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This conference booklet provides information about 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10) that took place in Mannheim, Germany, from 18 to 21 July 2023. It contains
– a description of the conference aims,
– details on the conference venue,
– information on committees,
– the conference program,
– the abstracts of the keynotes, oral and poster presentations, and
– an author index.
This paper focusss on the first Slavonic-Romanian lexicons, compiled in the second half of the 17th century and their use(rs), proposing a method of investigating the manner in which lexical information available in the above corpus relates, if at all, to the vocabulary of texts from the same period. We chose to investigate their relation to an anonymous Old Testament translation made from Church Slavonic, also from the second half of the 17th century, which was supposed to be produced in the same geographical area, in the same Church Slavonic school or even by the same author as the lexicons. After applying a lemmatizer on both the Biblical text (Books of Genesis and Daniel) and the Romanian material from the lexicons, we analyse the results and double the statistical analysis with a series of case studies, focusing on some common lexemes that might be an indicator of the relatedness of the texts. Even if the analysis points out that the lexicons might not have been compiled as a tool for the translation of religious texts, it proves to be a useful method that reveals interesting data and provides the basis for more extensive approaches.
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.
The paper presents the process of developing the AirFrame database, a specialized lexical resource in which aviation terminology is defined in the form of semantic frames, following the methodology of the Berkeley FrameNet (FN). First, the structure of the database is presented, and then the methodology applied in developing and populating the database is described. The link between specialized aviation frames and general language semantic frames, of which frames defining entities, processes, attributes and events are particularly relevant, is discussed on the example of the semantic frame of Flight and its related frames. The paper ends with discussing possibilities of using AirFrame as a model for further developing resources in which general and specialized knowledge are linked.
Almanca tuhfe / Deutsches Geschenk (1916) oder: Wie schreibt man deutsch mit arabischen Buchstaben?
(2022)
Versified dictionaries are bilingual/multilingual glossaries written in verse form to teach essential words in any foreign language. In Islamic culture, versified dictionaries were produced to teach the Arabic language to the young generations of Muslim communities not native in Arabic. In the course of time, many bilingual/multilingual versified dictionaries were written in different languages throughout the Islamic world. The focus of this study is on the Turkish-German versified dictionary titled Almanca Tuhfe / Deutsches Geschenk [German Gift], published by Dr. Sherefeddin Pasha in Istanbul in 1916. This dictionary is the only dictionary in verse ever written combining these two languages. Moreover the dictionary is one of the few texts containing German words written in Arabic letters (applying Ottoman spelling conventions). The study concentrates on the way German words are spelled and tries to find out, whether Sherefeddin Pasha applied something like fixed rules to write the German lexemes.
Wortgeschichte digital (Digital Word History) is an emerging historical dictionary of the German language that focuses on describing semantic shifts from about 1600 through today. This article provides deeper insight into the dictionary’s “cross-reference clusters,” one of its software tools that performs visualization of its reference network. Hence, the clusters are a part of the project’s macrostructure. They serve as both a means for users to find entries of interest and a tool to elucidate relations among dictionary entries. Rather than delve into technical aspects, this article focuses on the applied logics of the software and discusses the approach in light of the dictionary’s microstructure. The article concludes with some considerations about the clusters’ advantages and limitations.
The paper presents the results of a survey on lexicographic practices and lexicographers’ needs across Europe that was conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project European Lexicographic Infrastructure (ELEXIS) among the observer institutions of the project. The survey is a revised and upgraded version of the survey which was originally conducted among ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in 2018 (Kallas et al. 2019a). The main goal of this new survey was to complement the data from the ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in order to get a more complete picture of lexicographic practices both for born-digital and retro-digitised resources in Europe. The results offer a detailed insight into many aspects of the lexicographic process at European institutions, such as funding, training, staff, lexicographic expertise, software and tools. In addition, the survey reflects on current trends in lexicography and reveals what institutions see as the most important emerging trends that will affect lexicography in the short-term and long-term future. Overall, the results provide valuable input informing the development of tools, resources, guidelines and training materials within ELEXIS.
This paper discusses an investigation of how senses are ordered across eight dictionaries. A dataset of 75 words was used for this purpose, and two senses were examined for each word. The words are divided into three groups of 25 words each according to the relationship between the senses: Homonymy, Metaphor, and Systematic Polysemy. The primary finding is that WordNet differs from the other dictionaries in terms of Metaphor. The order of the senses was more often figurative/literal, and it had the highest percentage of figurative senses that were not found. We discuss leveraging another dictionary, COBUILD, to re-order the senses according to frequency.
Applying terminological methods to lexicography helps lexicographers deal with the terms occurring in general language dictionaries, especially when it comes to writing the definitions of concepts belonging to special fields. In the context of the lexicographic work of the Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, an updated digital version of the last Academia das Ciências de Lisboa’ dictionary published in 2001, we have assumed that terminology – in its dual dimension, both linguistic and conceptual – and lexicography are complementary in their methodological approaches. Both disciplines deal with lexical items, which can be lexical units or terms. In this paper, we apply terminological methods to improve the treatment of terms in general language dictionaries and to write definitions as a form of achieving more precision and accuracy, and also to specify the domains to which they belong. Additionally, we highlight the consistent modelling of lexicographic components, namely the hierarchy of domain labels, as they are term identification markers instead of a flat list of domains. The need to create and make available structured, organised and interoperable lexicographic resources has led us to follow a path in which the application of standards and best practices of treating and representing specialised lexicographic content are fundamental requirements.
It is well known that the distribution of lexical and grammatical patterns is size- and register-sensitive (Biber 1986, and later publications). This fact alone presents a challenge to many corpus-oriented linguistic studies focusing on a single language. When it comes to cross-linguistic studies using corpora, the challenge becomes even greater due to the lack of high-quality multilingual corpora (Kupietz et al. 2020; Kupietz/Trawiński 2022), which are comparable with respect to the size and the register. That was the motivation for the creation of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo, an initiative started in 2013 at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) together with several European partners (Kupietz et al. 2020). EuReCo is an emerging federated corpus, with large virtual comparable corpora across various languages and with an infrastructure supporting contrastive research. The core of the infrastructure is KorAP (Diewald et al. 2016), a scalable open-source platform supporting the analysis and visualisation of properties of texts annotated by multiple and potentially conflicting information layers, and supporting several corpus query languages. Until recently, EuReCo consisted of three monolingual subparts: the German Reference Corpus DeReKo (Kupietz et al. 2018), the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (Barbu Mititelu/Tufiş/Irimia 2018), and the Hungarian National Corpus (Váradi 2002). The goal of the present submission is twofold. On the one hand, it reports about the new component of EuReCo: a sample of the National Corpus of Polish (Przepiórkowski et al. 2010). On the other hand, it presents the results of a new pilot study using the newly extended EuReCo. This pilot study investigates selected Polish collocations involving light verbs and their prepositional / nominal complements (Fig. 1) and extends the collocation analyses of German, Romanian and Hungarian (Fig. 2) discussed in Kupietz/Trawiński (2022).
Phonesthemes (Firth 1930) are sublexical constructions that have an effect on the lexico-grammatical continuum: they are recurring form-meaning associations that occur more often than by chance but not systematically (Abramova/Fernandez/Sangati 2013). Phonesthemes have been shown (Bergen 2004) to affect psycholinguistic language processing; they organise the mental lexicon. Phonesthemes appear over time to emerge as driven by language use as indexical rather than purely iconic constructions in the lexicon (Smith 2016; Bergen 2004; Flaksman 2020). Phonesthemes are acknowledged in construction morphology (Audring/Booij/Jackendoff 2017) as motivational schemas. Some phonesthemes also tend to have lexicographic acknowledgment, as shown by etymologist Liberman (2010), although this relevance and cohesion appears to be highly variable as we will show in this paper.
Politische Grenzen haben nachweislich sowohl auf den Sprachgebrauch als auch auf die Sprachwahrnehmung einen großen Einfluss. Die vorliegende Arbeit analysiert für den die Länder Deutschland, Österreich und Italien übergreifenden bairischen Sprachraum, wie Sprecher/Hörer diesen räumlich (horizontal-areal) sowie hinsichtlich seines Verhaltensspektrums (vertikal-sozial) gliedern. Dabei werden die Wahrnehmungen sprachlicher und außersprachlicher Merkmale und die Einstellungen dazu genauer betrachtet.
Mithilfe eines pluridimensionalen Erhebungssettings, bestehend aus Tiefeninterview, Online-Fragebogen, Mental-Map-Erhebung und Hörerurteilstest, kann gezeigt werden, dass extralinguistische Barrieren, wie etwa politische Grenzen, stark mit attitudinal-perzeptiven Grenzen korrelieren. Damit stellt im Bewusstsein der Befragten auch die Staatsgrenze zwischen Deutschland und Österreich eine Sprachgrenze dar.
Germany’s diverse history in the 20th century raises the question of how social upheavals were constituted in and through political discourse. By analysing basic concepts, the research network “The 20th century in basic concepts” (based at the Leibniz institutes IDS, ZfL, ZZF) aims to identify continuities and discontinuities in political and social discourse. In this way, historical sediments of the present are to be uncovered and those challenges identified that emerged in the course of the 20th century and continue to shape political discourse until the present.
In this paper, the author studies the role of the dictionary in the first language acquisition, highlighting its didactic value. Based on two Romanian lexicographical works of the 19th century, Lexiconul de la Buda (Buda, 1825) [the Lexicon of Buda] et Vocabularu romano-francesu (Bucarest, 1870) [the Romanian-French Vocabulary], the author analyses the normative information recorded in the articles in order to observe which level of language (i. e. phonetical, morphological, syntactical and lexical) is concerned. Such an approach allows to distinguish between the possible changings both at the level of the perception or at the grammatical, lexical and semantical description, i. e. the settlement of the word in the first language, and at a technical level, i. e. the making of article and of dictionary.
To effectively design online tools and develop sophisticated programs, for the teaching of Ancient Greek language, there is a clear need for lexical resources that provide semantic links with Modern Greek. This paper proposes a microstructure for an online Ancient Greek to Modern Greek thesaurus (AMGthes) that serves educational purposes. The terms of this bilingual thesaurus have been selected from reference Ancient Greek texts, taught and studied during lower and upper secondary education in Greece. The main objective here is to build a semantic map that helps students find relevant and semanti- cally related terms (synonyms and antonyms) in Ancient Greek, and then provide a rich set of suitable translations and definitions in Modern Greek. Designed to be an online resource, the thesaurus is being developed using web technologies, and thus will be available to every school and university student that pursues a degree in digital humanities.
This think-aloud study charts the use of online resources by five final-year MA students in Nordic and Literacy Studies based on the analysis of screen and audio recordings of an error-correction task. The article briefly presents some linguistic features of Norwegian Nynorsk that are not common in the context of other European languages, that is, norm optionality with regards to inflection and spelling. While performing the task, the participants were allowed to use all digital aids. This article examines their resource consultation behavior, and it makes use of Laporte/Gilquin’s (2018) annotation protocol. The following research questions are posed: What online resources are used by the students? What characterizes the use? Are online resources helpful? This study provides new insights into an as yet little explored topic within the Norwegian context. The findings demonstrate that the participants relied heavily on the official monolingual dictionary Nynorskordboka. Indeed, the dictionary was helpful in the vast majority of the searches, either resulting in error improvement or the validation of a word; that is, many of the searches considered correct words. The findings suggest severe norm insecurity and emphasize the need to improve norm knowledge and metalinguistic knowledge as prerequisites for better utilization of aids. It is also suggested to include necessary information on norm optionality and other commonly queried issues in the dictionary architecture.
Contrastive analysis of climate-related neologisms registered in GermanN and French Wikipedia
(2023)
Neologisms represent new social norms, tendencies, controversies and attitudes. They denote new or changed concepts which are constantly being negotiated between different members of the discourse community (Wodak 2022 and Catalano/Waugh (eds.) 2020). Neologisms help to identify new communicative patterns and narratives which illustrate different strings of discourse in everyday life. In recent years, many neologisms relating to the subject of the environment and climate have been emerging around the world mainly due to dominant discussions on climate change and the movement “Fridays for Future”. In German, for example, neologisms such as Klimakleber, klimaresilient and globaler Streik and in French neologisms such as éco-anxiété, justice climatique and écocitoyen could be observed. These neologisms occur in many domains of life, for example in politics, media and also in advertising, which means that “l’importance croissante des enjeux environnementaux dans les discours politiques, médiatiques et publicitaires” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22) can be identified. However, it is not only the occurrence of environment- or climate-related topics that is increasing, but also the rising polarisation of the public debate. The polarisation within public discourse is based on the fact that there are opposing positions which are represented by new or recently relevant terms such as activistes du climat (or Klimaaktivisten) and climatosceptiques (or Klimaskeptiker) (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22). Due to different identifications with one or the other side, one can also speak of an “affrontement idéologique” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 23). 1 The explosive nature and the high complexity of the debate on climate and the environmental issues mean that many words are naturally unfamiliar to people. This is especially true with regard to neologisms. In addition, it is often not only the new word itself but also the signified concept that is initially unknown. When people then look up words, they often do so on the Internet. Wikipedia as a “free encyclopedia” (Wikipedia 2023) is particularly well suited as an object of study with regard to neologisms, since factual knowledge is given special attention there. Furthermore, this reference guide is perceived as a regular source of agreed and common knowledge on all sorts of subjects. Hence, the descriptions found here represent social agreement on controversial terms and discussions to some degree. In this paper, German and French neologisms from the subject area of climate and environment will be examined primarily in Wikipedia, but also in the neighbouring resource Wiktionary,2 which is “a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary” (Wiktionary 2023). Since Wikipedia and Wiktionary are available in French and in German, 21010. International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC) both are equally suitable for the contrastive analysis. Thus, Wikipedia articles which are accessible in both languages (e.g. Klimanotstand and État d›urgence climatique) or Wikipedia articles about similar events and phenomena (e.g. Letzte Generation and Dernière Rénovation) will be compared. For example, we will have a closer look at other new terms specifying different thematic aspects of the discourse of climate and environment. We will mainly refer to those lexical items which can be found in the respective articles in both languages. Special emphasis will be on overlaps and differences, thematic foci, speaker’s positions and evaluative terms.
Corona- und andere Partys
(2021)
Lexicographers working with minority languages face many challenges. When the language in question is also a sign language, circumstances specific to the visual-spatial modality have to be taken into consideration as well. In this paper, we aim to show and discuss which challenges we encounter while compiling the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DW-DGS), the first corpus-based dictionary of German Sign Language (DGS). Some parallel the challenges minority language lexicographers of spoken languages encounter, e. g. few resources, no written tradition, and having to create one dictionary for all potential user groups, while others are specific to sign languages, e. g. representation of visual-spatial language and creating access structures for the dictionary.
This paper gives an insight into a cross-media publishing process on different stages: from a printed bilingual syntagmatic dictionary for GFL to an online learner’s dictionary of German collocations to a German learner’s dictionary portal. On the basis of an sql database specially developed for a corpus-guided dictionary of German collocations, the bilingual syntagmatic learner’s dictionary KolleX was published in 2014. The first part of the article describes this lexicographic process, focusing the most relevant aspects of the dictionary concept, e. g. dictionary type, subject matter, corpus guided data selection and microstructure. The second part introduces the first online version of KolleX from 2016 and the profound changes in the editing system – from a desktop version (2005) to a web-based editing system (2016) –, which resulted successively in a prototype of a German learner’s dictionary portal, called E-KolleX DaF (2018–). Focusing on the aspects of dynamism and integration of different resources from a learner’s perspective the paper shows the innovative features of this new online reference work. The contribution presents the solutions for the integration of new datatypes in the database of KolleX and the linking to different data in German monolingual dictionary platforms. The paper outlines the web design, functioning and technical improvements of E-KolleX DaF. The conclusions provide an outlook to the forthcoming challenges.
This paper describes the results of an empirical investigation carried out within the project Lessico Multilingue dei Beni Culturali (LBC), whose aim is to create a multilingual online dictionary of the lexicon of the Italian artistic heritage. The dictionary, whose lexicographic process has already started, is intended for linguists and specialist translators as well as for professionals in the tourism sector and students of Foreign Languages and Literatures. The investigation conducted through a questionnaire submitted to undergraduate students at the University of Milan and at the University of Florence has a double aim: to research the habits in the use of lexicographic tools by possible users of the dictionary (Italian Learners of German Language), and to identify preferences regarding macro-, medio- and microstructural features of the future LBC-dictionary to realize a user-friendly tool. After a brief introduction on the state of the art of the survey in the field of Dictionary Users Studies, the article describes the questionnaire and the results obtained from the pilot study. A summary and a discussion on the future developments of the project conclude the work.
This paper presents the decisions behind the design of a maths dictionary for primary school children. We are aware that there has been a considerable problem regarding Mexican children’s performance in maths dragging on for a long time, and far from getting better, it is getting worse. One of the probable causes seems to be the lack of coordination between maths textbooks and teaching methods. Most maths textbooks used in primary schools include lots of activities and problem-solving techniques, but hardly any conceptual information in the form of definitions or explanations. Consequently, many children learn to do things, but have difficulty understanding mathematical concepts and applying them in different contexts. To help solve this problem, at least partially, the project of the dictionary was launched aiming at helping children to grasp and understand maths concepts learned during those first six years of their formal education. The dictionary is a corpus-based terminographical product whose macrostructure, microstructure, typography, and additional information were specifically designed to help children understand mathematical concepts.
In this paper, we propose a controlled language for authoring technical documents and report the status of its development, while maintaining a specific focus on the Japanese automotive domain. To reduce writing variations, our controlled language not only defines approved and unapproved lexical elements but also prescribes their preferred location in a sentence. It consists of components of a) case frames, b) case elements, c) adverbial modifiers, d) sentence-ending functions, and e) connectives, which have been developed based on the thorough analyses of a large-scale text corpus of automobile repair manuals. We also present our prototype of a writing assistant tool that implements word substitution and reordering functions, incorporating the constructed controlled language.
In foreign language teaching the use of dictionaries, especially bilingual, has always been related to the hypotheses concerning the relationship between the native language (L1) and second language acquisition method. If the bilingual dictionary was an obvious tool in the grammar-translation method, it was banned from the classroom in the direct, audiolingual and audiovisual methods. Also in the communicative method, foreign language learners are discouraged from using a dictionary. Its use should not obstruct the goals of communicatively oriented foreign language learning – a view still held by many foreign language teachers. Nevertheless, the reality has been different: Foreign language learners have always used dictionaries, even if they no longer possess a print dictionary and mainly use online resources and applications. Dictionaries and online resources will continue to play an important role in the future. In the Council of Europe’s language policy, with its emphasis on multilingualism and lifelong learning, the adequate use of reference tools as a strategic skill is highlighted. In several European countries, educational guidelines refer to the use of dictionaries in the context of media literacy, both in mother tongue and foreign language teaching. Not only is their adequate use important, but so too is the comparison, assessment and evaluation of the information presented, in order to develop Language Awareness and Language Learning Awareness. This is good news. However, does this mean that dictionaries are actually used in class? What role do dictionaries play in foreign language teaching in schools and universities? Are foreign language learners in the digital era really competent users? And how competent are their teachers? Are they familiar with the current (online) dictionary landscape? Can they support their students? After a more in-depth study of the status quo of dictionary use by foreign language learners and teachers and the gap between their needs and the reality, this contribution discusses the challenges facing lexicographers and meta-lexicographers and what educational policy measures are necessary to make their efforts worthwhile in turning foreign language learners – and their teachers – into competent users in a multilingual and digital world.
In a multilingual and multicultural society, dictionaries play an important role to enhance interlingual communication. A diversity of languages and different levels of dictionary culture demand innovative lexicographic approaches to establish a dictionary landscape that responds to the needs of the various speech communities. Focusing on the South African situation this paper discusses some aspects of a few dictionaries that contributed to an improvement of the local dictionary landscape. Using the metaphors of bridges, dykes and sluice gates it is shown how lexicographers need a balanced approach in their lemma selection and treatment. Whilst a too strong prescriptive approach can be to the detriment of the macrostructural selection, a lack of regulatory criteria could easily lead to a data overload. The lexicographer should strive to give a reflection of the actual language use and enable the users to retrieve the information that can satisfy their specific communication and cognitive needs. Such lexicographic products will enrich and improve the dictionary landscape.
Wie die Eule erkunden große & kleine Sprach-Checker ihre Neckarstadt-West. Kommt mit auf Entdeckungsreise!
Das Buch „Der Wörter-Sammel-Koffer“ ist ein Werk der Sprach-Checker. Es entstand im Rahmen des Projekts „Die Sprach-Checker - So sprechen wir in der Neckarstadt“ (Leitung: Dr. Christine Möhrs & Elena Schoppa-Briele) des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Kinderbuchautorin und Illustratorin Anke Faust, dem Campus Neckarstadt-West, den Neckarstadt-Kids sowie der Alten Feuerwache Mannheim.
Aus den vielen witzigen Ideen der Kinder entwickelte sich die Geschichte um die Eule, die anschließend mit Wasserfarben, Farbstiften und viel Phantasie von den Sprach-Checkern illustriert wurde.
Die Sprach-Checker: Der Wörter-Sammel-Koffer oder Eule Elli & ihre neuen Freunde aus der Neckarstadt
(2023)
Wie die Eule Elli erkunden große & kleine Sprach-Checker ihre Neckarstadt-West. Kommt mit auf Entdeckungsreise!
Das Buch „Der Wörter-Sammel-Koffer“ ist ein Werk der Sprach-Checker. Es entstand im Rahmen des Projekts „Die Sprach-Checker - So sprechen wir in der Neckarstadt“ (Leitung: Dr. Christine Möhrs & Elena Schoppa-Briele) des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Kinderbuchautorin und Illustratorin Anke Faust, dem Campus Neckarstadt-West, den Neckarstadt-Kids sowie der Alten Feuerwache Mannheim.
Aus den vielen witzigen Ideen der Kinder entwickelte sich die Geschichte um Eule Elli, die anschließend mit Wasserfarben, Farbstiften und viel Phantasie von den Sprach-Checkern illustriert wurde.
Ist Deutsch eigentlich die hässlichste Sprache Europas? Dieser Beitrag analysiert, wie die deutsche Sprache im europäischen Raum ästhetisch wahrgenommen wird und was hinter dieser Wahrnehmung sprachwissenschaftlich gesehen steckt.
Die Studie kombiniert qualitative und quantitative Forschungsmethoden miteinander. So werden auf der einen Seite Sprachurteile dokumentiert und analysiert. Auf der anderen Seite wird die durchgeführte europaweite Befragung mit über 2000 Proband*innen ausgewertet, was gleichzeitig einen methodischen Ausgangspunkt für weitere Erhebungen festlegt.
Überwiegt die Wahrnehmung des Deutschen als „harte“ Sprache wirklich? Ist „hart“ denn direkt „hässlich“? Und ist die Wahrnehmung mancher Sprachen als besonders reizlos tatsächlich nur gesellschaftlich konstruiert, wie der bisherige Stand der Forschung nahelegt, oder spielen universelle kognitive Prozesse doch eine größere Rolle als gedacht? Basierend auf einem beträchtlichen Datensatz wirft diese Studie neues Licht auf eine der umstrittensten und methodisch herausforderndsten Kontroversen der Linguistik.
Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die Geschichte des Korpus „Deutsche Mundarten: DDR“ von den ersten Planungen der Tonaufnahmen am Beginn der 1950er Jahre über ihre Durchführung und Aufbereitung bis hin zur Rezeption in der Sprachwissenschaft der DDR und der BRD. Besonderes Augenmerk wird auf das Verhältnis der DDR-Aufnahmen zum impulsgebenden Parallelprojekt Zwirners gelegt. Am Schicksal des Korpus wird überdies nachgezeichnet, wie sich die Dialektologie in der DDR unter politischem Druck in die Richtung einer modernen Regionalsprachenforschung entwickelte. Quellengrundlage der Korpusgeschichte sind Archivbestände der ehemaligen Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Akten zur Förderung Eberhard Zwirners durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft sowie zeitgenössische und neuere linguistische Publikationen, die mit dem Aufnahmekorpus gearbeitet haben.
Redeeinleiter sind sprachliche Ausdrücke unterschiedlicher Wortarten, die relativ zur Redewiedergabe in Voran-, Mittel- oder Nachstellung stehen und eine direkte oder indirekte Redewiedergabe einleiten. Dadurch sind Redeeinleiter sehr vielfältig, womit sie sich als Untersuchungsgegenstand einer Analyse zur lexikalischen Vielfalt von Teilwortschätzen eignen.
Als Datengrundlage der vorliegenden Untersuchung dienen die manuell annotierten direkten und indirekten Redeeinleiter des Redewiedergabe-Korpus. Dieses setzt sich aus fiktionalen und nicht-fiktionalen Textausschnitten, die zwischen 1840–1920 veröffentlicht wurden, zusammen. Ziel der Analyse ist es, zu ermitteln, wie sich der Teilwortschatz der direkten und der der indirekten Redeeinleiter in ihrer lexikalischen Vielfalt voneinander unterscheiden und wie diese Unterschiede zu begründen sind. Dafür wird ein Set an quantitativen Methoden erarbeitet mit dem die lexikalische Vielfalt von Teilwortschätzen bestimmt werden kann und das in zukünftigen Untersuchungen zur lexikalischen Vielfalt als Standardrepertoire herangezogen werden kann.
Im Beitrag werden die Ergebnisse einer im Jahr 2015 durchgeführten Online-Umfrage vorgestellt, in der die Angemessenheit von Aussprachevarianten des Deutschen in formellen Sprechsituationen bewertet werden sollte. Zu diesem Zweck wurden den 1.964 Teilnehmer/-innen Aussprachevarianten von insgesamt 207 Lexemen vorgelegt, vor allem aus den Bereichen Wortakzent, Vokalquantität und Fremdwortrealisierung. Die Umfrageergebnisse werden tabellarisch aufgeführt und damit weiterer Forschung zur Verfügung gestellt.
This paper describes a method for extracting collocation data from text corpora based on a formal definition of syntactic structures, which takes into account not only the POS-tagging level of annotation but also syntactic parsing (syntactic treebank model) and introduces the possibility of controlling the canonical form of extracted collocations based on statistical data on forms with different properties in the corpus. Specifically, we describe the results of extraction from the syntactically tagged Gigafida 2.1 corpus. Using the new method, 4,002,918 collocation candidates in 81 syntactic structures were extracted. We evaluate the extracted data sample in more detail, mainly in relation to properties that affect the extraction of canonical forms: definiteness in adjectival collocations, grammatical number in noun collocations, comparison in adjectival and adverbial collocations, and letter case (uppercase and lowercase) in canonical forms. The conclusion highlights the potential of the methodology used for the grammatical description of collocation and phrasal syntax and the possibilities for improving the model in the process of compilation of a digital dictionary database for Slovene.
Looking up for an unknown word is the most frequent use of a dictionary. For languages both agglutinative and inflectional, such as Georgian, this can be quite challenging because an inflected form can be very far from the lemmas used by the target dictionary. In addition, there is no consensus among Georgian lexicographers on which lemmas represent a verb in dictionaries. It further complicates dictionaries access. Kartu-Verbs is a base of inflected forms of Georgian verbs accessible by a logical information system. It currently contains more than 5 million inflected forms related to more than 16,000 verbs for 11 tenses; each form can have 11 properties; there are more than 80 million links in the base. This demonstration shows how, from any inflected form, we can find the relevant lemma to access any dictionary. Kartu-Verbs can thus be used as a front-end to any Georgian dictionary.
Interactants who encounter co-participant conduct which they find to be socio-normatively problematic or troublesome are faced with a range of choices. First and foremost, this includes the issue of whether to directly address it, or to simply ‘let it pass’ (at least for now) (Emerson/Messinger 1977). In the case of the former, the issue then becomes how to address it. Across the various ways in which participants can pragmatically engage with what they perceive to be transgressive or untoward behavior (e.g., Pomerantz 1978; Schegloff 1988b; Dersley/Wootton 2000; Günthner 2000; Bolden/Robinson 2011; Potter/Hepburn 2020; see also Rodriguez 2022), they sometimes meta-pragmatically formulate the co-participant’s doings in terms of specific actions. Such action descriptions are necessarily selective (Sacks 1963; Schegloff 1972, 1988a; Sidnell/Barnes 2013): They foreground certain aspects of the co-participant’s conduct, while backgrounding others, and thus contribute to publically construeing the formulated conduct in particular ways (Jayyusi 1993), viz. as socio-normatively problematic, transgressive or untoward, and interactionally accountable (Robinson 2016; Sidnell 2017).
Thesauri have long been recognized as valuable structured resources aiding Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled vocabulary which serves to coordinate data indexing and retrieval. The paper presents a bilingual Greek and English specialized thesaurus that is being developed as the backbone of a platform aimed at enhancing and enriching the cultural experiences of visitors in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece. The cultural component of the intended platform comprises textual data, images of artifacts and living entities (animals and plants in the area), as well as audio and video. The thesaurus covers the domains of Archaeology, Literature, Mythology, and Travel; therefore, it can be viewed as a set of inter-linked thesauri. Where applicable, terms and names in the database are also geo-referenced.
This paper aims at verifying if the most important online Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries include some of the neologisms identified in texts published in the 1990s to 2000s, formed with the elements ciber-, e-, bio-, eco- and narco, which we refer to as fractomorphemes / fracto-morphèmes. Three online dictionaries were analyzed (Aulete, Houaiss and Michaelis), as well as Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa (VOLP). We were able to conclude that all three dictionaries and VOLP include neologisms with these elements; Michaelis and VOLP do not include separate entries for bound morphemes, whereas Houaiss includes entries for all of them and Aulete includes entries for bio-, eco- and narco-. Aulete also describes the neological meaning of eco- and narco-, whereas Houaiss does not.
Heranwachsen in einem noch fremden Land: Die Studie beruht auf einer mehr als 20 Jahre umfassenden Langzeiterhebung in russlanddeutschen Familien mit insgesamt 16 Kindern. Schwerpunkt der Beobachtungen und Interviews war die jeweilige Situation der Kinder innerhalb und außerhalb der Familie. Wie veränderte sie sich aus der Sicht der Kinder und ihrer Angehörigen über die Jahre ab der Ankunft in Deutschland bis zum Übergang ins Berufsleben? Welche Bilanz ziehen die nunmehr jungen Erwachsenen ein Vierteljahrhundert nach ihrer Ankunft?
Die Autorinnen ordnen die individuellen Bilanzen in die internationale Migrations- und Integrationsforschung ein. Die deutsch-russische Zweisprachigkeit als Kern der Mehrsprachigkeit der StudienteilnehmerInnen wird in ihrer Beschaffenheit durch Diskursanalysen und deutschsprachige C-Tests beschrieben und zu den Deutschqualifikationen junger Erwachsener ohne Migrationshintergrund ins Verhältnis gesetzt. Die sprachlichen Qualifikationen erfahren so die ihnen gebührende Aufmerksamkeit. Sie sind Bedingung und Folge gesellschaftlicher Zugehörigkeit.
Our everyday lives in any social community are shaped by rules (e.g., Roughley 2019; Schmidt/Rakoczy 2019). Rules (in a broad sense) are interactionally negotiated, monitored, enforced, and serve as an ‘orientation value‘ in social life. If someone‘s behavior is treated as norm-violating or problematic in certain way, it may be therefore confronted. Confronting interlocutors can immediately stop, modify, or retrospectively reprimand the misconduct of others in a moralizing manner. Such confrontations of a problem behavior occur commonly in informal interactions. On the basis of our corpus, specifically in informal interactions at the table, I observed that, for example, in Polish, German and British English, direct confrontations occur on average at least once every three minutes. Participants design these actions in a variety of ways, but like everything in interaction, the design is not arbitrary (Sacks 1984; Enfield/Sidnell 2019). A recurrent feature of such turns is connecting misconduct to some more general concepts. It is evident from the data that e.g. speakers of German and Polish use ‘generally valid statements’ in problematic moments (cf. Küttner/Vatanen/Zinken 2022) to reach the closure of the problem sequence, also specifically dealing there with distribution of deontic and epistemic rights (Rogowska in prep.). I ask, when and for what purpose generality, that is, abstracting from a concrete behaviour, is used as a tool while confronting others. The focus is on sequential and linguistic features of abstracting in confronting moments in language comparison. What are the methods to achieve abstraction: i) defocusing the confronted, specific agent (cf. Zinken et al. 2021; Siewierska 2008), e.g. nur derjenige der dran ist der darf die bedingungen für den handel stellen (only the one whose turn it is may set the conditions for the trade); using ii) extreme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986), e.g. na siostrę zawsze można liczyć (you can always count on a sister); iii) referring to stable character traits, e.g. Matylda bardzo chetne by podala. (.) Ona jest taka skora do pomocy (Matylda would be very happy to pass (it to you). (.) She is so eager to help); or iv) broader categorizing of the given referent, e.g. do not build (.) do do not build do not build swastikas (when a) German guy is filming us? Sometimes, even several locus of abstraction are combined in the same turn. Can we identify language-specific and cross-linguistic patterns? What are the interactional consequences: enforcing a compliant behavior in the future, eliciting an apology or cognitively simplifying complex problems? From a comparative perspective, I ask whether going beyond the here-and-now while confronting others is a practice that unites speakers across languages and is thus a human cognitive strategy to display normativity. This ongoing study is based on new comparable data from four European languages from informal interaction during activities around the table (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. in prep.). The phenomenon was coded systematically in each of the four languages as part of a larger, quantitatively oriented study with different questions (Küttner et al. submitted). In the talk, I will show exemplarily Polish and German evidence. I use the methods of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2012) and Interactional Linguistics (Imo/Lanwer 2019).
A central goal of linguistics is to understand the diverse ways in which human language can be organized (Gibson et al. 2019; Lupyan/Dale 2016). In our contribution, we present results of a large scale cross-linguistic analysis of the statistical structure of written language (Koplenig/Wolfer/Meyer 2023) we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. To this end, we conduct a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6,500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections, so-called corpora, consisting of ~3.5 billion words or ~9.0 billion characters and covering 2,069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of un. To this end, we have trained a language model on more than 6,500 different documents as represented in 41 parallel/multilingual corpora consisting of ~3.5 billion words or ~9.0 billion characters and covering 2,069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population or ~46% of all languages that have a standardized written representation. Figure 1 shows that our database covers a large variety of different text types, e.g. religious texts, legalese texts, subtitles for various movies and talks, newspaper texts, web crawls, Wikipedia articles, or translated example sentences from a free collaborative online database. Furthermore, we use word frequency information from the Crúbadán project that aims at creating text corpora for a large number of (especially under-resourced) languages (Scannell 2007). We statistically infer the entropy rate of each language model as an information-theoretic index of (un)predictability/complexity (Schürmann/Grassberger 1996; Takahira/Tanaka-Ishii/Dębowski 2016). Equipped with this database and information-theoretic estimation framework, we first evaluate the so-called ‘equi-complexity hypothesis’, the idea that all languages are equally complex (Sampson 2009). We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. This constitutes evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective. We then present, discuss and evaluate evidence for a complexity-efficiency trade-off that unexpectedly emerged when we analysed our database: high-entropy languages tend to need fewer symbols to encode messages and vice versa. Given that, from an information theoretic point of view, the message length quantifies efficiency – the shorter the encoded message the higher the efficiency (Gibson et al. 2019) – this indicates that human languages trade off efficiency against complexity. More explicitly, a higher average amount of choice/uncertainty per produced/received symbol is compensated by a shorter average message length. Finally, we present results that could point toward the idea that the absolute amount of information in parallel texts is invariant across different languages.
The aim of this paper is to show how lexicographical choices reflect ideological thinking, singled out by Eagleton (2007) into the strategies of rationalizing, legitimating, action orienting, unifying, naturalizing and universalizing. It will be carried out by examining two twenty first century editions of each of the five English monolingual learner’s dictionaries published by Cambridge, Collins, Longman, Macmillan, and Oxford. The synchronic and diachronic analyses of the dictionaries and their different editions at the macro structural level (the wordlists) and at the micro structural level (the definitional styles) will show how the reduction and change of data, derived from heterogeneous social and cultural contexts of language use, to abstract essential forms, involves decisions about the central and peripheral aspects of the lexicon and the meaning of words.
Mit diesem Papier wird die neue Online-Reihe IDSopen des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache konzeptuell aufgelegt. Die Reihe bietet Autor/-innen und Rezipient/-innen aus allen Bereichen der Linguistik eine moderne und offene Plattform für digitales Publizieren. Mit IDSopen steht eine zeitgemäße Publikationsumgebung zur Verfügung, die schwerpunktmäßig Arbeiten veröffentlicht, die auf Ressourcen des IDS beruhen und deren Verwendungsmöglichkeiten in besonderem Maße zeigen. Gleichzeitig zeichnet sich IDSopen durch eine Öffnung für unkonventionelle Publikationsformen und -formate aus. Transparente Begutachtungsprozesse gehören dabei genauso zum Profil der Reihe wie ein offener Erscheinungsturnus und das Ansprechen unterschiedlicher Zielgruppen. IDSopen verfolgt entlang der Leitlinien des IDS und der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (vgl. LeibnizOpen) das Open-Access-Prinzip und veröffentlicht ausschließlich digital, ohne gedruckte Form (Online-only). Diese Maßnahmen haben das Ziel, kurze Veröffentlichungszeiten für Manuskripte zu ermöglichen, einen unbeschränkten und kostenlosen Zugang zu qualitäts-geprüfter wissenschaftlicher Information rund um die IDS-Ressourcen im Internet zu bieten und liquide Publikationsprozesse zu unterstützen.
Die Reihe Online-only Publikationen des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache (IDSopen) bietet Autor/innen und Rezipient/innen aus allen Bereichen der Linguistik eine moderne und offene Plattform für digitales Publizieren. Mit IDSopen steht eine zeitgemäße Publikationsumgebung zur Verfügung, die schwerpunktmäßig Arbeiten veröffentlicht, die auf Ressourcen des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) beruhen und deren Verwendungsmöglichkeiten in besonderem Maße zeigen. Gleichzeitig zeichnet sich IDSopen durch eine Öffnung für unkonventionelle Publikationsformen und -formate aus. Transparente Begutachtungsprozesse gehören dabei genauso zum Profil der Reihe wie ein offener Erscheinungsturnus und das Ansprechen unterschiedlicher Zielgruppen. IDSopen verfolgt entlang der Leitlinien des IDS und der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (vgl. LeibnizOpen) das Open-Access-Prinzip und veröffentlicht ausschließlich digital, ohne gedruckte Form (Online-only). Diese Maßnahmen haben das Ziel, kurze Veröffentlichungszeiten für Manuskripte zu ermöglichen, einen unbeschränkten und kostenlosen Zugang zu qualitätsgeprüfter wissenschaftlicher Information rund um die IDS-Ressourcen im Internet zu bieten und liquide Publikationsprozesse zu unterstützen.
One central goal of the project ‘Zentrum für digitale Lexikographie der deutschen Sprache’ (Center for digital lexicography for the German Language, www.zdl.org) is to provide a corpus-based lexicographic component of common German multi-word expressions (MWE), including idioms, for DWDS (www.dwds.de), a general language dictionary of contemporary German. As a central challenge of this task, we have identified an adequate lexicographic representation of such common properties of MWE as variation and modification. To document the variation, we have developed a special entry-clustering model, which we call hub-node entry. This model comprises a core hub entry headed by a short nuclear form of the MWE and several node entries, which represent the most common variants in their full lexical forms.
We describe the status of work intending at including sign language lexical data within the OntoLex-Lemon framework. Our general goal is to provide for a multimodal extension to this framework, which was originally conceived for covering only the written and phonetic representation of lexical data. Our aim is to achieve in the longer term the same type of semantic interoperability between sign language lexical data as this is achieved for their spoken or written counterparts. We want also to achieve this goal across modalities: between sign language lexical data and spoken/written lexical data.
In this paper, we present LexMeta, a metadata model for the description of human-readable and computational lexical resources in catalogues. Our initial motivation is the extension of the LexBib knowledge graph with the addition of metadata for dictionaries, making it a catalogue of and about lexicographical works. The scope of the proposed model, however, is broader, aiming at the exchange of metadata with catalogues of Language Resources and Technologies and addressing a wider community of researchers besides lexicographers. For the definition of the LexMeta core classes and properties, we deploy widely used RDF vocabularies, mainly Meta-Share, a metadata model for Language Resources and Technologies, and FRBR, a model for bibliographic records.
This presentation deals with collaborative turn-sequences (Lerner 2004), a syntactically coherent unit of talk that is jointly formulated by at least two speakers, in Czech and German everyday conversations. Based on conversation analysis (e.g., Schegloff 2007) and a multimodal approach to social interaction (e.g., Deppermann/Streeck 2018), we aim at comparing recurrent patterns and action types within co-constructional sequences in both languages. The practice of co-constructing turns-at-talk has been described for typologically different languages, especially for English (e.g., Lerner 1996, 2004), but also for languages such as Japanese (Hayashi 2003) or Finnish (Helasvuo 2004). For German, various forms and functions of co-constructions have already been investigated (e.g., Brenning 2015); for Czech, a detailed, interactionally based description is still pending (but see some initial observations in, e.g., Hoffmannová/Homoláč/Mrázková (eds.) 2019). Although the existence of co-constructions in different languages points to a cross-linguistic conversational practice, few explicitly comparative studies exist (see, e.g., Lerner/Takagi 1999, for English and Japanese). The language pair Czech-German has mainly been studied with respect to language contact and without specifically considering spoken language or complex conversational sequences (e.g., Nekula/Šichová/Valdrová 2013). Therefore, our second aim is to sketch out a first comparison of co-constructional sequences in German and Czech, thereby contributing to the growing field of comparative and cross-linguistic studies within conversation analysis (e.g., Betz et al. (eds.) 2021; Dingemanse/Enfield 2015; Sidnell (ed.) 2009). More specifically, we will present three main sequential patterns of co-constructional sequences, focusing on the type of action a second speaker carries out by completing a first speaker’s possibly incomplete turn-at-talk, and on how the initial speaker then responds to
this suggested completion (Lerner 2004). Excerpts from video recordings of Czech and German ordinary conversations will illustrate these recurrent co-constructional sequence types, i.e., offering help during word searches (see example 1 above), displaying understanding, or claiming independent knowledge. The third objective of this paper is to underline the participants’ orientation to similar interactional problems, solved by specific syntactic and/or lexical formats in Czech and German. Considering the more recent focus on the embodied dimension of co-constructional practices (e.g., Dressel 2020), we will also investigate the multimodal formatting of a started utterance as more or less “permeable” (Lerner 1996) for co-participant completion, the participants’ mutual embodied orientation, and possible embodied responses to others’ turn-completions (such as head nods or eyebrow flashes, cf. De Stefani 2021). More generally, this contribution reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a cross-linguistic comparison of complex multimodal sequences.
Das KOLLokationsLEXikon Deutsch als Fremdsprache (KOLLEX DAF) ist ein
- korpusgestütztes Kollokationswörterbuch, da es typische Wortverbindungen, sog. Kollokationen und häufige Wortkombinationen nach bestimmten Kategorien mit ihren ungarischen Äquivalenten auflistet (Stichwort mit SUBSTANTIVEN, ADJEKTIVEN, VERBEN und ADVERBIEN bzw. in KOMBINATIONEN),
- syntagmatisches Lernerwörterbuch, da es außer Kollokationen auch die Valenz der Stichwörter und die der Kollokationen und Wortkombinationen angibt, ergänzt mit pragmatischen und morphosyntaktischen Verwendungsbeschränkungen sowie ggf. mit einem Symbol für mögliche Fehlerquellen,
- benutzerfreundliches Produktionswörterbuch, da es alle deutschen Wortverbindungen in blauer Farbe und in klar strukturierten Wörterbuchartikeln mit einem Übersichtsblock zu den Bedeutungen des Stichwortes auflistet, aber auch die Sprachrezeption mit einem umfangreichen Register unterstützt.
This article aims to show the influence of doctrines in the medical lexicographers choices, with the Capuron-Nysten-Littré lineage as a case study. Indeed, the Dictionnaire de médecine has been crossed by several schools of thought such as spiritualism and positivism. While lexical continuity may seem self-evident due to the nature of the work, thus reducing the reprint to a simple lexical increase, this process introduces neologisms and deletions, all can be considered in their effects by using text statistics and factorial analysis.
Learning from students. On the design and usability of an e-dictionary of mathematical graph theory
(2022)
We created a prototype of an electronic dictionary for the mathematical domain of graph theory. We evaluate our prototype and compare its effectiveness in task-based tests with that of Wikipedia. Our dictionary is based on a corpus; the terms and their definitions were automatically extracted and annotated by experts (cf. Kruse/Heid 2020). The dictionary is bilingual, covering German and English; it gives equivalents, definitions and semantically related terms. For the implementation of the dictionary, we used LexO (Bellandi et al. 2017). The target group of the dictionary are students of mathematics who attend lectures in German and work with English resources. We carried out tests to understand which items the students search for when they work on graph-theoretical tasks. We ran the same test twice, with comparable student groups, either allowing Wikipedia as an information source or our dictionary. The dictionary seems to be especially helpful for students who already have a vague idea of a term because they can use the resource to check if their idea is right.
This paper presents the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a new, freely accessible publication platform for resources on German lexical borrowings in other languages, to be launched in the second half of 2022. The system will host digital-native sources as well as existing, digitized paper dictionaries on loanwords, initially for some 15 recipient languages. All resources remain accessible as individual standalone dictionaries; in addition, data on words (etyma, loanwords etc.) together with their senses and relations to each other is represented as a cross-resource network in a graph database, with careful distinction between information present in the original sources and the curated portal network data resulting from matching and merging information on, e. g., lexical units appearing in multiple dictionaries. Special tooling is available for manually creating graphs from dictionary entries during digitization and for editing and augmenting the graph database. The user interface allows users to browse individual dictionaries, navigate through the underlying graph and ‘click together’ complex queries on borrowing constellations in the graph in an intuitive way. The web application will be available as open source.
This paper presents the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a new, freely accessible publication platform for resources on German lexical borrowings in other languages, to be launched in the second half of 2022. The system will host digital-native sources as well as existing, digitized paper dictionaries on loanwords, initially for some 15 recipient languages. All resources remain accessible as individual standalone dictionaries; in addition, data on words (etyma, loanwords etc.) together with their senses and relations to each other is represented as a cross-resource network in a graph database, with careful distinction between information present in the original sources and the curated portal network data resulting from matching and merging information on, e. g., lexical units appearing in multiple dictionaries. Special tooling is available for manually creating graphs from dictionary entries during digitization and for editing and augmenting the graph database. The user interface allows users to browse individual dictionaries, navigate through the underlying graph and ‘click together’ complex queries on borrowing constellations in the graph in an intuitive way. The web application will be available as open source.
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.
Not only professional lexicographers, but also people without a professional background in lexicography, have reacted to the increased need for information on new words or medical and epidemiological terms being used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, corona-related glossaries published on German news websites are presented, as well as different kinds of responses from professional lexicography. They are compared in terms of the amount of encyclopaedic information given and the methods of definition used. In this context, answers to corona-related words from a German questionanswer platform are also presented and analyzed. Overall, these different reactions to a unique challenge shed light on the importance of lexicography for society and vice versa.
Not only professional lexicographers, but also people without a professional background in lexicography, have reacted to the increased need for information on new words or medical and epidemiological terms being used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, corona-related glossaries published on German news websites are presented, as well as different kinds of responses from professional lexicography. They are compared in terms of the amount of encyclopaedic information given and the methods of definition used. In this context, answers to corona-related words from a German questionanswer platform are also presented and analyzed. Overall, these different reactions to a unique challenge shed light on the importance of lexicography for society and vice versa.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strat egies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strategies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena that challenge the received division of labour between lexicon and grammar, and hence often fall through the cracks of traditional dictionaries and grammars. Such phenomena call for novel, pattern based types of linguistic reference works (see various papers in Herbst 2019). The present paper introduces one such resource: MAP (“Musterbank argumentmarkierender Präpositionen”), a web based corpus linguistic patternbank of prepositional argument structure constructions in German. The paper gives an overview of the design and functionality of the MAP prototype currently developed at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. We give a brief account of the data and our analytic workflow, illustrate the descriptions that make up the resource and sketch available options for querying it for specific lexical, semantic and structural properties of the data.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena that challenge the received division of labour between lexicon and grammar, and hence often fall through the cracks of traditional dictionaries and grammars. Such phenomena call for novel, pattern-based types of linguistic reference works (see various papers in Herbst 2019). The present paper introduces one such resource: MAP (“Musterbank argumentmarkierender Präpositionen”), a web-based corpus-linguistic patternbank of prepositional argument structure constructions in German. The paper gives an overview of the design and functionality of the MAP-prototype currently developed at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. We give a brief account of the data and our analytic workflow, illustrate the descriptions that make up the resource and sketch available options for querying it for specific lexical, semantic and structural properties of the data.
This conversation analytic study compares the use of negation particles in spoken German and Persian, namely nein/nee and na. While these particles have a range of functions in both languages (Ghaderi 2022; Imo 2017), their use in response to news remains understudied. We focus on nein/nee and na in two sequential contexts: (i) after prior disconfirmations (Extract (a)) and (ii) in response to either solicited or unsolicited informings (see Extracts (b) and (c), respectively). In both contexts, nein/nee and na mark unexpectedness and open up an opportunity space for more, but they do so in different ways and with different outcomes. Nein/nee- and na-turns after disconfirming, often minimal responses to first-position confirmable turns mark the prior as unexpected (or even contrasting with the nein/nee/na-speaker’s expectations) and thus as expandable/accountable (cf. Ford 2001; Gubina/Betz 2021). Nein/nee/na-turns after informings (e.g., announcements that display a story teller’s negative emotional stance) differ not only in sequential position but also in prosodic realization. They can be either falling or rising, but all are characterized by marked prosody, i.e., lengthening, very low onset, smiling or breathy voice, or high overall pitch. Through position and turn design features, such nein/nee- and na-turns not only mark a prior turn as counter to (normative) expectations, but may also display the speaker’s affective stance and affiliate with the affective stance of the prior interactant. By comparing the use of nein/nee and na in German and Persian in the two functions illustrated in Extracts (a) and (b/c), we will show (i) how nein/nee- and na-turns shape interactional trajectories after responsive actions and (ii) what role the particles play in managing news and stance-taking as well as epistemic and affective positioning. Apart from revealing similarities in the use of German and Persian negation particles, the results of our crosslinguistic comparison will demonstrate that even if different languages have similar practices for specific actions, the use of these practices is language- and culture-specific. This means that even similar practices in different languages have their own “collateral effects” (Sidnell/Enfield 2012), linguistic and prosodic characteristic features, and, at least sometimes, consequences for social actions accomplished in the specific language (e.g., Dingemanse/Blythe/Dirksmeyer 2014; Evans/Levinson 2009; Floyd/Rossi/Enfield (eds.) 2020; Fox et al. 2009). Our study uses the method of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2013) and draws on more than 80 hours of audio and video recordings of spontaneous interactions (co-present, via video link, and on the telephone) in everyday and institutional contexts.
Maske oder Mundschutz?
(2021)
Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion im lexikographischen Prozess zu lexikalischen Informationssystemen
(2022)
Dictionaries of today and tomorrow are rather digital products than print dictionaries. From the user’s perspective, electronic dictionary applications and in particular „lexical information systems“, also referred to as „digital word information systems“ are coming to the fore alongside Google searches. Given the rapid developments in the area of the automated provision of lexicographic information, more precisely the automatic creation of online dictionaries, the new role of the lexicographer in the modern lexicographic process is questionable. This article addresses this issue.
While there was arguably a need for multi authored, multi volume, metalexicographic handbooks three decades ago – when the field of metalexicography was still ‘young’ – it is a bit puzzling to make sense of the current output flurry in this field. Is it simply a matter of ‘every publisher trying to fill its shelves’? or is there really a need in the scientific community for more and (continuously) updated reference works? And once available, are such works also consulted? Which parts? By whom? How often? For what purposes? In this paper we look at an ongoing, real world metalexicographic handbook project to answer these questions.
Technische Innovationen, historische Ereignisse, sich wandelnde gesellschaftliche Gegebenheiten
oder politische Neuerungen – für eine funktionierende Verständigung muss sich
der Wortschatz ständig anpassen. Da kann es schnell passieren, dass man ein Wort hört oder
liest, das man noch nicht kennt oder bei dem man sich unsicher ist, wie man es schreibt oder
spricht. Und beim Nachschlagen in einem Wörterbuch, das neue Wörter verzeichnet, stellen
sich weitere Fragen: Welche Quellen werden für ein solches Neologismenwörterbuch ausgewertet,
wie kommt ein Wort dort hinein, und ab wann gilt es als gut integriert? Welche
Typen von Neologismen gibt es eigentlich?
In G, E, I, and H there are constructions with accusative NPs being the external argument of an infinitival, (1) to (4). In P these accusative NPs can only co-occur with an adjectival participle, (5), a construction also occurring in E, (6). The talk compares the syntactic and semantic structure of these constructions focussing on the syntactic category of the nonfinite clause, the status of the accusative NP, the status of the infinitive, restructuring effects, and embedding predicates (including aspect).
i. As to G, E, I, and H, the infinitival clause is regarded as a TP, i.e., a small clause. Its accusative NP and infinitival predicate form a unit – [4], [12], [8]. The AcI denotes, according to [4], an eventuality, which prevents it from being negated. Its subject is case marked by the matrix predicate, either by ECM or subject-to-object raising – [9] and [10]. AcI-constructions can show clause union effects, (7). H additionally allows Dative subjects in infinitive clauses, the latter only being licensed by impersonal predicates and co-occurring with an agreeing infinitive, (8a), – [3]. In case there is no agreeing infinitive, the Dative NP is the experiencer of the matrix clause, (8b). As for Italian, it allows Nominative subject NPs in the infinitive clause, (9a, b).
ii. As to P, small clause constructions differ structurally from E, G, I and H ones – [6], [7]. P small clauses are realizable by copula constructions with verbal być ‘be’ pronominal to ‘it’, (10), or “dual” copula elements, (cooccurrence of a pronominal and a verbal element, [1]), varying with respect to selectional restrictions (part of speech or case within complement phrases, extraction possibilities, [1]). The P counterpart to the AcI-constructions is the secondary predication over an accusative object via an adjectival present participle, (5), (11) and (12). The adjectival participle construction is systematically paraphrasable via clauses introduced by jak ‘how’ (11’) and (12’). In Polish, adjectival phrases like recytującego wiersz ‘reciting’, (11), and wracającego z podróży ‘returning’, (12), clearly function as adjuncts of the accusative object go ‘him’. In our talk, we will compare this P view to languages with typical AcI-constructions, where the AcI-clause is standardly analyzed as a complement of a matrix verb.
This paper examines a certain subset of the vocabulary of Modern Icelandic, namely those words that are labelled as ‘ancient’ in the Dictionary of Contemporary Icelandic (DCI). The words were analysed and grouped into two main categories, 1) Words with only ‘ancient’ sense(s) and 2) words that have modern as well as an obsolete older sense. Several subgroups were identified as well as some lexical characteristics. The words in question were then analysed in two other sources, the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) and the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus (IGC). The results show that the words belong to several semantic domains that reflect the types of texts that have survived until modern times. Most of the words are robustly attested in Old Norse sources, although there are a few exceptions. Large majority of the words can be found in Modern Icelandic texts, but to a varying degree. Limits of the corpus material makes it difficult to analyse some of the words. The result indicate that the words labelled ‘ancient’ can be divided into three main groups: a) words that are poorly attested and should perhaps not be included in the lexicographic description of Modern Icelandic; b) words that are likely to occur sometimes in Modern Icelandic; c) words that function as other inherited Old Norse words and perhaps do not require a special label or should have an additional sense in the DCI.
This study examines a list of 3,413 neologisms containing one or more borrowed item, which was compiled using the databases built by the Korean Neologism Investigation Project. Etymological aspects and morphological aspects are taken into consideration to show that, besides the overwhelming prevalence of English-based neologisms, particular loans from particular languages play a significant role in the prolific formation of Korean neologisms. Aspects of the lexicographic inclusion of loan-based neologisms demonstrate the need for Korean neologism and lexicography research to broaden its scopes in terms of methodology and attitudes, while also providing a glimpse of changes.
This paper reports on the restructuring of a bilingual (Greek Sign Language, GSL – Modern Greek) lexicographic database with the use of the WordNet semantic and lexical database. The relevant research was carried out by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) / Athena R.C. team within the framework of the European project Easier. The project will produce a framework for intelligent machine translation to bring down language barriers among several spoken/written and sign languages. This paper describes the experience of the ILSP team to contribute to a multilingual repository of signs and their corresponding translations and to organize and enhance a bilingual dictionary (GSL – Modern Greek) as a result of this mapping; this will be the main focus of this paper. The methodology followed relies on the use of WordNet and, more specifically, the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW) tool to map content in GSL to WordNet synsets.
Dictionaries have been part and parcel of literate societies for many centuries. They assist in communication, particularly across different languages, to aid in understanding, creating, and translating texts. Communication problems arise whenever a native speaker of one language comes into contact with a speaker of another language. At the same time, English has established itself as a lingua franca of international communication. This marked tendency gives lexicography of English a particular significance, as English dictionaries are used intensively and extensively by huge numbers of people worldwide.
The issue: We discuss (declarative) prepositional object clauses (PO-clauses) in the West Germanic languages Dutch (NL), German (DE), and English (EN). In Dutch and German, PO-clauses occur with a prepositional proform (=PPF, Dutch: ervan, erover, etc.; German: drauf/darauf, drüber/darüber, etc.). This proform is optional with some verbs (1). In English, by contrast, P embeds a clausal complement in the case of gerunds or indirect questions (2), however, P is obligatorily absent when the embedded CP is a that-clause in its base positionv(3a). However, when the that-clause is passivized or topicalized, the stranded P is obligatory (3b). Given this scenario, we will address the following questions: i) Are there structural differences between PO-clauses with a P/PPF and those in which the P/PPF is optionally or obligatorily omitted? ii) In particular, do PO-clauses without P/PPF structurally coincide with direct object (=DO) clauses? iii) To what extent are case and nominal properties of clauses relevant? We use wh-extraction as a relevant test for such differences.
Previous research: Based on pronominalization and topicalization data in German and Dutch, PO-clauses are different from DO-clauses independent of the presence of the PPF (see, e.g., Breindl 1989; Zifonun/Hoffmann/Strecker 1997; Berman 2003; Broekhuis/Corver 2015 and references therein) (4,5). English pronominalization and topicalization data (3b) appear to point in the same direction (Fischer 1997; Berman 2003; Delicado Cantero 2013). However, the obligatory absence of P before that-clauses in base position indicates a convergence with DO-clauses.
Experimental evidence: To provide further evidence to these questions we tested PO-clauses in all three languages for long wh-extraction, which is usually possible for DO-clauses in English and Dutch, and in German for southern regional varieties. For German and Dutch we conducted rating studies using the thermometer method (Featherston 2008). Each study contained two sets of sentences: the first set tested long wh-extraction with regular DO-clauses (6). The second set tested wh-extraction from PO-clauses with and without PPFs (7), respectively. The results show no significant difference in extraction with PO-clauses whether or not the PPF was present even for those speakers who otherwise accept long-distance extraction in German. This supports a uniform analysis of PO-clauses with and without the PPF in contrast to DO-clauses. For English we tested extraction with verbs that select for PP-objects in two configurations: V+that-clause and V+P-gerund (8) in comparison to sentences without extraction. Participants rated sentences on a scale of 1 (unnatural) to 7 (natural). We included the gerund for English as this is a regular alternative for such objects. The results show that extraction is licit in both configurations. This suggests that English PO-clauses are different from German and Dutch PO-clauses: They rather behave as DO-clauses allowing for extraction. Note though, that the availability of extraction from P+gerund also shows that PPs are not islands for extraction in English. Overall, this shows that there is a split between English vs. German/Dutch PO-clauses when the P/PPF is absent. While these clauses behave like PO-clauses in the latter languages, extraction does not show a difference between DO- and PO-clauses in English. We will discuss the results in relation to the questions i)–iii) above.
In many European languages, propositional arguments (PAs) can be realized as different types of structures. Cross-linguistically, complex structures with PAs show a systematic correlation between the strength of the semantic bond and the syntactic union (cf. Givón 2001; Wurmbrand/Lohninger 2023). Also, different languages show similarities with respect to the (lexical) licensing of different PAs (cf. Noonan 1985; Givón 2001; Cristofaro 2003 on different predicate types). However, on a more fine-grained level, a variation across languages can be observed both with respect to the syntactic-semantic properties of PAs as well as to their licensing and usage. This presentation takes a multi-contrastive view of different types of PAs as syntactic subjects and objects by looking at five European languages: EN, DE, IT, PL and HU. Our goal is to identify the parameters of variation in the clausal domain with PAs and by this to contribute to a better understanding of the individual language systems on the one hand and the nature of the linguistic variation in the clausal domain on the other hand. Phenomena and Methodology: We investigate the following types of PAs: direct object (DO) clauses (1), prepositional object (PO) clauses (2), subject clauses (3), and nominalizations (4, 5). Additionally, we discuss clause union phenomena (6, 7). The analyzed parameters include among others finiteness, linear position of the PA, (non) presence of a correlative element, (non) presence of a complementizer, lexical-semantic class of the embedding verb. The phenomena are analyzed based on corpus data (using mono- and multilingual corpora), experimental data (acceptability judgement surveys) or introspective data.
Inspired by GWLN 3, we take a look at the new words, meanings, and expressions that have been created during or promoted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic provides a rare opportunity to follow the rise, spread, and integration of words and expressions in a language that may serve as an illustration of how linguistic innovation in general works. Relevant words were selected from various lists, notably monthly and annual lists of prominent words attested in the corpus of The Danish Dictionary. Analysis of these lists gives an insight into the number of words that stand out month by month and what kinds of words are involved, both in terms of morphological type and of semantic category, with special attention given to neologisms. Finally, we discuss the criteria for selecting which words to include in the dictionary. With this study, Danish is added to the list of languages covered in the GWLN series on
COVID-19 neologisms.
In diesem Buch werden auf einer großen empirischen Basis die regionalen Sprechweisen von verschiedenen Bevölkerungsgruppen in einem kleinen Gebiet im alemannischen Sprachraum untersucht. Als Datengrundlage dienen aktuelle, spontansprachliche und fragebuchbasierte Daten, die einander gegenübergestellt und diachron mit den Ergebnissen des Südwestdeutschen Sprachatlas (SSA) aus den 1970er Jahren verglichen werden. Es werden vorwiegend datenaggregierende Verfahren angewendet, um die regionale und soziale Gebundenheit der vorgefundenen Variation zu erfassen. Mit Hilfe von Dialektabstandsmessungen werden ausgewählte, überwiegend phonologische Merkmale im Hinblick auf Dialektwandelprozesse untersucht. Außerdem wird gezeigt, dass mit dialektometrischen Verfahren explorative Aggregatanalysen möglich sind, die es erlauben, Sprachräume zu identifizieren und dialektologisch zu beschreiben.
It is a ubiquitous phenomenon of everyday interaction that participants confront their co-participants for behaviour that they assess as undesirable or in some other way untoward. In a set of video data of informal interaction from the PECII corpus (Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction), cases of such sanctions have been collected in English, German, Italian and Polish data. This study presents work in progress and focuses on interrogatively formatted sanctions, in particular on non-polar interrogatives. It has already been shown that interrogatives can do much more than ask questions (Huddleston 1994). They can also function as directives (Lindström et al. 2017) or, more specifically, as requests (Curl/Drew 2008), as invitations (Margutti/Galatolo 2018) or reproaches (Klattenberg 2021), among others. What makes them interesting for cross-linguistic comparison is that the four languages that are considered provide different morphological and (morpho-)syntactical ressources for the realization of interrogative phrases. For example, German provides the option of building in the modal particle denn that reveals a previous lack of clarity and obliges the co-participant(s) to deliver the missing information (Deppermann 2009). Of course, the other three languages have modal particles, too (e.g. allora in Italian or though in English), but they do not seem to convey the same semantic and interactional qualities as denn. From an interactional point of view, one could think that interrogatives are a typical and effective way of solliciting accounts, since formally they open up a conditionally relevant space for an answer or a
reaction. But as the data shows, this does not guarantee that they are actually responded to. Another relevant aspect in the context of sanctions is that the interrogative format seems to carry a certain ‚openness‘ that might be seen as a mitigating effect and thus provides an interesting point of comparison with other mitigating devices. This study uses the methods of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. It is based on a collection of 148 interrogative sanctions (out of which 84 are non-polar interrogatives) covering the four languages. I draw on coded data from roughly 1000 cases to get a first overall idea of how the interrogative format might differ from other formats, and how it might interrelate with specific features – for example, if subsequently an account is delivered. Going more into depth, the interrogative sanctions will then be analyzed with respect to their formal design (e.g. polar questions vs. content questions vs. tag questions, Rossano 2010; Hayano 2013) and to their pragmatic implications. I also analyze reactions to such sanctions – both formally (cf. Enfield et al. 2019, 279) and, again, from an interactional perspective (e.g. acceptance/compliance vs. challenging/defiance; Kent 2012; Cekaite 2020). A more detailed zooming in on the sequential unfolding of some particularly interesting
instances of sanctioning interrogatives will make the picture complete.
In the currently ongoing process of retro-digitization of Serbian dialectal dictionaries, the biggest obstacle is the lack of machine readable versions of paper editions. Therefore, one essential step is needed before venturing into the dictionary-making process in the digital environment – OCRing the pages with the highest possible accuracy. Successful retro-digitization of Serbian dialectal dictionaries, currently in progress, has shown a dire need for one basic yet necessary step, lacking until now – OCRing the pages with the highest possible accuracy. OCR processing is not a new technology, as many opensource and commercial software solutions can reliably convert scanned images of paper documents into digital documents. Available software solutions are usually efficient enough to process scanned contracts, invoices, financial statements, newspapers, and books. In cases where it is necessary to process documents that contain accented text and precisely extract each character with diacritics, such software solutions are not efficient enough. This paper presents the OCR software called “SCyDia”, developed to overcome this issue. We demonstrate the organizational structure of the OCR software “SCyDia” and the first results. The “SCyDia” is a web-based software solution that relies on the open-source software “Tesseract” in the background. “SCyDia” also contains a module for semi-automatic text correction. We have already processed over 15,000 pages, 13 dialectal dictionaries, and five dialectal monographs. At this point in our project, we have analyzed the accuracy of the “SCyDia” by processing 13 dialectal dictionaries. The results were analyzed manually by an expert who examined a number of randomly selected pages from each dictionary. The preliminary results show great promise, spanning from 97.19% to 99.87%.
Any bilingual dictionary is contrastive by nature, as it documents linguistic information between language pairs. However, the design and compilation of most bilingual dictionaries is often no more than mere lists of lexical or semantic equivalents. In internet forums, one can observe a huge interest in acquiring relevant knowledge about specific lexical items or pairs that are prone to comparison in a more comprehensive manner as they may pose lexical semantic challenges. In particular, these often concern easily confused pairs (e.g. false friends or paronyms) and new terms increasingly travelling between languages in news and social media (Šetka-Čilić/Ilić Plauc 2021). With regard to English and German, the fundamental comparative principles upon which contrastive guides should be build are either absent, or specialised contrastive dictionaries simply do not exist, e.g. comprehensive descriptive resources for false friends, paronyms, protologisms or neologisms (see Gouws/Prinsloo/de Schryver 2004). As a result, users turn to electronic resources such as Google translate, blogs and language forums for help. For example, it is English words such as muscular which have two German translations options.
These are two confusables muskulär and muskulös both of which exhibit a different semantic profile. German sensitiv/sensibel and their English formal counterparts sensitive/sensible are false friends. However, these terms are highly polysemous in both languages and have semantic features in common. Their full meaning spectrum is hardly captured in bilingual dictionaries to allow for a full comparison. Translating protologisms such as German Doppelwumms as well as more established new words is one of the most challenging problems. Currently, German neologisms such as Klimakleber are translated as climate glue (instead of climate activist glueing him-/herself onto objects) by online tools, simply causing mistakes and contextual distortion. Most challenges users face today are well-known (e.g. Rets 2016). New terms are often unregistered in dictionaries and it is often impossible to make appropriate choices between two or more (commonly misused) words between two languages (e.g. Benzehra 2007). These are all relevant problems to translators and language learners alike (e.g González Ribao 2019).
This paper calls for the implication of insights from contrastive lexicology into modern bilingual lexicography. To turn dictionaries into valuable resources and in order to create productive strategies in a learning environment, the practice of writing dictionaries requires a critical re-assessment. Furthermore, the full potential of electronic contrastive resources needs to be recognised and put into practice. After all, monolingual German lexicography has started to reflect on how users’ needs can be accounted for in specific comparative linguistic situations. Some of these ideas can be comfortably extended to bilingual reference guides. On the one hand, this paper will deliver a critical account of some English-German/German-English dictionaries and touch on the shortcomings of contemporary bilingual lexicography. On the other hand, with the help of fictitious resources I will demonstrate contrastive structures as focal points of consultations which answer some of the more frequent language questions more reliably. Among others, I will explain how we need to build user-friendly dictionaries to allow for translating false friends or easily confusable words from the source language into its target language efficiently. With regard to neologisms, I will show how discursive descriptions and definitions that are more elaborate can support language learners to learn about necessary extra-linguistic knowledge. Overall, this could improve the role of specialised dictionaries in the teaching or translating process (cf. Miliç/Sadri/Glušac 2019).
Shutdown, Lockdown und Exit
(2021)
This paper deals with the lexicographic treatment of the evidently plenty and pervasive scatological vocabulary, that is vocabulary concerning the process and products of bodily excretion (especially feces), in the synchronic Early New High German Dictionary (FWB = Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch) from a dictionary user’s view. Initially, different cultural concepts of scatology by Norbert Elias, Michail Bachtin and Mary Douglas among others and the term taboo are reflected. Subsequently, selected lexical items such as words with a primary scatological meaning (e. g. drek, kot, scheisse), concealing expressions (euphemisms, periphrases, metaphors, e. g. sitzen, seine notdurft tun, bauernveiel), and certain aspects within the polysemy of the verb scheissen are discussed, the latter on the one hand referring to a physical process with uncontrollable aspects and on the other hand denoting a deliberate action and functionalized as a fighting word during the reformation. Focussing on different positions of lexicographical information within the microstructure of the FWB, the surveillance shows that in a synchronic perspective Early New High German scatological vocabulary is a heterogeneous and complex phenomenon due to speaker, context and respectively semantic and pragmatic purposes
Given the relevance of interoperability, born-digital lexicographic resources as well as legacy retro-digitised dictionaries have been using structured formats to encode their data, following guidelines such as the Text Encoding Initiative or the newest TEI Lex-0. While this new standard is being defined in a stricter approach than the original TEI dictionary schema, its reuse of element names for several types of annotation as well as the highly detailed structure makes it difficult for lexicographers to efficiently edit resources and focus on the real content. In this paper, we present the approach designed within LeXmart to facilitate the editing of TEI Lex-0 encoded resources, guaranteeing consistency through all editing processes.
Selten hat ein globales Ereignis nicht nur den Alltag sehr vieler Menschen weltweit schlagartig verändert und in einem längeren Zeitraum zu nachhaltigen Änderungen der Lebensumstände geführt, sondern auch direkte Spuren im Wortschatz und der Art und Weise des Kommunizierens hinterlassen, wie dies durch die Coronakrise der Fall war. Die Beiträge in diesem Band zeichnen diese Reflexionen nach und machen die Veränderungen auf Basis unterschiedlichen Materials (z.B. Pressetexte, Social-Media-Quellen, Gespräche) und zu einem breiten Themenspektrum (Arbeit, Schule, Wirtschaft usw.) nachvollziehbar. Ein deutlicher Fokus liegt dabei auf dem lexikalischen Wandel und zahlreichen Neologismen, die rund um die Coronapandemie aufgekommen sind.
The paper presents the results of empirical research conducted with students from the Faculty of Translation studies of Ventspils University of Applied Sciences (VUAS) in Latvia. The study investigates the habits and practices concerning the use of dictionaries on the part of translation students, as well as types of dictionaries used, frequency of use, etc. The study also presents an insight into the evaluation of the usefulness of dictionaries by Latvian students. The research describes the advantages and disadvantages of dictionaries used by the respondents, the importance of the preface and the explanation of the terms and abbreviations used in dictionaries. The research conducted, as well as the insights, results and recommendations presented, will be relevant for the lexicographic community, as it reflects the experience of one Latvian University to improve the teaching of dictionary use and lexicographic culture in this country and to complement dictionary use research with the Latvian experience.
In this presentation I show first results from an ongoing study about syntactic complexity of sanctioning turns in spoken language. This study is part of a larger project on sanctioning of misconduct in social interaction in different European languages (English, German, Italian and Polish). For the study I use video recordings of different everyday settings (family breakfasts, board game interactions and car rides) with three or four participants. These data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. submitted). I focus on sanctioning turns with more than one turn-constructional unit (see among others for TCUs: Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974; Clayman 2013). The study asks how often TCUs are linked to each other in the different languages, for what function, and how language diversity enters into this. Note that complex sanctioning turns do not always come as complex sentences.