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The first International Summer Institute for Interactional Linguistics (henceforth ISIIL) took place from July 18 to 23 at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The local organizers, Arnulf Deppermann and Alexandra Gubina, collaborated with five other facilitators in preparing this Summer Institute: Emma Betz (University of Waterloo), Elwys De Stefani (University of Heidelberg & KU Leuven), Barbara A. Fox (University of Colorado), Chase Raymond (University of Colorado) and Jörg Zinken (Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim). The goal of ISIIL was to bring together both early-career researchers and established scholars from the fields of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interactional Linguistics (IL) in order to foster the development of new skills for doing research using IL. The participants and organizers had diverse backgrounds, both in terms of their research interests (e.g., classroom interaction, second language acquisition, cross-linguistic comparison, particles, grammar-in-interaction) and institutional affiliations, with many participants from institutions from around Europe (i.e., Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland) as well as overseas (Canada, U.S.A., South Africa). Because of the compact nature of the Institute, the advanced topics covered, as well as the original research projects the participants would engage in, participation was limited to 24 participants, selected on the basis of their prior training and experience in CA/IL.
L’article intitulé «Traitement de l’information: Spinfo, HKI et humanités numériques - l’expérience de Cologne» présente l’histoire du développement des humanités numériques au sein de l’Université de Cologne. L'institutionnalisation des humanités numériques a commencé encore à l’époque où dans le monde germanophone le périmètre de la discipline était en train d’être défini par les travaux de quelques pionniers. Parmi eux, il convient de souligner le rôle d’Elisabeth Burr, active notamment à Tubingue, Duisbourg, Brême et Leipzig.L’article retrace le développement des humanités numériques à Cologne à partir de leurs débuts dans les années soixante du 20ème siècle, en passant par leur consolidation dans les années quatre-vingt-dix, jusqu’aux deux dernières décennies, quand Cologne est devenu un centre important de cette discipline. Le processus illustre comment une nouvelle discipline scientifique peut s’institutionnaliser au sein d’une université allemande. L’article décrit la perspective de deux domaines fondateurs: le traitement linguistique de l’information (en allemand: Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung, Spinfo) et le traitement historico-culturel de l’information (en allemand: Historisch Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung, HKI) et leur synthèse, qui a abouti en 2017 à la création de l’Institut des Humanités Numériques (Digital Humanities), qui aujourd’hui est - du point de vue interne - une composante de la Faculté de Philosophie de l’Université de Cologne et - du point de vue externe - une partie intégrante de la communauté internationale des humanités numériques.
This paper presents the IVK-Ler corpus, a longitudinal, annotated learner corpus of weekly writings produced by a group of 18 adolescents in a preparatory class. The corpus consists of 117 student texts collected between 2020 and 2021 and has a structure layered by student and text number. It includes metadata that enables researchers to analyze and track individual student progress in terms of syntactic competence and literacy. The annotation schema, manual and automatic annotation processes, and corpus representation are described in detail. The corpus currently includes target hypotheses and gold standard part-of-speech tags. Future work could include additional annotation layers for topological fields and dependency relations, as well as semantic and discourse annotations to make the corpus usable for tasks beyond syntactic evaluations.
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’).
Pivot
(2023)
The term pivot denotes an element of talk that can be understood to belong to two larger units of talk simultaneously, thereby joining them together and acting as a transitional link between them (Schegloff 1979: 275-276). Most commonly, the term is used to refer to lexico-syntactic elements that can be interpreted as ending one turn-constructional unit (TCU) while at the same time launching a next.
Retro-sequence
(2023)
Modular pivot
(2023)
A modular pivot is a type of turn-constructional pivot. It is built from syntactically entirely optional items (i.e. linguistic adjuncts) that can occur in both turn-initial and turn-final position and can therefore be used to patch a wide range of otherwise discrete turn-constructional units (TCUs) together (Clayman & Raymond 2015). A prime example of an item that lends itself to be deployed as a modular pivot are address terms (Clayman 2012).
Assessment
(2023)
Most broadly, an assessment is a type of social action by which an interactant expresses an evaluative stance towards someone or something (e.g., an object, an event, an action, an experience, a state of affairs, a place, a circumstance, etc.). The target of an assessment is typically called the ‘assessable’.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Mayan.
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 manual introduces a conversation analytically informed coding scheme for episodes involving the direct social sanctioning of problem behavior in informal social interaction which was developed in the project Norms, Rules, and Morality across Languages (NoRM-aL) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language. It outlines the background for its development, delimits the phenomena to which the coding scheme can be applied and provides instructions for its use.
The scheme asks for basic information about the recording and the participants involved in the episode, before taking stock of different features of the sanctioning episode as a whole. This is followed by sets of specific coding questions about the sanctioning move itself (such as its timing and composition) and the reaction it engenders. The coding enables researchers to get a bird’s eye view on recurrent features of such episodes in larger quantities of data and allows for comparisons across different languages and informal settings.
National Socialism, one could argue, was all about belonging: belonging to the ‘Volk’ or the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’, belonging to the ‘Aryan’ or ‘Non-Aryan race’, belonging to the National Socialist ‘movement’, and so on. These categories of belonging worked both inclusionary and exclusionary and they were constituted, proclaimed and enacted to a great part through language. What is more, they had to be performed through communicative acts. For the normative side of National Socialist propaganda and legislation, this seems rather obvious and one-directional. On the side of the general population, however, this entailed a mixture of communicative need to position oneself vis-à-vis National Socialism (mostly in affirmative ways), but also the urge to do so willingly. When we look at the language use of ‘ordinary people’ in different communicative situations and texts during National Socialism, we have to focus on these dimensions of discursive collusion, co-constitution and appropriation. People during National Socialism, such is our hypothesis, navigated through discourses of belonging and by that made them real and effective. Besides diaries, war letters and autobiographical writings, one way to grasp this phenomenon is to analyse petitions, i.e., letters of complaint and request sent in large numbers by ‘ordinary people’ to public authorities of the party and the state. As I will show by some examples, letter-writers tried to inscribe themselves within (what they took for) National Socialist discourses of belonging in order to legitimate their claims. By doing so, they co-constituted and co-created the discursive realm of National Socialism.
This article details the process of creating the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube-Sprache ('The Nottingham German YouTube Language Corpus' - or NottDeuYTSch corpus) and outlines potential research opportunities. The corpus was compiled to analyse the online language produced by young German-speakers and offers significant opportunity for in-depth research across several linguistic fields including lexis, morphology, syntax, orthography, and conversational and discursive analysis. The NottDeuYTSch corpus contains over 33 million words taken from approximately 3 million YouTube comments from videos published between 2008 to 2018 targeted at a young, German-speaking demographic and represent an authentic language snapshot of young German speakers. The corpus was proportionally sampled based on video category and year from a database of 112 popular German-speaking YouTube channels in the DACH region for optimal representativeness and balance and contains a considerable amount of associated metadata for each comment that enable further longitudinal cross-sectional analyses. The NottDeuYTSch corpus is available for analysis as part of the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo).
From June 26th to July 2nd 2023 the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA) took place in Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia – after a long pause due to the Covid-pandemic and for the first time in the southern hemisphere. About 350 participants from about 50 different countries attended the conference. This year’s ICCA came up with 36 panels and about 300 papers that were presented. Four plenary speakers have been invited and 24 pre-conference workshops took place. On Wednesday evening Ilana Mushin, in her role as conference chair, officially opened ICCA. The President of the International Society of Conversation Analysis (ISCA), Tanya Stivers, also welcomed all participants. To get acquainted with the indigenous culture of Queensland, the opening ceremony was enriched with a highly impressive dance performance by First Nations people. After the official inauguration the international community met at the Welcome Reception to look forward together to the days ahead with many opportunities for exchange and networking.
As it will become clear throughout this report, the research topics revolved around not only classic CA concepts, but also importantly concerned embodiment, which continued the line of past conferences (Dix 2019). Another aspect that has been highlighted was conflict and social norms. Due to personal capacities, we can only present a selection of presentations within the scope of this conference report. The selection was influenced by the personal interest of the authors and should not be understood as rating in any sense.
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.”
Recent typological studies have shown that socio-linguistic factors have a substantial effect on at least certain structures of language. However, we are still far from understanding how such factors should be operationalized and how they interact with other factors in shaping grammar. To address both questions, this study examines the influence of socio-linguistic factors on the number of dedicated conditional constructions in a sample of 374 languages. We test the number of speakers, the degree of multilingualism, the availability of a literature tradition, the use of writing, and the use of the language in the education system. At the same time, we control for genealogical, contact, and bibliographical biases. Our results suggest that the number of speakers is the most informative predictor. However, we find that the association between the number of speakers and the number of dedicated conditional constructions is much weaker than assumed, once genealogical and contact biases are controlled for.
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.
This paper has two distinct but interdependent goals. The empirical and analytical primary goal is to present a detailed overview of the patterns of (syntactico-semantic) argument structure and (morpho-syntactic) argument realization found with clause-embedding predicates in German. In particular, it will elucidate the observable relationships and dependencies between them, with a special focus on prepositional object clauses. The methodological secondary goal is to demonstrate the recently published ZAS Database of Clause-Embedding Predicates and illustrate its usefulness in approaching a concrete research agenda. The goals are aligned with each other because the data on patterns of argument structure and realization were collected using the database, and indeed the relevant questions could not have been investigated in such a thorough and efficient way without it. We will begin in Part 1 with an introduction to the database, its structure, and why and how it was created, before moving in Part 2 to the presentation of the data and analysis of argument structure and argument realization.
The landscape of digital lexical resources is often characterized by dedicated local portals and proprietary interfaces as primary access points for scholars and the interested public. In addition, legal and technical restrictions are potential issues that can make it difficult to efficiently query and use these valuable resources. As part of the research data consortium Text+, solutions for the storage and provision of digital language resources are being developed and provided in the context of the unified cross-domain German research data infrastructure NFDI. The specific topic of accessing lexical resources in a diverse and heterogenous landscape with a variety of participating institutions and established technical solutions is met with the development of the federated search and query framework LexFCS. The LexFCS extends the established CLARIN Federated Content Search that already allows accessing spatially distributed text corpora using a common specification of technical interfaces, data formats, and query languages. This paper describes the current state of development of the LexFCS, gives an insight into its technical details, and provides an outlook on its future development.
The present article proposes a syntactic and semantic analysis of assertive clauses that comprises their truth-conditional aspects and their speech act potential in communication. What is commonly called “illocutionary force” is differentiated into three structurally and functionally distinct layers: a judgement phrase, representing subjective epistemic and evidential attitudes; a commitment phrase, representing the social commitment related to assertions; and an act phrase, representing the relation to the common ground of the conversation. The article provides several pieces of evidence for this structure: from the interpretation and syntactic position of various classes of epistemic, evidential, affirmative and speech act-related operators, from clausal complements embedded by different types of predicates, from embedded root clauses, and from anaphora referring to different clausal projections. The syntactic assumptions are phrased within X-bar theory, and the semantic interpretation makes use of dynamic update of common ground, differentiating between informative and performative updates. The object language is German, with particular reference to verb final and verb second structure.
This paper first argues that the distinction between Propositions and States-of-Affairs is significant for understanding a number of linguistic contrasts, including contrasts between nominalizations, complement clauses, readings of modal infinitives, raising constructions, illocutions and moods, relative clauses, and nouns. Subsequently, the paper outlines a cognitive linguistic model of the distinction, according to which Propositions and States-of-Affairs differ in terms of construal. Both prompt Langackerian “processes”, but only Propositions prompt a construal of these processes as referential. The paper argues that this model has a number of advantages over a traditional, denotational understanding of the distinction.
Head alignment in German compounds: Implications for prosodic constituency and morphological parsing
(2022)
The notion of head alignment was introduced to account for the observation that in a word with multiple feet, one is more prominent than the others. In particular, this notion is meant to capture the characteristic edge-orientation of main stress by requiring the (left or right) word boundary and the respective (left or right) boundary of the head foot to coincide (McCarthy & Prince 1993). In the present paper the notion of head alignment will be applied to compounds, which are also characterized by the property that one of their members, located in a margin position, is most prominent.
The adequacy of an analysis in terms of head alignment hinges on the question of whether observable prominence peaks associate with the boundaries of independently motivated constituents. It will be argued that such links exist for German compounds, indicating reference to at least three distinct compound categories established on morphological grounds: copulative, phrasal, and a default class of “regular” compounds. The evidence for the relevant distinctions sheds light on morphological parsing, indicating that compound categories can be – and often are – determined by properties pertaining to their complete form, rather than by conditions affecting their (original) construction.
Lexical data API
(2022)
This API provides data from various dictionary resources of K Dictionaries across 50 languages. It is used by language service providers, app developers, and researchers, and returns data as JSON documents. A basic search result consists of an object containing partial lexical information on entries that match the search criteria, but further in-depth information is also available. Basic search parameters include the source resource, source language, and text (lemma), and the entries are returned as objects within the results array. It is possible to look for words with specific syntactic criteria, specifying the part of speech, grammatical number, gender and subcategorization, monosemous or polysemous entries. When searching by parameters, each entry result contains a unique entry ID, and each sense has its own unique sense ID. Using these IDs, it is possible to obtain more data – such as syntactic and semantic information, multiword expressions, examples of usage, translations, etc. – of a single entry or sense. The software demonstration includes a brief overview of the API with practical examples of its operation.
In the etymological information for a word in a dictionary, the first question to be answered is whether the word is a borrowing or the result of word formation. Here, we consider this question for internationalisms ending in -ation in German and in -ácia in Slovak. In German, -ation is a suffix that attaches to verbs in -ieren. For these verbs, it is in competition with -ung. In Slovak, -ácia is a suffix that attaches to bases of Latin or Greek origin. The corresponding verbs are often backformations. Most Slovak verbs also have a nominalization in -nie. In order to investigate to what extent the nouns in -ation or -ácia are borrowings or derived from the corresponding verbs in German and Slovak, we took a random sample of English nouns in -ation for which OED gives a corresponding verb. For this sample, we checked whether the cognate noun in -ation or -ácia is attested in standard dictionaries and in corpora. Then we did the same for the corresponding verbs and the nouns in -ung or -nie. Finally, we checked the frequency of these words in DeReKo for German and SNK for Slovak. On this basis, we found evidence that -ation in German has a slightly different status to -ácia in Slovak. This status affects the relationship to the corresponding verbs and to the nouns in -ung or -nie. Such generalizations are important as background information for specifying etymological information in dictionaries, especially for languages where first attestations dates are not readily available.
Action ascription can be understood from two broad perspectives. On one view, it refers to the ways in which actions constitute categories by which members make sense of their world, and forms a key foundation for holding others accountable for their conduct. On another view, it refers to the ways in which we accountably respond to the actions of others, thereby accomplishing sequential versions of meaningful social experience. In short, action ascription can be understood as matter of categorisation of prior actions or responding in ways that are sequentially fitted to prior actions, or both. In this chapter, we review different theoretical approaches to action ascription that have developed in the field, as well as the key constituents and resources of action ascription that have been identified in conversation analytic research, before going on to discuss how action ascription can itself be considered a form of social action.
Action ascription is an emergent process of mutual displays of understanding. Usually, the kind of action that is ascribed to a prior turn by a next action remains implicit. Sometimes, however, actions are overtly ascribed, for example, when speakers expose the use of strategies. This happens particularly in conflictual interaction, such as public debates or mediation talks. In these interactional settings, one of the speakers’ goals is to discredit their opponents in front of other participants or an overhearing audience. This chapter investigates different types of overt strategy ascriptions in a public mediation: exposing the opponent’s use of rhetorical devices, exposing the opponent’s use of false premises, and exposing that an opponent is telling only a half-truth. This chapter shows how speakers use ascriptions of acting strategically as accusations to disclose their opponents’ intentions and ‘truths’ that the opponents allegedly conceal and that are detrimental to their position.
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.
CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future.
The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU).
The normative layer of CLARIN is, alongside the organizational and technical layers, an essential part of the infrastructure. It consists of the regulatory framework (statutory law, case law, authoritative guidelines, etc.), the contractual framework (licenses, terms of service, etc.), and ethical norms. Navigating the normative layer requires expertise, experience, and qualified effort. In order to advise the Board of Directors, a standing committee dedicated to legal and ethical issues, the CLIC, was created. Since its establishment in 2012, the CLIC has made considerable efforts to provide not only the BoD but also the general public with information and guidance. It has published many articles (both in proceedings of CLARIN conferences and in its own White Paper Series) and developed several LegalTech tools. It also runs a Legal Information Platform, where accessible information on various issues affecting language resources can be found.
Dieses Kapitel lotet Möglichkeiten und Methoden aus, digitale Diskursanalysen nationalsozialistischer Quellentexte durchzuführen. Digitale Technologie wird dabei als heuristisches Werkzeug betrachtet, mit dem der Sprachgebrauch während des Nationalsozialismus im Rahmen größerer Quellenkorpora untersucht werden kann. In einem theoretischen Abschnitt wird grundsätzlich dafür plädiert, während des Analyseprozesses hermeneutisches Sinnverstehen mit breitflächigen korpusbasierten Abfragen zu kombinieren. Verdeutlicht wird diese Herangehensweise an zwei empirischen Beispielen: Anhand eines Korpus von Hitler- und Goebbels-Reden wird dem Auftauchen und der diskursiven Ausgestaltung des nationalsozialistischen Konzepts „Lebensraum“ nachgespürt. Schritt für Schritt wird offengelegt, welche Analysewege durch das Abfragen von Schlüsseltexten, Keywords, Konkordanzen und Kollokationen verfolgt werden können. Das zweite Beispiel zeigt anhand von Eingaben, die aus der Bevölkerung an Staats- und Parteiinstanzen gerichtet wurden, wie solche Quellen mithilfe eines digitalen Tools manuell annotiert werden können, um sie danach auf Musterhaftigkeiten im Sprachgebrauch hin auswerten zu können.
Standards in CLARIN
(2022)
This chapter looks at a fragment of the ongoing work of the CLARIN Standards Committee (CSC) on producing a shared set of recommendations on standards, formats, and related best practices supported by the CLARIN infrastructure and its participating centres. What might at first glance seem to be a straightforward goal has over the years proven to be rather complex, reflecting the robustness and heterogeneity of the emerging distributed digital research infrastructure and the various disciplines and research traditions of the language-based humanities that it serves and represents, and therefore part of the chapter reviews the various initiatives and proposals that strove to produce helpful standards-related guidance. The focus turns next to a subtask initiated in late 2019, its scope narrowed to one of the core activities and responsibilities of CLARIN backbone centres, namely the provision of data deposition services. Centres are obligated to publish their recom-mendations concerning the repertoire of data formats that are best suited for their research profiles. We look at how this requirement has been met by the particular centres and suggest that having centres maintain their information in the Standards Information System (SIS) is the way to improve on the current state of affairs.
This chapter will present lessons learned from CLARIN-D, the German CLARIN national consortium. Members of the CLARIN-D communities and of the CLARIN-D consortium have been engaged in innovative, data-driven, and community-based research, using language resources and tools in the humanities and neigh-bouring disciplines. We will present different use cases and users’ stories that demonstrate the innovative research potential of large digital corpora and lexical resources for the study of language change and variation, for language documentation, for literary studies, and for the social sciences. We will emphasize the added value of making language resources and tools available in the CLARIN distributed research infrastructure and will discuss legal and ethical issues that need to be addressed in the use of such an infrastructure. Innovative technical solutions for accessing digital materials still under copyright and for data mining such materials will be presented. We will outline the need for close interaction with communities of interest in the areas of curriculum development, data management, and training the next generation of digital humanities scholars. The importance of community-supported standards for encoding language resources and the practice of community-based quality control for digital research data will be presented as a crucial step toward the provisioning of high quality research data. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of impor-tant directions for innovative research and for supporting infrastructure development over the next decade and beyond.
CLARIN stands for “Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure”. In 2012 CLARIN ERIC was established as a legal entity with the mission to create and maintain a digital infrastructure to support the sharing, use, and sustainability of language data (in written, spoken, or multimodal form) available through repositories from all over Europe, in support of research in the humanities and social sciences and beyond. Since 2016 CLARIN has had the status of Landmark research infrastructure and currently it provides easy and sustainable access to digital language data and also offers advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse, or combine such datasets, wherever they are located. This is enabled through a networked federation of centres: language data repositories, service centres, and knowledge centres with single sign-on access for all members of the academic community in all participating countries. In addition, CLARIN offers open access facilities for other interested communities of use, both inside and outside of academia. Tools and data from different centres are interoperable, so that data collections can be combined and tools from different sources can be chained to perform operations at different levels of complexity. The strategic agenda adopted by CLARIN and the activities undertaken are rooted in a strong commitment to the Open Science paradigm and the FAIR data principles. This also enables CLARIN to express its added value for the European Research Area and to act as a key driver of innovation and contributor to the increasing number of industry programmes running on data-driven processes and the digitalization of society at large.
Enabling appropriate access to linguistic research data, both for many researchers and for innovative research applications, is a challenging task. In this chapter, we describe how we address this challenge in the context of the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and the corpus analysis platform KorAP. The core of our approach, which is based on and tightly integrated into the CLARIN infrastructure, is to offer access at different levels. The graduated access levels make it possible to find a low-loss compromise between the possibilities opened up and the costs incurred by users and providers for each individual use case, so that, viewed over many applications, the ratio between effort and results achieved can be effectively optimized. We also report on experiences with the current state of this approach.
Preface
(2022)
The aim of this work is to describe criteria used in the process of inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries of Spanish within the framework of pandemic instability. Our starting point will be data obtained by the Antenas Neológicas Network (https://www.upf.edu/web/antenas), whose representation in three different lexicographic tools will be analyzed with the purpose of identifying problems in the methodology used to dictionarize – that is, how and what words were selected to be included in dictionaries and how they were represented in their entries – neologisms during the COVID-19 pandemic (sources and corpora of analysis, selection criteria, types of definition, among other aspects). Two of them are monolingual and COVID-19 lexical units were included as part of their updates: the Antenario, a dictionary of neologisms of Spanish varieties, and the Diccionario de la Lengua Española [DLE], a dictionary of general Spanish, published by the Real Academia Española [RAE], Spanish Royal Academy). The other is a bilingual unidirectional English-Spanish dictionary first published as a glossary, Diccionario de COVID-19 EN-ES [TREMEDICA], entirely made up of neological and non-neological lexical units related to the virus and the pandemic. Thus, the target lexis was either included in existing works or makes up the whole of a new tool located in a portal together with other lexicographic tools. Unlike other collections of COVID-19 vocabulary that kept cropping up as the pandemic unfolded, all three have been designed and written according to well-established lexicographic practices.
Our working hypothesis is that the need to record and define words which were recently created impacts the criteria for inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries about Spanish, including a certain degree of overlap of some features which are traditionally thought to be specific to each type of dictionary.
The syntagma gel hidroalcohólico ‘hydroalcoholic gel’ or the noun hidroalcohol ‘hydroalcohol’ cannot be found in Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE) of the Real Academia Española (‘Royal Spanish Academy’) or other general reference dictionaries of the Spanish language. This is so despite the fact that, for well over a year and to this very day, we have not been able to do anything without first sanitising our hands with this product. It is one of the many neologisms that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought us, and these have become commonly used words that dictionaries should consider as candidates for future updates.
By looking at the dictionarisability of these neologisms, in this work we try to set their boundaries on the continuum along which they fall. “Dictionarisability” means, in our context, the greater or lesser interest of these unities regarding the updating of general language dictionaries. At both ends of this continuum, there are surprising nonce words, as well as neologisms that have recently lost their status as such because they have now been incorporated into the dictionary. To identify different groups on the continuum of pandemic neologisms, we take into account the criteria proposed in the current literature and, by so doing, we are able to assess the extent to which they are discriminatory. This will allow us to address the neological process and to reflect on the various stages of it, from the time a neologism is born until the moment it ceases to be one because it has been dictionarised. Before that, however, we present the framework of our study and refer to the mechanisms available for detecting neologisms in general and pandemic neologisms in particular.
The present paper examines the usage of 341 COVID-19 neologisms which appeared in South Korea over a span of eighteen months (from December 2019 to May 2021) and were extracted from a corpus composed of COVID-19-related news articles and comments, the COVID-19 Corpus, in order to address the following research questions: 1) How do the 341 COVID-19 neologisms extracted rank in news articles and comments respectively?, 2) What usage trends do neologisms designating the disease and other high-frequency neologisms show in news articles and comments respectively?, 3) What characteristic differences do comments as a non-expert and subjective language resource and news articles as an expert and objective language resource show and what value may each genre add to the lexicographic description of neologisms?
Between January 2020 and July 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary to enable communication under the new conditions that evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic. Medical and epidemiological vocabulary was integrated into the general language to a large extent. Suddenly, some lexemes from general language were used with very high frequency, while other words were used less often than before. These processes of language change can be studied in various ways, for example, in corpus linguistics with respect to the frequency or emergence of certain words in certain types of texts (e.g. press releases vs. posts in social media), in critical discourse analysis with respect to certain participants of the discourse (e.g. vocabulary of Covid-19 pandemic deniers), or in conversation analysis (e.g. with respect to new verbal interactions in greetings and farewells). The rapid expansion of vocabulary has notably affected also lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics.
This article will focus on the ways in which a German neologism dictionary project has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Both challenges and advantages arise from lexicographic practice “at the pulse of time”. The Neologismenwörterbuch is presented as an example that lends itself well to such a discussion because its subject (neologisms) is characterized as new, innovative, and constantly changing.
Since the beginning of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has dominated public discourse and introduced a wealth of words and expressions to the general vocabulary of English and other world languages. The lexical adaptation necessitated by this global health crisis has been unprecedented in speed and scope, and in response, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has continually revised its coverage, publishing special updates of Covid-19-related words in 2020 outside of its usual quarterly publication cycle. This article describes how OED lexicographers have analysed language corpora and other text databases to monitor the development of pandemic-related words and provide a linguistic and historical context to their usage.
This volume of Lexicographica : Series Maior focuses on lexicographic neology and neological lexicography concerning COVID-19 neologisms, featuring papers originally presented at the third Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neology (GWLN 2021).
The thirteen papers in this volume focus on ten languages: one Altaic (Korean), one Finno-Ugric (Hungarian), two Germanic (English and German), four Romance (French, Italian, [Brazilian and European] Portuguese and [Pan-American and European] Spanish), and one Slavic (Croatian), as well as the Sign Language of New Zealand. Specialized dictionaries of neologisms are discussed as well as general language ones, monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexical resources, print and electronic dictionaries. Questions regarding terminology as well as general language and standard and norm regarding COVID-19 neologisms are raised and different methods of detecting candidates in media corpora, as well as by user contributions, are discussed.
While the role of intentions in the constitution of actions gives rise to complex and heavily controversial questions, it appears to be indisputable that action ascription in interaction mostly does without any overt ascription of intention. Yet, sometimes participants explicitly ascribe intentions to their interlocutors in order to make sense of their prior actions. The chapter examines intention ascriptions in response to a partner’s adjacent prior turn using the German modal verb construction willst du/wollen Sie (do you want). The analysis focuses on the aspect of the prior action the intention ascription addresses (action type, projected next action, motive etc.), the action the intention ascription performs itself, and the next action they make relevant from the prior speaker. It was found that intention ascriptions are used to clarify and intersubjectively ground the meaning of the prior turn, which seems otherwise underspecified, ambiguous or puzzling. Yet, they are also used to adumbrate criticism, e.g., that the prior turn projects a course of future actions which is considered to be inadequate, or to expose a concealed, problematic allegedly “real” meaning of the prior turn.
This paper arises within the current communication urgency experienced throughout the pandemic. From its onset, several new lexical units have permeated the overall media discourse, as well as social media and other channels. These units convey information to the public regarding the ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ namely COVID-19. In addition to its worldwide impact healthwise, the pandemic generates noteworthy influence in the linguistic landscape, and as a result, a significant number of neologisms have emerged. Within the scope of our ongoing research, we identify the neologisms in European Portuguese that are related to the term COVID-19 via form or meaning. However, not all the new lexical units identified in our corpus containing COVID-19 in its formation can unequivocally be regarded as neoterms (terminological neologisms). Accordingly, this article aims not only to reflect on the distinction between neologism and neoterm but also to explore the determinologisation process that several of these new lexical units experience.
To leverage the Deaf community’s increasing online presence, the web-based platform NZSL Share was launched in March 2020 to crowdsource new and previously undocumented signs, and to encourage community validation of these signs. The platform allows users to upload sign videos, comment on videos and agree or disagree with (often new) signs being proposed. It is managed by the research team that maintains the ODNZSL, which includes the authors. NZSL Share is being used by individuals as well as Deaf community groups to record and share signs of a specialist nature (e.g., school curriculum signs). NZSL Share now has close to 50 actively contributing members. Its launch coincided with the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak in New Zealand and so some of the first signs contributed were COVID-19-related, which are the focus of this paper.
In the present contribution, I investigate if and how the English and French editions of the Wiktionary collaborative dictionary can be used as a corpus for real time neology watch. This option is envisaged as a stopgap, when no satisfactory corpus is available. Wiktionary can also prove useful in addition to standard corpus analysis, to minimize the risk of overlooking new coinages and new senses. Since the collaborative dictionary’s quest for exhaustiveness makes the manual inspection of the new additions unreasonable (more than 31,000 English lemmas and 11,000 French lemmas entered the nomenclature in 2020), identifying the possibly relevant headwords is an issue. The solution proposed here is to use Wiktionary revision history to detect the (new or existing) entries that received the greatest number of modifications. The underlying hypothesis is that the most heavily edited pages can help identify the vocabulary related to “hot topics”, assuming that, in 2020, the pandemic-related vocabulary ranks high. I used two measures introduced by Lih (2004), whose aim was to estimate the quality of Wikipedia articles: the so-called rigour (number of edits per page) and diversity (number of unique contributors per page). In the present study, I propose to adapt the rigour and diversity metrics to Wiktionary in order to identify the pages that generated a particular stir, rather than to estimate the quality of the articles. I do not subscribe to the idea that – in Wiktionary – more revisions necessarily produce quality articles (more revisions often produce complete articles). I therefore adopt Lih’s notion of diversity to refer to the number of distinct contributors, but leave out the name rigour when it comes to the number of revisions. Wolfer and Müller-Spitzer (2016) used the two metrics to describe the dynamics of the German and English editions of Wiktionary. One of their findings was that the number of edits per page is correlated with corpus word frequencies. The variation in number of page edits should therefore reflect to some extent the variation of corpus word frequencies. Renouf (2013) established a relationship between the fluctuation of word frequencies in a diachronic corpus and various neological processes. In particular, she illustrated how specific events generate sudden frequency spikes for words previously unseen in the corpus. For instance, Eyjafjallajökull, the – existing – name of an Icelandic glacier, appeared in the corpus when the underlying volcano erupted in 2010 and disrupted air traffic in Europe. In order to check if the same phenomenon occurs when using Wiktionary edits instead of corpus frequencies, I manually annotated the most frequently revised entries (according to various ranking scores) with the binary tag: “related to Covid-19” (yes/no). The annotations were then used to test the ability of various configurations to detect relevant headwords from the English and French Wiktionary, namely Covid-19 neologisms and related existing words that deserve updates.
While adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world started to talk about the “new normal” way of life, and they conveyed feelings and thoughts on the topic through social networks and traditional communication channels resorting to a set of specific linguistic strategies, such as metaphors and neologisms. The vocabulary in different domains and in everyday speech was expanded to accommodate a complex social, cultural, and professional phenomenon of changes. Therefore, this new life gave birth to a new language – the “coronaspeak”. According to Thorne (2020), the “coronaspeak” has three stages: first, it emerged in the way medical aspects were communicated in everyday language; secondly, it occurred when speakers verbalized the experiences they had undergone and “invented their own terms”; finally, this “new” way of speaking emerged in the government and authorities’ jargon, to ensure that the new rules and policies were understood, and that population adopted socially responsible behaviours.
In this paper, we will focus on the second stage, because we intend to take stock of how speakers communicate and verbalize this new way of living, particularly on social networks, for example. Alongside, we are interested in the context in which the neologism – be it a new word, a new meaning, or a new use – emerged, is used, and understood, through the observation of the occurrence of the new word(s) either on social networks or through dissemination texts (press) to confront it with the ones that Portuguese digital dictionaries have attested so far. Different criteria regarding the insertion of new units, the inclusion date, and the lexicographic description of the entries in the dictionaries will be debated.
This paper focuses on standardological and lexicographical aspects of Coronavirus-related neologisms in Croatian. The presented results are based on corpus analysis. The initial corpus for this analysis consists of terms collected for the Glossary of Coronavirus. This corpus has been supplemented by terms we collected on the Internet and from the media. The General Croatian corpora: Croatian Web Corpus – hrWaC (cf. Ljubešić/Klubička 2016) and Croatian Language Repository (cf. Brozović Rončević/Ćavar 2008: 173–186) were also used, but since they do not include neologisms that entered the language after 2013, they could be used only to check terms in the language before that time. From October 2021, a specialized Corona corpus compiled by Štrkalj Despot and Ostroški Anić (2021) became publicly available on request. The data from these corpora are analyzed by Sketch Engine (cf. Kilgarriff et al. 2004: 105–116), a corpus query system loaded with the corpora, enabling the display of lexeme context through concordances and (differential) word sketches and the extraction of keywords (terms) and N-grams. The most common collocations are sorted into syntactic categories. For English equivalents, in addition to the sources found on the Internet, enTenTen2020 corpus was consulted. In the second part of the paper, we analyze and compare the presentation of Coronavirus terminology in the descriptive Glossary of Coronavirus and the normative Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnik.
This article has a double objective. First, it seeks to offer an initial approach, with critical notes, to the group of pandemic-related neologisms incorporated into the DLE in the year 2020. To that end, the trends in the academic dictionary’s incorporation of neologisms will be reviewed, focusing in particular on specialized language neologisms. Second, the article presents the design of a research study that allows for the examination of any new words beginning with CORONA- added to the DLE and the DHLE. An assessment will be made of the particularities of the DLE and the DHLE regarding the incorporation of the new words, as well as the degree of correspondence or complementarity between the two works in this sense. This will show the complementary roles that the DLE and the DHLE are currently acquiring. In this sense, the new additions open up a debate on the treatment of neologisms in academic lexicography, in a particularly unique scenario.
This paper presents the main issues connected with the creation of a trilingual Hungarian-Italian-English dictionary of the COVID-19 pandemic using Lexonomy. My aim is not only to create a coronacorpus (in Hungarian, I propose my own corona-neologism or ‘coroneologism’: koronakorpusz) and a dictionary of equivalents, but also to understand how the different waves and phases of the COVID-19 pandemic are changing the Hungarian language, detect the Corona-, COVID-, pandemic-, virus-, mask-, quarantine-, and vaccine-related neologisms, and offer an overview of the most frequent or linguistically interesting Hungarian neologisms and multiword units related to COVID-19.
Within the scope of the project "Study and dissemination of COVID-19 terminology", the study reported here aims to detect, analyse and discuss the characteristics of COVID-19 terminology, in particular the role of the adjective novo [new] in this terminology, the high recurrence of terms in the plural and the resemantization of some of the terminological units used. The present paper also discusses how these characteristics influenced the choices that have guided the creation of the proposed dictionary. This paper presents, therefore, the results of the analyses of these aspects, starting with a discussion of the relation between terminology and neology and arriving at the characteristic aspects of the macrostructural and microstructural choices about which some considerations were made.
This volume brings together contributions by international experts reflecting on Covid19-related neologisms and their lexicographic processing and representation. The papers analyze new words, new meanings of existing words, and new multiword units, where they come from, how they are transmitted (or differ) across languages, and how their use and meaning are reflected in dictionaries of all sorts. Recent trends in as many as ten languages are considered, including general and specialized language, monolingual as well as bilingual and printed as well as online dictionaries.
Words originating from shortening, including acronyms and clippings, constitute a treasure trove of insight into phonological grammar. In particular, they serve as an ideal testing ground for Optimality Theory (OT) and its view of grammar as an interaction of markedness constraints, which express (dis-) preferences regarding phonological structure in output forms, and faithfulness constraints, which require output forms to correspond to input structure (Prince and Smolensky 1993). This is because shortenings are characterised by a sharply diminished role of faithfulness, allowing for markedness constraints to make their force felt (“The Emergence of the Unmarked”). This article aims to demonstrate the heuristic value of shortening data for testing the OT model and for shedding light on various controversies in German phonology. A particular concern is to draw attention to the need for properly sorting the shortening data, to identify influences on phonological structure due to internal domain boundaries or to special correspondence effects potentially obscuring the view on the maximally unmarked patterns.
Every Regional Dossier begins with an introduction about the region in question, followed by six chapters that each deal with a specific level of the education system (e.g. primary education). Chapters 8 and 9 cover the main lines of research into education of the minority language under discussion, and the prospects for the minority language in general and in education in particular, respectively. Chapter 10 provides a summary of statistics. Lists of (legal) references and useful addresses regarding the minority language are given at the end of the dossier.
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.
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.
Control, typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate, has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC), Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena, there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion, the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control, with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses, cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause, or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control, split control, or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages, this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject, the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller, thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.
Digital research infrastructures can be divided into four categories: large equipment, IT infrastructure, social infrastructure, and information infrastructure. Modern research institutions often employ both IT infrastructure and information infrastructure, such as databases or large-scale research data. In addition, information infrastructure depends to some extent on IT infrastructure. In this paper, we discuss the IT, information, and legal infrastructure issues that research institutions face.
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.
We present zu-excessive structures like Otto ist zu schwer ‘Otto is too heavy’ as instantiations of comparatives that have been reflexivized. Comparatives express asymmetric relations between distinguished referents, but reflexivization identifies argument places (or reduces two argument places to one), leading to a Symmetrie relation. Reflexivization is thus in conflict with the asymmetry property of comparatives and leads to an intermediate semantic representation that is con- tradictory. Two experiments substantiate that zu-excessives share this property with privative adjective and animal-for-statue constructions that similarly give rise to contradictory semantics. The processing of any of the constructions mentioned yields a positivity in the event-related-potential signature characteristic of concep- tual reorganization; however, the observed positivity occurs earlier in the case of zu-excessives than in the other cases. We propose this difference is due to zu signalling the mandatory preparation for an ensuing repair rather than reflecting the repair Operation itself that involves manipulating the Standard of comparison, coded elsewhere in the String (if at all).
This article sketches the development of paronym dictionaries in German. These dictionaries document and describe commonly confused words which cause uncertainties because they are similar in sound, spelling and/or meaning (e.g. effektiv/effizient, sportlich/sportiv). First, an overview of existing reference guides is provided, covering different traditions. Numerous lemma lists have been collected for pedagogical purposes and there has always been an interest in the lexicological treatment of paronyms. However, only a handful of dictionaries covering commonly confused pairs and a small number of genuine paronym dictionaries have ever been compiled. I will focus on lexicographic endeavours, including Wustmann (1891), Müller (1973) and Pollmann and Wolk (2001). Secondly, I will shed light on the differences in descriptions in these dictionaries. This includes how prescriptive approaches have been replaced over time by empirical descriptive accounts and how dictionaries have moved away from restricted, static hardback editions towards dynamic e-dictionaries. Finally, an e-dictionary, “Paronyme — Dynamisch im Kontrast”, is presented with contrastive and flexible two-level consultation views. Its three key elements are its corpus-based foundation, the implementation of meta-lexicographic requirements and a consideration of users’ interests. This dictionary has implemented a user-friendly and dynamic interface and it records conventionalized patterns and preferences in authentic communication.
This paper deals with a specific type of lexeme, namely binary preposition-noun combinations containing temporal references like am Ende [at (the) end] or für Sekunden [for seconds]. The main characteristic of these combinations is the recurrent internal zero gap. Despite the fact that the omission of the determiner can often be explained by grammatical rules, the zero gaps indicate a higher degree of lexicalization. Therefore, we interpret these expressions as minimal phraseological units with holistic meanings and functions. The corpusdriven exploration of typical context patterns (e.g. using collocation profiles and the lexpan slot filler analysis) shows that a) even such minimal expressions are based on semi-abstract schemes and b) temporal expressions can also fulfill modal or discursive functions, usually with fuzzy borders and overlapping structures. In the case of modalization or pragmatization one can regard such PNs as distinct lexicon entries.
In our paper, we present a case study on the quality of concept relations in the manually developed terminological resource of grammis, an information system on German grammar. We assess a SKOS representation of the resource using the tool qSKOS, create a typology of the issues identified by the tool, and conduct a qualitative analysis of selected cases. We identify and discuss aspects that can motivate quality issues and uncover that ill-formed relations are frequently indicative of deeper issues in the data model. Finally, we outline how these findings can inform improvements in our resource’s data model, discussing implications for the machine readability of terminological data.
For a long time, the lecture dominated performatively presented scientific communication. Given academic traditions, it is possible to make a connection between the lecture and classical rhetoric, a highly differentiated instrument of analysis. The tradition of the lecture has been perpetuated in the presentation of research results, first in the use of transparencies and subsequently through computer-based projections. Yet the use of media technology has also allowed new practices to emerge, including mediation practices hitherto neglected in the theory of rhetoric.
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 article examines the language contact situation as well as the language attitudes of the Caucasian Germans, descendants of German-born inhabitants of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union who emigrated in 1816/17 to areas of Transcaucasia. After deportations and migrations, the group of Caucasian Germans now consists of those who have since emigrated to Germany and those who still live in the South Caucasus. It’s the first time that sociolinguistic methods have been used to record data from the generation who experienced living in the South Caucasus and in Germany as well as from two succeeding generations. Initial results will be presented below with a focus on the language contact constellations of German varieties as well as on consequences of language contact and language repression, which both affect language attitudes.
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.
This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Polish use when recruiting assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Polish, and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of Polish with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.
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.
Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions.
EFNIL, the European Federation of National Institutions for Language, promotes the standard languages and the linguistic diversity of the European countries as an essential characteristic of their cultural diversity and wealth. The 17th annual conference of EFNIL in Tallinn dealt with the relation between language and economy.
• Language politics often have economic intentions, the language use of the individual is embedded in economic conditions, languages seem to differ in their economic value. In recent years, economists and sociolinguists have developed models of describing these interdependencies.
• The interaction in multilingual settings needs professional handling. There are traditional instances such as language teaching or translation and new professional fields of the digital age such as multilingual databases. Lots of economic needs and opportunities appear in this field.
• Digitization and societal diversity are two elements leading to more successful interaction, assisted by the use of automatic everyday translation, the development of plain language etc.
This volume presents an extensive overview of the interplay of language and economy.
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.
Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other.
The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar.
The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.
Research on language politics, policy, and planning is of importance to contact linguistics, since political relations between groups of language users, the way in which the use of language(s) is organized, and how language issues are politicized fundamentally shape the political and social conditions under which language varieties are in contact. This chapter first provides a short sketch of how language policy, planning, and politics have so far been conceptualized. Major subfields will be discussed, and then relevant actors and factors in these processes will be introduced. At the end, these aspects will be discussed from a contact linguistic perspective and summarized in a graphic visualization.
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 investigates differences in language regards in Latvia and Estonia. Based on the results of a survey that had about 1000 respondents in each country, it analyses general views on languages and language-learning motivation, as well as specific regards of Estonian, Latvian, Russian, English, German and other languages. The results show that languages and language learning are generally important for the respondents; language-learning motivation is overwhelmingly instrumental. Besides the obvious value of the titular languages of each country, English and Russian are to differing degrees considered of importance for professional and leisure purposes, ahead of German, Finnish (in Estonia) and French, whereas other languages are of little relevance. In more emotionally related categories, differences are more salient. L1-speakers of Russian differ in their views from L1-speakers of Estonian and Latvian, indicating that the linguistic acculturation of society in Estonia tends to be more monodirectional towards Estonian, whereas in Latvia there are more bidirectional tendencies as both Latvian and Russian L1-speakers regard each other’s languages as at least moderately relevant.
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.
Theories of lexical decomposition assume that lexical meanings are complex. This complexity is expressed in structured meaning representations that usually consist of predicates, arguments, operators, and other elements of propositional and predicate logic. Lexical decomposition has been used to explain phenomena such as argument linking, selectional restrictions, lexical-semantic relations, scope ambiguities, and the inference behavior of lexical items. The article sketches the early theoretical development from noun-oriented semantic feature theories to verb-oriented complex decompositions. It also deals with a number of theoretical issues, including the controversy between decompositional and atomistic approaches to meaning, the search for semantic primitives, the function of decompositions as definitions, problems concerning the interpretability of decompositions, and the debate about the cognitive status of decompositions.
Starting from early approaches within Generative Grammar in the late 1960s, the article describes and discusses the development of different theoretical frameworks of lexical decomposition of verbs. It presents the major subsequent conceptions of lexical decompositions, namely, Dowty’s approach to lexical decomposition within Montague Semantics, Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics, the LCS decompositions emerging from the MIT Lexicon Project, Pustejovsky’s Event Structure Theory, Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wunderlich’s Lexical Decompositional Grammar, Hale and Kayser’s Lexical Relational Structures, and Distributed Morphology. For each of these approaches, (i) it sketches their origins and motivation, (ii) it describes the general structure of decompositions and their location within the theory, (iii) it explores their explanative value for major phenomena of verb semantics and syntax, (iv) and it briefly evaluates the impact of the theory. Referring to discussions in article 7 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Engelberg) Lexical decomposition, a number of theoretical topics are taken up throughout the paper concerning the interpretation of decompositions, the basic inventory of decompositional predicates, the location of decompositions on the different levels of linguistic representation (syntactic, semantic, conceptual), and the role they play for the interfaces between these levels.
Defining groups and affiliating the self and the other with specific social categories is an important part of constructing a colonial conceptualization of societies. Many written documents from the colonial period attest to this practice. The current paper focuses on missionaries’ ways of positioning themselves and others within the colonial context. The German speaking Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft (RMG, Rhenish Mission Society) established mission stations in the Astrolabe Bay area of New Guinea, an area that was under German domination between 1884 and 1914. The paper analyzes how RMG missionaries, by means of language, construct, define, and position different population groups, and it investigates what patterns emerge from these language practices.
Modern theoretical linguistics lives by the insight that the meanings of complex expressions derive from the meanings of their parts and the way these are composed. However, the currently dominating theories of the syntax-semantics interface hastily relegate important aspects of meaning which cannot readily be aligned with visible structure to empty projecting heads non-reductively (mainstream Generative Grammar) or to the syntactic construction holistically (Construction Grammar). This book develops an alternative, compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal and comparative meanings of a range of productive constructions of which pseudorefl exive, excessive and directional complement constructions take center stage. Accordingly, a contradiction-inducing hence semantically problematic part of literally coded meaning is locally ignored and systematically realized „expatriately“ with respect to parts of structure that achieve the indexical anchoring of propositional contents in terms of times, worlds and standards of comparison, thus yielding the observed hidden meanings.