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The ISOcat registry reloaded
(2012)
The linguistics community is building a metadata-based infrastructure for the description of its research data and tools. At its core is the ISOcat registry, a collaborative platform to hold a (to be standardized) set of data categories (i.e., field descriptors). Descriptors have definitions in natural language and little explicit interrelations. With the registry growing to many hundred entries, authored by many, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the rather informal definitions and their glossary-like design make it hard for users to grasp, exploit and manage the registry’s content. In this paper, we take a large subset of the ISOcat term set and reconstruct from it a tree structure following the footsteps of schema.org. Our ontological re-engineering yields a representation that gives users a hierarchical view of linguistic, metadata-related terminology. The new representation adds to the precision of all definitions by making explicit information which is only implicitly given in the ISOcat registry. It also helps uncovering and addressing potential inconsistencies in term definitions as well as gaps and redundancies in the overall ISOcat term set. The new representation can serve as a complement to the existing ISOcat model, providing additional support for authors and users in browsing, (re-)using, maintaining, and further extending the community’s terminological metadata repertoire.
In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.
How to propose an action as an objective necessity. The case of Polish trzeba x (‘one needs to x’)
(2011)
The present study demonstrates that language-specific grammatical resources can afford speakers language-specific ways of organizing cooperative practical action. On the basis of video recordings of Polish families in their homes, we describe action affordances of the Polish impersonal modal declarative construction trzeba x (“one needs to x”) in the accomplishment of everyday domestic activities, such as cutting bread, bringing recalcitrant children back to the dinner table, or making phone calls. Trzeba-x turns in first position are regularly chosen by speakers to point to a possible action as an evident necessity for the furthering of some broader ongoing activity. Such turns in first position provide an environment in which recipients can enact shared responsibility by actively involving themselves in the relevant action. Treating the necessity as not restricted to any particular subject, aligning responsive actions are oriented to when the relevant action will be done, not whether it will be done. We show that such sequences are absent from English interactions by analyzing (a) grammatically similar turn formats in English interaction (“we need to x,” “the x needs to y”), and (b) similar interactive environments in English interactions. We discuss the potential of this research to point to a new avenue for researchers interested in the relationship between language diversity and diversity in human action and cognition.
The authors compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The finding shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.
In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes from systematic variation in the design of imperative turns, relative to the fittedness of the imperatively mandated action to the addressee’s ongoing trajectory of actions, what we call the “dine of commitment”. We present four points on this dine: Responsive imperatives perform an operation on the deontic dimension of what the addressee has announced or already begun to do (in particular its permissibility); local-project imperatives formulate a new action advancing a course of action in which the addressee is already actively engaged; global-project-imperatives target a next task for which the addressee is available on the grounds of their participation in the overall event, and in the absence of any competing work; and competitive imperatives draw on a presently otherwise engaged addressee on the grounds of their social commitment to the relevant course of actions. These four turn shapes are increasingly complex, reflecting the interactional work required to bridge the increasing distance between what the addressee is currently doing, and what the imperative mandates. We present data from German and Polish informal and institutional settings.
Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
‘Linguistic relativity’ has become a major keyword in debates on the psychological significance of language diversity. In this context, the term ‘relativity’ was originally taken on loan from Einstein’s then-recent theories by Edward Sapir (1924) and Benjamin L. Whorf (1940). The present paper assesses how far the idea of linguistic relativity does analogically build on relevant insights in modern physics, and fails to find any substantial analogies. The term was used rhetorically by Sapir and Whorf, and has since been incorporated into a cognitivist research programme that seeks to answer whether ‘language influences thought’. Contemporary research on ‘linguistic relativity’ has developed into a distinct way of studying language diversity, which shares a lot with the universalistic cognitivist framework it opposes, but little with relational approaches in science.
Am Beispiel von zwei Fallstudien wird die Frage der Generalisierbarkeit von an einer Einzelsprache gewonnenen Erkenntnissen über Verknüpfungselemente (Konnektoren) und konnektorale Strukturen aufgeworfen. Empirisch geht es zum einen um die Topologie von Adverbkonnektoren, zum anderen um das Verhältnis zwischen Adverbkonnektoren, Subjunktoren (bzw. Untersatzeinleitern) und den ihnen zugrundeliegenden Präpositionen. Methodischer Ausgangspunkt sind jeweils die Analysen und Klassifikationen des HDK, also ein dezidiert auf das Deutsche bezogener Ansatz. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass die feinkörnige einzelsprachliche Analyse, wie sie das HDK bietet, mit Gewinn auch auf andere europäische Sprachen, hier Englisch, Französisch und am Rande auch Polnisch, adaptiert werden kann, wenn die Rahmenbedingungen stimmen, also zugrundeliegende funktionale komparative Konzepte und sprachspezifische Strukturprinzipien beachtet werden. Dann ist auch ein Zugewinn für die Beschreibung des Deutschen zu erwarten.
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
In spite of the obvious importance that is accorded to the notion grammatical construction in any approach that sees itself as a construction grammar (CxG), there is as yet no generally accepted definition of the term across different variants of the framework. In particular, there are different assumptions about which additional requirements a given structure has to meet in order to be recognized as a construction besides being a ‘form-meaning pair’. Since the choice of a particular definition will determine the range of both relevant phenomena and concrete observations to be considered in empirical research within the framework, the issue is not just a mere terminological quibble but has important methodological repercussions especially for quantitative research in areas such as corpus linguistics. The present study illustrates some problems in identifying and delimiting such patterns in naturally occurring text and presents arguments for a usage-based interpretation of the term grammatical construction.
Ziel dieses Projekts ist es, Sprachdaten so nah wie möglich am Jetzt zu erheben und analysierbar zu machen. Wir möchten, dass möglichst viele Menschen, nicht nur Sprachwissenschaftlerinnen und Sprachwissenschaftler, in die Lage versetzt werden, Sprachdaten zu explorieren und zu nutzen. Hierzu erheben wir ein Korpus, d. h. eine aufbereitete Sammlung von Sprachdaten von RSS-Feeds deutschsprachiger Onlinequellen. Wir zeichnen die Entwicklung der Analysewerkzeuge von einem Prototyp hin zur aktuellen Form der Anwendung nach, die eine komplette Reimplementierung darstellt. Dabei gehen wir auf die Architektur, einige Analysebeispiele sowie Erweiterungsmöglichkeiten ein. Fragen der Skalierbarkeit und Performanz stehen dabei im Mittelpunkt. Unsere Darstellungen lassen sich daher auf andere Data-Science-Projekte verallgemeinern.
Wir stellen eine empirische Studie vor, die der Frage nachgeht, ob und in welchem Ausmaß Wörterbücher und andere lexikographische Ressourcen die Ergebnisse von Textüberarbeitungen verbessern. Studierende wurden in unserer Studie gebeten, zwei Texte zu optimieren und waren dabei zufällig in drei unterschiedliche Versuchsbedingungen eingeteilt: 1. ein Ausgangstext ohne Hinweise auf potenzielle Fehler im Text, 2. ein Ausgangstext, bei dem problematische Stellen im Text hervorgehoben waren und 3. ein Ausgangstext mit hervorgehobenen Problemstellen zusammen mit lexikographischen Ressourcen, die zur Lösung der spezifischen Probleme verwendet werden konnten. Wir fanden heraus, dass die Teilnehmer*innen der dritten Gruppe die meisten Probleme korrigierten und die wenigsten semantischen Verzerrungen während der Überarbeitung einführten. Außerdem waren sie am effizientesten (gemessen in verbesserten Textabschnitten pro Zeit). Wir berichten in dieser Fallstudie ausführlich vom Versuchsaufbau, der methodischen Durchführung der Studie und eventuellen Limitationen unserer Ergebnisse.
The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest crisis the world has had to face since World War II. It does not come as a surprise that it is also having an impact on language as our primary communication tool. In this short paper, we present three inter-connected resources that are designed to capture and illustrate these effects on a subset of the German language: An RSS corpus of German-language newsfeeds (with freely available untruncated frequency lists), a continuously updated HTML page tracking the diversity of the vocabulary in the RSS corpus and a Shiny web application that enables other researchers and the broader public to explore the corpus in terms of basic frequencies.