insightful approach to capturing relevant asymmetries invokes a notion of affix coherence, first introduced by Dixon in connection with his work on Yidiɲ, a nearly extinct language spoken in Northern Australia. This notion is based on a categorical division of affixes into ones that integrate into the phonological word of the stem and ones that do not. The integration of affixes is envisioned as being fully determined by phonological and morphological structure in a given language and verifiable by diagnostics relevant to phonological word domains (primarily the syllable and the foot structure). The assumption of two types of prosodic domains characterized by integrated versus non-integrated affixes is manifest in consistent asymmetries that pertain to morphophonological, phonological, and phonetic rules. This consistency constitutes compelling evidence for the structure-based analysis of the impact of various affixes on derived words, as opposed to alternative approaches to capturing these effects by associating affixes with diacritics (morpheme versus word boundary, class 1 versus class 2, stratum 1 versus stratum 2). The present entry aims to demonstrate, mostly on the basis of data from Germanic languages, the breadth of the empirical evidence in support of a fundamental role of affix coherence. Moreover, it aims to draw attention to the various implications of affix coherence for modeling relevant generalizations, in particular the necessary reference to a level of phonological representation characterized by a specific degree of abstractness (‘phonemic’).
This paper discusses contemporary societal roles of German in the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania). Speaker and learner statistics and a summary of sociolinguistic research (Linguistic Landscapes, language learning motivation, language policies, international roles of languages) suggest that German has by far fewer speakers and functions than the national languages, English, and Russian, and it is not a dominant language in the contemporary Baltics anymore. However, German is ahead of ‘any other language’ in terms of users and societal roles as a frequent language in education, of economic relations, as a historical lingua franca, and a language of traditional and new minorities. Highly diverse groups of users and language policy actors form a ‘coalition of interested parties’ which creates niches which guarantee German a frequent use. In the light of the abundance of its functions, the paper suggests the concept ‘additional language of society’ for a variety such as German in the Baltics – since there seems to be no adequate alternative labelling which would do justice to all societal roles. The paper argues that this concept may also be used for languages in similar societal situations and, not least, be useful in language marketing and the promotion of multilingualism.
In this chapter, we will investigate smartphone-based showing sequences in everyday social encounters, that is, moments in which a personal mobile device is used for presenting (audio-)visual content to co-present participants. Despite a growing interest in object-centred sequences and mundane technology use, detailed accounts of the sequential, multimodal, and material dimensions of showing sequences are lacking. Based on video data of social interactions in different languages and on the framework of multimodal interaction analysis, this chapter will explore the link between mobile device use and social practices. We will analyse how smartphone showers and their recipients coordinate the manipulation of a technological object with multiple courses of action, and reflect upon the fundamental complexity of this by-now routine joint activity.
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.
We argue that properties with a nominal origin get transferred regularly in certain Gentian particle verb constructions to properties that are propositional insofar as they characterize the temporal structure of eventualities, understood to be described by propositional (= truth-assessable) representations of state changes. Accordingly, the oft-noted perfectivizing function of certain verbal particles like ein- in einfahren ('pull in', cf. Kühnhold 1972) is the effect of redressing a conflict at the syntax-semantics interface: On the one hand, constructions like in [die Grube]acc einfahren ('pull into the mine’) exhibit transitive syntax (Gehrke 2008), requiring that the syntactic arguments be mapped onto well-distinguished or DIFFERENT referents in the semantics (Kemmer 1993). On the other hand, in/ein codes a spatio-temporal inclusion relation between its relata, contradicting the requirement imposed by the transitive syntax. Following Brandt (2019), we submit that the interface executes a manoeuvre that delays the interpretation of part of the contradiction-inducing DIFFERENCE feature. It is not locally interpreted (semantically represented) in toto but in part passed on to the next syntactic-semantic computational cycle. Here, the passed-on meaning is interpreted in the locally customary terms, in the case at hand, as a temporal index where the post-state of the depicted eventuality does not hold.
Introduction
(2023)
This replication study aims to investigate a potential bias toward addition in the German language, building upon previous findings of Winter and colleagues who identified a similar bias in English. Our results confirm a bias in word frequencies and binomial expressions, aligning with these previous findings. However, the analysis of distributional semantics based on word vectors did not yield consistent results for German. Furthermore, our study emphasizes the crucial role of selecting appropriate translational equivalents, highlighting the significance of considering language-specific factors when testing for such biases for languages other than English.
Aims and objectives:
Language debates in Latvia often focus on the role of Latvian as official and main societal language. Yet, Latvian society is highly multilingual, and families with home languages other than Latvian have to choose between different educational trajectories for their children. In this context, this paper discusses the results of two studies which addressed the question of why families with Russian as a home language choose (pre)schools with languages other than Russian as medium of instruction (MOI). The first study analyses family narratives which provide insight into attitudes and practices which lead to the decision to send children to Latvian-MOI institutions. The second study investigates language attitudes and practices by families in the international community of Riga German School.
Methodology:
The paper discusses data gathered during two studies: for the first, semi-structed interviews were conducted with Russian-speaking families who choose Latvian-medium schools for their children. For the second study, a survey was carried out in the community of an international school in Riga, sided by ethnographic observations and interviews with teachers and the school leadership.
Data and analysis:
Interviews and ethnographic observations were subjected to a discourse analysis with a focus on critical events and structures of life trajectory narratives. Survey data were processed following simple statistical analysis and qualitative content analysis.
Findings/conclusions:
Our data reveal that families highly embrace multilingualism and see the development of individual plurilingualism as important for integration into Latvian society as well as for educational and professional opportunities in the multilingual societies of Latvia and Europe. At the same time, multilingualism and multiculturalism, including Russian, are seen as a value in itself. In addition, our studies reflect the bidirectionality of family language policies in interplay with practices in educational institutions: family decisions influence children’s language acquisition at school, but the school also has an impact on the families’ language practices at home. In sum, we argue that educational policies should therefore pay justice to the wishes of families in Latvia to incorporate different language aspects into individual educational trajectories.
Originality:
Language policy is a frequent topic of investigation in the Baltic states. However, there has been a lack in research on family language policy and school choices. In this vein, our paper adds to the understanding of educational choices and language policy processes among Russian-speaking families and the international community in Latvia.
The idea of this article is to take the immaterial and somehow ethereal nature of aesthetic concepts seriously by asking how aesthetic concepts are negotiated and thus formed in communication. My examples come from theatrical production where aesthetic decisions naturally play a major role. In the given case, an aesthetic concept is introduced with which only the director, but none of the actors is familiar in the beginning of the rehearsals. The concept, Wabi Sabi, comes from Japanese culture. As the whole rehearsal process was video recorded, it is possible to track the process of how the concept is negotiated and acquired over time. So, instead of defining criteria what Wabi Sabi as an aesthetic concept “consists of,” this article seeks to show how the concept is introduced, explained and “used” within a practical context, in this case a theater rehearsal. In contrast to conventional models of aesthetic experience, I am interested in the ways in which an aesthetic concept is configured in and through socially organized interaction, and — vice versa — how that interaction contributes to the situational accomplishment of the same concept. In short: I am interested in the “doing” of aesthetic concepts, especially in “doing Wabi Sabi.”
The ubiquity of smartphones has been recognised within conversation analysis as having an impact on conversational structures and on the participants’ interactional involvement. However, most of the previous studies have relied exclusively on video recordings of overall encounters and have not systematically considered what is taking place on the device. Due to the personal nature of smartphones and their small displays, onscreen activities are of limited visibility and are thus potentially opaque for both the co-present participants (“participant opacity”) and the researchers (“analytical opacity”). While opacity can be an inherent feature of smartphones in general, analytical opacity might not be desirable for research purposes. This chapter discusses how a recording set-up consisting of static cameras, wearable cameras and dynamic screen captures allowed us to address the analytical opacity of mobile devices. Excerpts from multi-source video data of everyday encounters will illustrate how the combination of multiple perspectives can increase the visibility of interactional phenomena, reveal new analytical objects and improve analytical granularity. More specifically, these examples will emphasise the analytical advantages and challenges of a combined recording set-up with regard to smartphone use as multiactivity, the role of the affordances of the mobile device, and the prototypicality and “naturalness” of the recorded practices.
Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories concerned with different notional facets of the event or situation conveyed by a given clause. They are prototypically expressed by the verbal system. Tense can be defined as a category that relates points or intervals in time to one another; in a most basic model, those include the time of the event or situation referred to and the speech time. The former may precede the latter (“past”), follow it (“future”), or be simultaneous with it (or at least overlap with it; “present”). Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of the event or situation, which may be viewed as a single whole (“perfective”) or with particular reference to its internal structure (“imperfective”), including its being ongoing at a certain point in time (“progressive”). Mood, in a narrow, morphological sense, refers to the inflectional realization of modality, with modality encompassing a large and varying set of sub-concepts such as possibility, necessity, probability, obligation, permission, ability, and volition. In the domain of tense, all Germanic languages make a distinction between non-past and past. In most languages, the opposition can be expressed inflectionally, namely, by the present and preterite (indicative). All modern languages also have a periphrastic perfect as well as periphrastic forms that can be used to refer to future events. Aspect is characteristically absent as a morphological category across the entire family, but most, if not all, modern languages have periphrastic forms for the expression of aspectual categories such as progressiveness. Regarding mood, Germanic languages are commonly described as distinguishing up to three such form paradigms, namely, indicative, imperative, and a third one referred to here as subjunctive. Morphologically distinct subjunctive forms are, however, more typical of earlier stages of Germanic than they are of most present-day languages.
In this article, we provide an insight into the development and application of a corpus-lexicographic tool for finding neologisms that are not yet listed in German dictionaries. As a starting point, we used the words listed in a glossary of German neologisms surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. These words are lemma candidates for a new dictionary on COVID-19 discourse in German. They also provided the database used to develop and test the NeoRate tool. We report on the lexicographic work in our dictionary project, the design and functionalities of NeoRate, and describe the first test results with the tool, in particular with regard to previously unregistered words. Finally, we discuss further development of the tool and its possible applications.
This paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementing Reichenbach’s (1947) classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics.
Meta-communicative practices are generally reflexive in a fairly obvious sense: Inasmuch as speakers use them to talk about or comment on earlier/subsequent talk, they use language self-reflexively. In this paper, we explore a practice that is reflexive not only in this meta-communicative sense but also in a sequential-interactional one: Prefacing a conversational turn with I was gonna say. We show that the I was gonna say-preface furnishes the following general semantic-pragmatic affordances: (1) It retroactively relates the speaker’s subsequent talk to preceding talk from a co-participant, (2) it embodies a claim to prior, now-preempted, communicative intent with regard to what their co-participant has (just) said/done, (3) it therefore displays its speaker’s orientation to the relevance or the appropriate placement of the action(s) done in their own subsequent talk at an earlier moment in the interaction, and (4) it reflexively re-invokes, or retrieves, this earlier moment as the relevant sequential context for their action(s). We then go on to illustrate how speakers draw on these sequentially reflexive affordances for managing recurrent interactional contingencies in specific sequential environments. The paper ends with a discussion of the role that reflexivity plays in and for the deployment of this practice.
In a recent article, Meylan and Griffiths (Meylan & Griffiths, 2021, henceforth, M&G) focus their attention on the significant methodological challenges that can arise when using large-scale linguistic corpora. To this end, M&G revisit a well-known result of Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson (2011, henceforth, PT&G) who argue that average information content is a better predictor of word length than word frequency. We applaud M&G who conducted a very important study that should be read by any researcher interested in working with large-scale corpora. The fact that M&G mostly failed to find clear evidence in favor of PT&G's main finding motivated us to test PT&G's idea on a subset of the largest archive of German language texts designed for linguistic research, the German Reference Corpus consisting of ∼43 billion words. We only find very little support for the primary data point reported by PT&G.
The Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) was established in Mannheim in 1964. Since then, it has been at the forefront of innovation in German linguistics as a hub for digital language data. This chapter presents various lessons learnt from over five decades of work by the IDS, ranging from the importance of sustainability, through its strong technical base and FAIR principles, to the IDS’ role in national and international cooperation projects and its expertise on legal and ethical issues related to language resources and language technology.
This paper deals with different types of verbal complementation of the German verb verdienen. It focuses on constructions that have been undergoing a grammaticalization process and thus express deontic modality, as in Sie verdient geliebt zu werden (ʽShe deserves to be lovedʼ) and Sie verdient zu leben (ʽShe deserves to liveʼ) (Diewald, Dekalo & Czicza 2021). These constructions are connected to parallel complementation types with passive and active infinitives containing a correlate es, as in Sie verdient es, geliebt zu werden and Sie verdient es, zu leben, as well as finite clauses with the subordinator dass with and without correlative es, as in Sie verdient, dass sie geliebt wird and Sie verdient es, dass sie geliebt wird. This paper attempts to show a close comparative investigation of these six types of constructions based on their relevant semantic and syntactic properties in terms of clause linkage (Lehmann 1988). We analyze the relevant data retrieved from the DWDS corpus of the 20th century and present an expanded grammaticalization path for verdienen-constructions. The finite complementation with dass is regarded as an example of a separate structural option called “elaboration”. Concerning the use of correlative es, it is shown that it does not have any substantial effect on the grammaticalization of modal verdienen-constructions.
The article addresses Solution-Oriented Questions (SOQs) as an interactional practice for relationship management in psychodiagnostic interviews. Therapeutic alliance results from the concordance of alignment, as willingness to cooperate regarding common goals, and of affiliation, as relationship based upon trust. SOQs particularly allow for both: They are situated at the end of a troublesome topic area, which is linked to low agency on the patient’s side, and they reveal understanding of and interest in the patient. Following the paradigm of Conversation Analysis and German Gesprächsanalyse this paper analyzes the design and functions of SOQs as a means for securing and enhancing the relationship in the process of therapy. Our data comprise 15 videotaped first interviews following the manual of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics. The analyses refer to all SOQs found but will be illustrated by means of a single conversation.
This paper investigates synchronic variation in the lexical and grammatical environments of the German lexical verb verdienen ‘earn’, ‘deserve’. In its lexical uses, verdienen co-occurs with an object noun phrase whose head is either concrete (e.g. Geld ‘money’) or, more commonly, abstract (e.g. Beachtung ‘attention’). When it is used more grammatically with deontic modal meaning, verdienen is followed by a passive or active infinitive. This paper uses collostructional analyses to contrast lexical and grammatical uses in terms of the most strongly attracted lexical items, which are grouped into semantic classes. The results reflect different degrees of host-class expansion (cf. Himmelmann 2004), whereby the collexemes of verdienen expand from concrete to abstract and their morpho-syntactic contexts from nominal to infinitival complement and subsequently from passive to active. Synchronic distribution can thus serve as a window on diachronic development (Kuteva 2001), in this case the rise of a deontic modality marker.
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
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.
OKAY originates from English, but it is increasingly used across languages. This chapter presents data from 13 languages, illustrating the spectrum of possible uses of OKAY in responding and claiming understanding in contexts of informings. Drawing on a wide range of interaction types from both informal and institutional contexts, including those crucially involving embodied practices, we show how OKAY can be used to (i) claim sufficient understanding, (ii) mark understanding of the prior informing as preliminary or not complete, and (iii) index discrepancy of expectation.
Our paper examines how bodily behavior contributes to the local meaning of OKAY. We explore the interplay between OKAY as response to informings and narratives and accompanying multimodal resources in German multi-party interaction. Based on informal and institutional conversations, we describe three different uses of OKAY with falling intonation and the recurrent multimodal patterns that are associated with them and that can be characterized as ‘multimodal gestalts’. We show that: 1. OKAY as a claim to sufficient understanding is typically accompanied by upward nodding; 2. OKAY after change-of-state tokens exhibits a recurrent pattern of up- and downward nodding with distinctive timing; and 3. OKAY closing larger activities is associated with gaze-aversion from the prior speaker.
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.
In this paper we examine the composition and interactional deployment of suspended assessments in ordinary German conversation. We define suspended assessments as lexicosyntactically incomplete assessing TCUs that share a distinct cluster of prosodic-phonetic features which auditorily makes them come off as 'left hanging' rather than cut-off (e.g., Schegloff/Jefferson/Sacks 1977; Jasperson 2002) or trailing-off (e.g., Local/Kelly 1986; Walker 2012). Using CA/IL methodology (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018) and drawing on a large body of video-recorded face-to-face conversations, we highlight the verbal, vocal and bodily-visual resources participants use to render such unfinished assessing TCUs recognizably incomplete and identify six recurrent usage types. Overall, the suspension of assessing TCUs appears to either serve as a practice for circumventing the production of assessments that are interactionally inapposite, or as a practice for coping with local contingencies that render the very doing of an assessment problematic for the speaker. Data are in German with English translations.
In this paper, we present an overview of freely available web applications providing online access to spoken language corpora. We explore and discuss various solutions with which the corpus providers and corpus platform developers address the needs of researchers who are working with spoken language. The paper aims to contribute to the long-overdue exchange and discussion of methods and best practices in the design of online access to spoken language corpora.
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.
This introduction summarizes general issues combining lexicography and neology in the context of the Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neology series. We present each of the six papers composing this Special Issue, featuring two Slavic languages (Czech and Slovak) and two Romance ones (Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish in its European and Latin American varieties) and their diverse lexicographic research and representation, in specialized dictionaries of neologisms or general language ones, in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexical resources, and in print and digital dictionaries.
Our paper discusses family language policies among multilingual families in Latvia with Russian as home language. The presentation is based on three case studies, i.e. interviews conducted with Russophones who have chosen to send their children to Latvian-medium pre-schools and schools. The main aim is to understand practices and regards among such families “from below,” i.e. which family-internal and family-external factors influenced the choice of Latvian-medium education and what impact this choice has on linguistic practices.
The paper shows that there have been critical events which both encouraged and discouraged the choice of Latvian-medium education. The wish to integrate into mainstream society has been met by obstacles both from ethnic Russians and Latvians. Yet, the three families consider their choices to be the right ones for the future development of their children in a multiethnic Latvia in which Latvian serves as the unifying language of society.
Nonnative-accented speakers face prevalent discrimination. The assumption that people freely express negative sentiments toward nonnative speakers has also guided common research methods. However, recent studies did not consistently find downgrading, so that prejudice against nonnative accents might even be questioned at first sight. The present theoretical article will bridge these contradictory findings in three ways: (a) We illustrate that nonnative speakers with foreign accents frequently may not be downgraded in commonly used first-impression and employment scenario paradigms. It appears that relatively controlled responding may be influenced by norms and motivations to respond without prejudice, whereas negative biases emerge in spontaneous responding. (b) We present an integrative view based on knowledge on modern forms of prejudice to develop modern notions of accent-ism, which allow for predictions when accent biases are (not) likely to surface. (c) We conclude with implications for interventions and a tailored research agenda.
This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
This is an introduction to a special issue of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America. It offers a characterization of neology and describes the Globalex-sponsored workshop at which the papers in the issue originated. It provides an overview of the papers, which treat lexicographical neology and neological lexicography in Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Frisian, Greek, Korean, Spanish, and Swahili and address relevant aspects of lexicography in those languages, presenting state-of-the-art research into neology and ideas about modern lexicographic treatment of neologisms in various dictionary types.
This contribution deals with right-dislocated complement clauses with the subordinating conjunction dass (‘that’) in German talk-in-interaction. The bi-clausal construction we analyze is as follows: The first clause, in which one argument is realized by the demonstrative pronoun das (‘this/that’), is syntactically and semantically complete; the reference of the pronoun is (re-)specified by adding a dass-complement clause after a point of possible completion (e.g., aber das hab ich nich MITbekommen. (0.32) dass es da so YOUtubevideos gab. (‘But I wasn’t aware of that. That there were videos about that on YouTube.’). The first clause always performs a backward-oriented action (e.g., an assessment) and the second clause (re-)specifies the propositional reference of the demonstrative, allowing for a (strategic) perspective shift. Based on a collection of 93 cases from everyday conversations and institutional interactions, we found that the construction is used close to the turn-beginning for referring to and (re-)specifying (parts of) another speaker’s prior turn; turn-internal uses tie together parts of a speaker’s multi-unit turn. The construction thus facilitates an incremental constitution of meaning and reference.
This paper discusses a theoretical and empirical approach to language fixedness that we have developed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) (‘Institute for German Language’) in Mannheim in the project Usuelle Worterbindungen(UWV) over the last decade. The analysis described is based on the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (‘German Reference Corpus’; DeReKo) which is located at the IDS. The corpus analysis tool used for accessing the corpus data is COSMAS II (CII) and – for statistical analysis – the IDS collocation analysis tool (Belica, 1995; CA). For detecting lexical patterns and describing their semantic and pragmatic nature we use the tool lexpan (or ‘Lexical Pattern Analyzer’) that was developed in our project. We discuss a new corpus-driven pattern dictionary that is relevant not only to the field of phraseology, but also to usage-based linguistics and lexicography as a whole.
How Do Speakers Define the Meaning of Expressions? The Case of German x heißt y (“x means y”)
(2020)
To secure mutual understanding in interaction, speakers sometimes explain or negotiate expressions. Adopting a conversation analytic and interaction linguistic approach, I examine how participants explain which kinds of expressions in different sequential environments, using the format x heißt y (“x means y”). When speakers use it to clarify technical terms or foreign words that are unfamiliar to co-participants, they often provide a situationally anchored definition that however is rather context-free and therefore transferable to future situations. When they explain common (but indexical, ambiguous, polysemous, or problematic) expressions instead, speakers always design their explanation strongly connected to the local context, building on situational circumstances. I argue that x heißt y definitions in interaction do not meet the requirements of scientific or philosophical definitions but that this is irrelevant for the situational exigencies speakers face.
The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest crisis the world has had to face since World War II. It does not come as a surprise that it is also having an impact on language as our primary communication tool. In this short paper, we present three inter-connected resources that are designed to capture and illustrate these effects on a subset of the German language: An RSS corpus of German-language newsfeeds (with freely available untruncated frequency lists), a continuously updated HTML page tracking the diversity of the vocabulary in the RSS corpus and a Shiny web application that enables other researchers and the broader public to explore the corpus in terms of basic frequencies.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of word formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DeReKo and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.
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.
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.
The lexicography of German
(2020)
This chapter discusses the main dictionaries of the German language as it is spoken and written in Germany, and also German as it is spoken and written in Austria, Switzerland, the eastern fringes of Belgium, and South Tyrol. It also briefly describes Pennsylvania German. Corpora and other language resources used in German dictionary-making are also presented. Finally, there is a discussion of some current issues in German lexicography, as well as future prospects.
As immigration and mobility increases, so do interactions between people from different linguistic backgrounds. Yet while linguistic diversity offers many benefits, it also comes with a number of challenges. In seven empirical articles and one commentary, this Special Issue addresses some of the most significant language challenges facing researchers in the 21st century: the power language has to form and perpetuate stereotypes, the contribution language makes to intersectional identities, and the role of language in shaping intergroup relations. By presenting work that aims to shed light on some of these issues, the goal of this Special Issue is to (a) highlight language as integral to social processes and (b) inspire researchers to address the challenges we face. To keep pace with the world’s constantly evolving linguistic landscape, it is essential that we make progress toward harnessing language’s power in ways that benefit 21st century globalized societies.
Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic and statistical cues are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language.
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
Studies on the Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) investigate frequencies, functions, and power relations between languages and their speakers in public space. Research on the LL thereby aims to understand how the production and perception of signs reflect and simultaneously shape realities. In this sense, the LL is one of the most dynamic places where processes of minoritization take place: the (in)visibility of minority languages and the functional and symbolic relationships to majority languages are in direct relationship with negotiations of minorities’ place in society. This chapter looks at minority languages in the LL from two major perspectives. Firstly, it discusses language policies, focussing on which policy categories and which domains of language use are of particular relevance for understanding minority languages in the LL. Then, it turns to issues of conflict, contestation, and exclusion by providing examples from a range of geographically and typologically prototypical case studies, including Israel, Canada, Belgium, the Basque Country, and Friesland.
This chapter introduces readers to the context and concept of this volume. It starts by providing an historical overview of languages and multilingualism in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, highlighting the 100th anniversary of statehood which the three Baltic states are celebrating in 2018. Then, the chapter briefly presents important strands of research on multilingualism in the region throughout the past decades; in particular, questions about language policies and the status of the national languages (Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian) and Russian. It also touches on debates about languages in education and the roles of other languages such as the regional languages of Latgalian and Võro and the changing roles of international languages such as English and German. The chapter concludes by providing short summaries of the contributions to this book.
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.
This paper discusses German neologisms in the so-called “new-media” and presents a German corpus-based online dictionary of neologisms. Several neological morphemes and lexemes, as well as their meaning will be presented, showing that these new modes of communication are an important source of enrichment of German lexicon.
The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.
Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
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.
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.
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.
How do people communicate in mobile settings of interaction? How does mobility affect the way we speak? How does mobility exert influence on the manner in which talk itself is consequential for how we move in space? Recently, questions of this sort have attracted increasing attention in the human and social sciences. This Special Issue contributes to the emerging body of studies on mobility and talk by inspecting an ordinary and ubiquitous phenomenon in which communication among mobile participants is paramount: participation in traffic. This editorial presents previous work on mobility in natural settings, as carried out by interactionally oriented researchers. It also shows how the investigation into traffic participation adds new perspectives to research on language and communication.
Based on conference reports and minutes, archive material and official documents, the article seeks to explore the way in which the promotion of women’s sports and of women in leadership positions became an important part of the sport policy of two major organizations involved in European sport cooperation: the Council of Europe and the European Sport Conference. During first and modest discussions in the 1960s and 1970s it constituted a rather paternalistic project. Also, it was based on the assumption of an essential difference between men and women concerning the need for participation in sport. This only changed since the beginning of the 1980s when women took the course in their own hands, challenged the underlying assumptions and created new networks of cooperation.
German subjectively veridical sicher sein ‘be certain’ can embed ob-clauses in negative contexts, while subjectively veridical glauben ‘believe’ and nonveridical möglich sein ‘be possible’ cannot. The Logical Form of F isn’t certain if M is in Rome is regarded as the negated disjunction of two sentences ¬(cf σ ∨ cf ¬σ) or ¬cf σ ∧ ¬cf ¬σ. Be certain can have this LF because ¬cf σ and ¬cf ¬σ are compatible and nonveridical. Believe excludes this LF because ¬bf σ and ¬bf ¬σ are incompatible in a question-under-discussion context. It follows from this incompatibility and from the incompatibility of bf σ and bf ¬σ that bf ¬σ and ¬bf σ are equivalent. Therefore believe cannot be nonveridical. Be possible doesn’t allow the LF either. Similar to believe, ¬pf σ and ¬pf ¬σ are incompatible. But unlike believe, pf σ and pf ¬σ are compatible.
The demo presents a minimalist, off-the-shelf AND tool which provides a fundamental AND operation, the comparison of two publications with ambiguous authors, as an easily accessible HTTP interface. The tool implements this operation using standard AND functionality, but puts particular emphasis on advanced methods from natural language processing (NLP) for comparing publication title semantics.
The use of digital resources and tools across humanities disciplines is steadily increasing, giving rise to new research paradigms and associated methods that are commonly subsumed under the term digital humanities. Digital humanities does not constitute a new discipline in itself, but rather a new approach to humanities research that cuts across different existing humanities disciplines. While digital humanities extends well beyond language-based research, textual resources and spoken language materials play a central role in most humanities disciplines.
The transfer of research data management from one institution to another infrastructural partner is all but trivial, but can be required, for instance, when an institution faces reorganization or closure. In a case study, we describe the migration of all research data, identify the challenges we encountered, and discuss how we addressed them. It shows that the moving of research data management to another institution is a feasible, but potentially costly enterprise. Being able to demonstrate the feasibility of research data migration supports the stance of data archives that users can expect high levels of trust and reliability when it comes to data safety and sustainability.
Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DEREKO and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
Latvia
(2019)
This chapter deals with current issues in bilingual education in the framework of language and educational policies in Latvia, and also outlines similarities or common tendencies in the two other Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania. As commonly understood in the 21st century, the term ‘bilingual education’ includes ‘multilingual education, as the umbrella term to cover a wide spectrum of practice and policy’ (García, 2009: 9).
Terminological resources play a central role in the organization and retrieval of scientific texts. Both simple keyword lists and advanced modelings of relationships between terminological concepts can make a most valuable contribution to the analysis, classification, and finding of appropriate digital documents, either on the web or within local repositories. This seems especially true for long-established scientific fields with elusive theoretical and historical branches, where the use of terminology within documents from different origins is often far from being consistent. In this paper, we report on the progress of a linguistically motivated project on the onomasiological re-modeling of the terminological resources for the grammatical information system grammis. We present the design principles and the results of their application. In particular, we focus on new features for the authoring backend and discuss how these innovations help to evaluate existing, loosely structured terminological content, as well as to efficiently deal with automatic term extraction. Furthermore, we introduce a transformation to a future SKOS representation. We conclude with a positioning of our resources with regard to the Knowledge Organization discourse and discuss how a highly complex information environment like grammis benefits from the re-designed terminological KOS.
Just like most varieties of West Germanic, virtually all varieties of German use a construction in which a cognate of the English verb 'do' (standard German 'tun') functions as an auxiliary and selects another verb in the bare infinitive, a construction known as 'do'-periphrasis or 'do'-support. The present paper provides an Optimality Theoretic (OT) analysis of this phenomenon. It builds on a previous analysis by Bader and Schmid (An OT-analysis of 'do'-support in Modern German, 2006) but (i) extends it from root clauses to subordinate clauses and (ii) aims to capture all of the major distributional patterns found across (mostly non-standard) varieties of German. In so doing, the data are used as a testing ground for different models of German clause structure. At first sight, the occurrence of 'do' in subordinate clauses, as found in many varieties, appears to support the standard CP-IP-VP analysis of German. In actual fact, however, the full range of data turn out to challenge, rather than support, this model. Instead, I propose an analysis within the IP-less model by Haider (Deutsche Syntax - generativ. Vorstudien zur Theorie einer projektiven Grammatik, Narr, Tübingen, 1993 et seq.). In sum, the 'do'-support data will be shown to have implications not only for the analysis of clause structure but also for the OT constraints commonly assumed to govern the distribution of 'do', for the theory of non-projecting words (Toivonen in Non-projecting words, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2003) as well as research on grammaticalization.
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.
Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (“exactly”). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the “confirmable”) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B’s confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the “anchor”). Through claiming temporal priority, eben speakers treat a just-formulated position as self-evident and mark independence. Further evidence for the three-part structure “anchor-confirmable-eben” that eben sets in motion retrospectively comes from instances where eben speakers supply a missing/opaque anchor via a postpositioned display of independent access. Data are in German with English translation.
Based on the empirical data of 97 fourth-graders from three districts of Braunschweig in Germany, this paper investigates the possibility of changing semantic frames in multilingual communities. The focus of study is the verb field of self-motion. In a free-sorting task involving 52 verbs, Turkish-speaking students, in particular, placed the verbs schleichen (‘to sneak’) and kommen (‘to come’) in the same group. When explaining the perceived similarity they also used the word schleichen (‘to sneak’), in a specific grammatical construction that is not found in Standard German. This paper suggests that semantic frames may change along with grammatical constructions when typologically distinct languages come into close contact.
Null subjects (NSs) have been a central research topic in generative syntax ever since the 1980s. This chapter considers the situation of German NSs both from a dialectological and from a diachronic perspective and attempts to reconstruct a direct line concerning the licensing conditions of pro-drop from Old High German (OHG) through Middle High German (MHG) and Early New High German (ENHG) to current dialects of New High German (NHG). Particularly, we will argue that German changed from a consistent, yet asymmetric pro-drop language to a partial, but symmetric one. In order to demonstrate that this development took place and the steps involved, we survey the existing empirical evidence and introduce new data.
Germany's (single) national official language is German. The dominance of German in schools, politics, the legal system, administration and the entire written public domain is so great that for a long time the lack of a coherent language policy was not seen as a problem. State restraint in this area is due, on the one hand, to historical reasons; on the other hand, it has been promoted by the federal system in Germany, which grants the federal states far-reaching responsibilities in the fields of education and culture. More recently, multilingualism among the population has increased and has resulted in a growing interest in understanding the language situation in Germany and (in particular) taking a closer look at the different minority languages. In 2017, for the first time in about 80 years, there is a question on the language of the population in the German micro census. The Institute for the German Language has also carried out various representative surveys; in the winter of 2017/201, a large representative survey with questions on the language repertoire and language attitudes is in the field.
Present-day German uses two formally different patterns of compounding in N+N compounds. The first combines bare stems (e.g. Tisch+decke ‘tablecloth’) while the second contains an intervening linking element (LE) as in Geburt-s-ort ‘birth-LE-place’. The linked compounding type developed in Early New High German (1350–1650) from phrasal constructions by reanalyzing genitive attributes as first constituents of compounds. The present paper uses corpus data to explore three key stages in this development: In the initial stage, it shows how prenominal non-specific genitive constructions lent themselves to reanalysis due to their functional overlap and formal similarity. Additionally, compounds seem to have replaced not only prenominal genitives, but also structurally different postnominal genitives. In the second stage, the new compounding pattern increases in productivity between 1500 and 1710, especially compared to the older pattern without linking elements. The last stage pertains to changes in spelling practice. It shows that linked compounds were written separately in the beginning. Their gradual graphematic integration into directly connected words was reversed by a century of hyphenation (1650–1750). This is strikingly different from present-day spelling practice and shows that the linked pattern was still perceived as marked.
Several studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In this study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty. Consistent with previous results from Wotschack and Kliegl, the question difficulty manipulation influenced the probability of regressing from late in sentences and re-reading earlier regions; readers who expected difficult comprehension questions were more likely to re-read. However, this manipulation had no reliable influence on eye movements during first-pass reading of earlier sentence regions. Moreover, for the subset of sentences that contained a plausibility manipulation, the disruption induced by implausibility was not modulated by the question manipulation. We interpret these results as suggesting that comprehension demands influence reading behavior primarily by modulating a criterion for comprehension that readers apply after completing first-pass processing.
Since Lerner coined the notion of delayed completion in 1989, this recurrent social practice of continuing one’s speaking turn while disregarding an intermediate co-participant’s utterance has not been investigated with regard to embodied displays and actions. A sequential approach to videotaped mundane conversations in German will explain the occurrence and use of delayed completions. First, especially in multi-party and multi-activity settings, delayed completions can result from reduced monitoring and coordinating activities. Second, recipients can use intra-turn response slots for more extended responsive actions than the current speaker initially projected, leading to delayed completion sequences. Finally, delayed completions are used for blocking possibly misaligned co-participant actions. The investigation of visible action illustrates that delayed completions are a basic practice for retrospectively managing co-participant response slots.
Psychological research has neglected people whose accent does not match their appearance. Most research on person perception has focused on appearance, overlooking accents that are equally important social cues. If accents were studied, it was often done in isolation (i.e., detached from appearance). We examine how varying accent and appearance information about people affects evaluations. We show that evaluations of expectancy-violating people shift in the direction of the added information. When a job candidate looked foreign, but later spoke with a native accent, his evaluations rose and he was evaluated best of all candidates (Experiment 1a). However, the sequence in which information was presented mattered: When heard first and then seen, his evaluations dropped (Experiment 1b). Findings demonstrate the importance of studying the combination and sequence of different types of information in impression formation. They also allow predicting reactions to ethnically mixed people, who are increasingly present in modern societies.
Aversion to loanwords may express itself in various ways: deliberate and motivated by ideology of linguistic purism or more implicit and motivated by the strength of one’s national identification and ethnolinguistic vitality. A study of Polish philology students assessed their tendency to choose loanwords versus synonymous native words. The results supported a two-path model of linguistic purism. Social identity (strength of identification) directly predicted avoidance of loanwords, whereas ideological concerns (conservative political views) predicted it indirectly, through purist ideology.
As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
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.
To date, little is known about prosodic accommodation and its conversational functions in instances of overlapping talk in conversation. A major conversational action that happens in overlap is turn competition. It is not known whether participants accommodate prosodic parameters locally in the overlapped turn (initialisation) or access a repertoire of prosodic patterns that refer to general prosodic parameter norms (normalisation) when competing for the turn in overlap. This paper investigates the initialisation and normalisation of fundamental frequency (f0) and assesses its role as a resource for turn competition in overlap. We drew instances of overlapping talk from a corpus of conversational multi-party interactions in British English. We annotated the overlaps on a competitiveness scale and categorised them by overlap onset position and conversational function. We automatically extracted f0 parameters from the speech signal and processed them into f0 accommodation features that represent the normalising or the initialising use of f0. Using decision tree classification we found that f0 accommodation is only relevant as a turn competitive resource in overlaps that start clearly before a speaker transition. In this turn context, we found that normalising and initialising f0 features can both be relevant turn competitive resources. Their deployment depends on the conversational function of overlap.
The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native–nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
Recently, a claim was made, on the basis of the German Google Books 1-gram corpus (Michel et al., Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science 2010; 331: 176–82), that there was a linear relationship between six non-technical non-Nazi words and three ‘explicitly Nazi words’ in times of World War II (Caruana-Galizia. 2015. Politics and the German language: Testing Orwell’s hypothesis using the Google N-Gram corpus. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities [Online]. http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/fqv011 (accessed 15 April 2015)). Here, I try to show that apparent relationships like this are the result of misspecified models that do not take into account the temporal aspect of time-series data. The main point of this article is to demonstrate why such analyses run the risk of incorrect statistical inference, where potential effects are both meaningless and can potentially lead to wrong conclusions.
Wolfgang von Kempelen's book "The Mechanism of Human Speech" from 1791 is a famous milestone in the history of speech communication research. It has an enormous relevance for the phonetic sciences and it marks an important turning point for the development of the (mechanical) speech synthesis. So far no English version of this work was available, which excludes many interested researchers. Access to the original versions in German and French is restricted for various reasons. For example the blackletter script of the German version is troublesome for most of today's readers. We report here on a new edition of Kempelen's book which unites a better readable German version and its English translation. It will now also be in a searchable electronic format and has been enriched with many commentaries, which aid in the understanding of details of the late 18th century that are little known or unknown to many researchers today.
We present a method to identify and document a phenomenon on which there is very little empirical data: German phrasal compounds occurring in the form of as a single token (without punctuation between their components). Relying on linguistic criteria, our approach implies to have an operational notion of compounds which can be systematically applied as well as (web) corpora which are large and diverse enough to contain rarely seen phenomena. The method is based on word segmentation and morphological analysis, it takes advantage of a data-driven learning process. Our results show that coarse-grained identification of phrasal compounds is best performed with empirical data, whereas fine-grained detection could be improved with a combination of rule-based and frequency-based word lists. Along with the characteristics of web texts, the orthographic realizations seem to be linked to the degree of expressivity.
This chapter investigates policies which shape the role of the German language in contemporary Estonia. Whereas German played for many centuries an important role as the language of the economic and cultural elite in Estonia, it severely declined in importance throughout the twentieth century. Mirrored on this historical background, the paper provides an overview of the current functions of German and attitudes towards it and it discusses how these functions and attitudes are influenced by policies of various actors from inside and outside Estonia. The paper argues that German continues to play a significant role: while German is no longer a lingua franca, it still enjoys a number of functions and prestige in clearly defined niches involving communication within German-speaking circles or between Estonians and Germans. The interplay of language policies of the Estonian and the German-speaking states as well as by semi-state and private institutions succeed in maintaining German as an additional language in contemporary Estonia.
In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes from systematic variation in the design of imperative turns, relative to the fittedness of the imperatively mandated action to the addressee’s ongoing trajectory of actions, what we call the “dine of commitment”. We present four points on this dine: Responsive imperatives perform an operation on the deontic dimension of what the addressee has announced or already begun to do (in particular its permissibility); local-project imperatives formulate a new action advancing a course of action in which the addressee is already actively engaged; global-project-imperatives target a next task for which the addressee is available on the grounds of their participation in the overall event, and in the absence of any competing work; and competitive imperatives draw on a presently otherwise engaged addressee on the grounds of their social commitment to the relevant course of actions. These four turn shapes are increasingly complex, reflecting the interactional work required to bridge the increasing distance between what the addressee is currently doing, and what the imperative mandates. We present data from German and Polish informal and institutional settings.
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.
There are a number of recent replicas of Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine. Although all of them are explicitly based on Kempelen's own description nearly none of them are identical in construction and sound. In this paper we want to illustrate some of these differences and their reasons for five replicas built by ourselves.
Most research on ethnicity has focused on visual cues. However, accents are strong social cues that can match or contradict visual cues. We examined understudied reactions to people whose one cue suggests one ethnicity, whereas the other cue contradicts it. In an experiment conducted in Germany, job candidates spoke with an accent either congruent or incongruent with their (German or Turkish) appearance. Based on ethnolinguistic identity theory, we predicted that accents would be strong cues for categorization and evaluation. Based on expectancy violations theory we expected that incongruent targets would be evaluated more extremely than congruent targets. Both predictions were confirmed: accents strongly influenced perceptions and Turkish-looking German-accented targets were perceived as most competent of all targets (and additionally most warm). The findings show that bringing together visual and auditory information yields a more complete picture of the processes underlying impression formation.
Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.