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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Basic grammatical categories may carry social meanings irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs—a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages—are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension of social perception. In an archival analysis of actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and older people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not with communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and an integral part of social perception.
Communication of stereotypes in the classroom: biased language use of German and Turkish adolescents
(2014)
Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon of describing stereotypes more abstractly. The LIB is the tendency to use language abstraction for in-group protective reasons. Results revealed an unmoderated LEB, whereas the LIB only occurred when foreigners were in the numerical majority, the classroom composition was perceived as a learning disadvantage, or the interethnic conflict frequency was high. These findings provide first evidence for the use of both LEB and LIB in an interethnic classroom setting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This study investigates the question of whether the processing of complex anaphors require more cognitive effort than the processing of NP-anaphors. Complex anaphors refer to abstract objects which are not introduced as a noun phrase and bring about the creation of a new discourse referent. This creation is called “complexation process”. We describe ERP findings which provide converging support for the assumption that the cognitive cost of this complexation process is higher than the cognitive cost of processing NP-anaphors.
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.
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 order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in the perceptual quality of a text-to-speech system. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of a symbolic representation which was either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic representation is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, post-lexical segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to derive an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
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.
The analysis which we present in this paper is part of an ethnographically based sociolinguistic study of various immigrant youth groups and their social style of communication. The study describes the wide variety of migrant groups and their socio-cultural orientation in relation to different migrant worlds as well as to different social worlds of the dominant German society. The development of a social style of communication is grounded in the groups’ socio-cultural orientation as well as in the perception of themselves in relation to relevant others. The main purpose of our study is to analyse the construction of the groups’ social identity in terms of their social style of communication.
The main point of this chapter is to demonstrate how a speaker’s concept of his/her professional role can be inferred from his/her perspectival work (perspective setting and relating different perspectives to one another) in professional encounters. Thereby some risks of complex perspectival work in discourse will become manifest which result - at one point in the talk - in perspectival inconsistency, revealing a deeply grounded social problem for the speaker. This will be examined in the framework of a rhetorical conversation analysis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
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.
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.
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.
MRI data of German vowels and consonants was acquired for 9 speakers. In this paper tongue contours for the vowels were analyzed using the three-mode factor analysis technique PARAFAC. After some difficulties, probably related to what constitutes an adequate speaker sample for this three-mode technique to work, a stable two-factor solution was extracted that explained about 90% of the variance. Factor 1 roughly captured the dimension low back to high front; Factor 2 that from mid front to high back. These factors are compared with earlier models based on PARAFAC. These analyses were based on midsagittal contours; the paper concludes by illustrating from coronal and axial sections how non-midline information could be incorporated into this approach.
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be derived from this more general semantic contribution. In addition we discuss some cross linguistic consequences of our analysis.
We provide a unified account of semantic effects observable in attested examples of the German applicative (‘be-’) construction, e.g. Rollstuhlfahrer Poul Sehachsen aus Kopenhagen will den 1997 erschienenen Wegweiser Handiguide Europa fortführen und zusammen mit Movado Berlin berollen (‘Wheelchair user Poul Schacksen from Copenhagen wants to continue the guide ‘Handiguide Europe’, which came out in 1997, and roll Berlin together with Movado.’). We argue that these effects do not come from lexico-semantic operations on ‘input’ verbs, but are instead the products of a reconciliation procedure in which the meaning of the verb is integrated into the event-structure schema denoted by the applicative construction. We analyze the applicative pattern as an argument-structure construction, in terms of Goldberg (1995). We contrast this approach with that of Brinkmann (1997), in which properties associated with the applicative pattern (e.g. omissibility of the theme argument, holistic interpretation of the goal argument, and planar construal of the location argument) are attributed to general semantico-pragmatic principles. We undermine the generality of the principles as stated, and assert that these properties are instead construction-particular. We further argue that the constructional account provides an elegant model of the valence-creation and valence-augmentation functions of the prefix. We describe the constructional semantics as prototype-based: diverse implications of fee-predications, including iteration, transfer, affectedness, intensity and saturation, derive via regular patterns of semantic extension from the topological concept of coverage.
Linguistic variation and linguistic virtuosity of young “Ghetto”-migrants in Mannheim, Germany
(2011)
In this paper, we provide an insight into the life world and social experiences of young Turkish migrants who are categorised by German society as “social problem cases”. Based on natural conversational data, we describe the communicative repertoire of one migrant adolescent and that of his friends. Our aims are (a) to isolate those linguistic features that convey the impression of “foreignness”, and stand out among other German speakers’ features, and (b) to analyse the variability in our informants’ discursive practices - i.e. code- or style-switching, as it is commonly referred to in the literature - in order to show how variation serves as a communicative resource. Our findings show that these adolescents’ remarkable linguistic proficiency and communicative competence contrast markedly to their low educational and professional status.
Complex common names such as Indian elephant or green tea denote a certain type of entity, viz. kinds. Moreover, those kinds are always subkinds of the kind denoted by their head noun. Establishing such subkinds is essentially the task of classifying modifiers that are a defining trait of endocentrically structured complex common names. Examining complex common names of different lexico-syntactic types(NN compounds, N+N syntagmas, NP/PP syntagmas, A+N syntagmas) and from different languages (particularly English, German and French) it can be shown that complex common names are subject to language- independent formal and semantic constraints. In particular, complex common names qualify as name-like expressions in that they tend to be deficient in terms of formal complexity and semantic compositionality.
The multiple gradations of German strong verbs are but manifestations of a rather uncomplicated system. There is a small number of ways to make up ablaut forms; these types of formation are identifiable in formal terms and, what is more, they have definite functions as morphological markers. Using classifications of stem forms according to quality, complexity and quantity of vowels, three types of operations involved in ablaut formation are identified. Ablaut always includes a change of quality type or a change of complexity type, and in addition it may include a change of quantity type. Ablaut forms are clearly distinguished as against bases (and against each other): their vocalism meets a defined standard of dissimilarity. On this basis, gradations are collected into inflectional classes that are defined in strictly synchronic terms. These classes continue the historical seven classes known from reference grammars. For the majority of strong verbs, membership in these classes (and thus ablaut) is predictable.
The paper gives an analysis of productively occurring dative constructions in German, attempting to unify what are known traditionally as Double Object and Experiencer Datives. The datives in question - cipients as we call them - are argued to be licensed under two conditions: One, predicates licensing cipients project a theme and a location argument internally; two, interpretation of the predication as a whole involves reference to two dissociated temporal intervals, or more generally, indexical truth intervals. It is argued that the location argument is needed because it provides the variable that is bound by the cipient argument - the variable in question ranges over superlocations of the location argument referent. Reference to two truth intervals is forced because interpreting the cipient structure involves evaluation of two propositional meanings that would contradict each other in a single context. The first propositional meaning is embedded in the predicate; it encodes that something is at a certain location (in quality space). The second propositional meaning is projected as a presupposition that corresponds just to the negation of the first one. The cipient, functioning as the logical subject of the construction, accommodates this second presuppositional meaning; this makes the construction as a whole interpretable. The analysis applies uniformly to what appear to be the two major contexts licensing cipients: ‘eventive’ and ‘foo-comparative’ predications, thereby accounting for some striking parallels between them.
As the nature of negative polarity items (NPIs) and their licensing contexts is still under much debate, a broad empirical basis is an important cornerstone to support further insights in this area of research. The work discussed in this paper is intended as a contribution to realizing this objective. The authors briefly introduce the phenomenon of NPIs and outline major theories about their licensing and also various licensing contexts before discussing our major topics: Firstly, a corpus-based retrieval method for NPI candidates is described that ranks the candidates according to their distributional dependence on the licensing contexts. Our method extracts single-word candidates and is extended to also capture multi-word candidates. The basic idea for automatically collecting NPI candidates from a large corpus is that an NPI behaves like a kind of collocate to its licensing contexts. Manual inspection and interpretation of the candidate lists identify the actual NPIs. Secondly, an online repository for NPIs and other items that show distributional idiosyncrasies is presented, which offers an empirical database for further (theoretical) research on these items in a sustainable way.
Antonymy is a relation of lexical opposition which is generally considered to involve (i) the presence of a scale along which a particular property may be graded, and hence both (ii) gradability of the corresponding lexical items and (iii) typical entailment relations. Like other types of lexical opposites, antonyms typically differ only minimally: while denoting opposing poles on the relevant dimension of difference, they are similar with respect to other components of meaning. This paper presents examples of antonymy from the domain of speech act verbs which either lack some of these typical attributes or show problems in the application of these. It discusses several different proposals for the classification of these atypical examples.
Automatic recognition of speech, thought, and writing representation in German narrative texts
(2013)
This article presents the main results of a project, which explored ways to recognize and classify a narrative feature—speech, thought, and writing representation (ST&WR)—automatically, using surface information and methods of computational linguistics. The task was to detect and distinguish four types—direct, free indirect, indirect, and reported ST&WR—in a corpus of manually annotated German narrative texts. Rule-based as well as machine-learning methods were tested and compared. The results were best for recognizing direct ST&WR (best F1 score: 0.87), followed by indirect (0.71), reported (0.58), and finally free indirect ST&WR (0.40). The rule-based approach worked best for ST&WR types with clear patterns, like indirect and marked direct ST&WR, and often gave the most accurate results. Machine learning was most successful for types without clear indicators, like free indirect ST&WR, and proved more stable. When looking at the percentage of ST&WR in a text, the results of machine-learning methods always correlated best with the results of manual annotation. Creating a union or intersection of the results of the two approaches did not lead to striking improvements. A stricter definition of ST&WR, which excluded borderline cases, made the task harder and led to worse results for both approaches.
This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analysis. An interactional episode involving mock stories to reveal and reproach an inadequate identity-claim of a co-participant is analysed both in terms of practices of membership categorization and positioning. It is concluded that membership categorization is a core element of positioning. Still, positioning goes beyond membership categorization in a) revealing biographical dimensions accomplished by narration and b) by uncovering implicit performative claims of identity, which are not established by categorization or description.
"Standard language" is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers. This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed "standard usage". It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project "Variation in Spoken German", Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of "standard usage" in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of "standard usage" inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.
In her overview, Margret Selting makes the case for the claim that dealing with authentic conversation necessarily lies at the heart of an interactionallinguistic approach to prosody (see Selting this volume, Section 3.3). However, collecting and transcribing corpora of authentic interaction is a time-consuming enterprise. This fact often severely restricts what the individual researcher is able to do in terms of analysis within the scope of his or her resources. Still, for dealing with many of the desiderata Margret Selting points out in Section 5 of her extensive overview, the use of larger corpora seems to be required. In this commenting paper, I want to argue that future progress in research on prosody in interaction will essentially rest on the availability and use of large public corpora. After reviewing arguments for and against the use of public corpora, I will discuss some upshots regarding corpus design and issues of transcription of public corpora.