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Authors like Fillmore 1986 and Goldberg 2006 have made a strong case for regarding argument omission in English as a lexical and construction-based affordance rather than one based on general semantico-pragmatic constraints. They do not, however, address the question of how grammatical restrictions on null complementation might interact with broader narrative conventions, in particular those of genre. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this oversight by presenting a comprehensive overview of genre-based argument omissions and offering a construction-based analysis of genre-based omission conventions. We consider five genre-based omission types: instructional imperatives (Culy 1996, Bender 1999), labelese, diary style (Haegeman 1990), match reports (Ruppenhofer 2004) and quotative clauses. We show that these omission types share important traits; all, for example, have anaphoric rather than indefinite construals. We also show, however, that the omission types differ from each other in idiosyncratic ways. We then address several interrelated representational problems posed by the grammatical treatment of genre-based omissions. For example, the constructions that represent genre-based omission conventions must interact with the lexical entries of verbs, many of which do not generally permit omitted arguments. Accordingly, we offer constructional analyses of genre-based omissions that allow constructions to override lexical valence constraints.
Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.
In this paper, we present an overview of freely available web applications providing online access to spoken language corpora. We explore and discuss various solutions with which the corpus providers and corpus platform developers address the needs of researchers who are working with spoken language. The paper aims to contribute to the long-overdue exchange and discussion of methods and best practices in the design of online access to spoken language corpora.
This paper investigates the use of linking adverbs in adversative constructions in German and Italian. In Italian those constructions are very frequently formulated with adverbs such as invece, while wordings without a lexical connective are more typical of German. Corpus data show that the syntactic und semantic conditions favouring the use of adversative adverbs are by and large the same in both languages. Lexical connectives can increase explicitness when the intended adversative interpretation is not obvious on other grounds. The higher frequency of adversative adverbs in Italian is shown to be a consequence of the more restrictive rules of the placement of prosodic accent.
There are strict formal requirements for the use of a comma. However, there are none regarding the comma’s actual shape. In printed fonts, it is determined by the font’s specification. In hand-written texts though, the shape of the comma is variable; most writers choose from a set of straight, convex and concave shapes. By using a corpus of 1464 commas written by 99 individuals, we will present three case studies of persons whose comma shapes do somehow correlate with linguistic structures. With that, we might identify a few (possibly subconscious) shaping strategies. Some writers might mark a norm insecurity by a different comma form, others might mark the function of the entity which is segmented by the comma, or the comma type itself (sentence boundary, exposition or coordination).
This article describes an English Zulu learners’ dictionary that is part of a larger set of information tools, namely an online Zulu course, an e-dictionary of possessives (which was implemented earlier) accompanied by training software offering translation tasks on several levels, and an ontology of morphemic items categorizing and describing all parts of speech of Zulu. The underlying lexicographic database contains the usual type of lexicographic data, such as translation equivalents and their respective morphosyntactic data, but its entries have been extended with data related to the lessons of the online course in order to enable the learner to link both tools autonomously. The ‘outer matter’ is integrated into the website in the form of several texts on additional web pages (how-to-use, typical outputs, grammar tables, information on morphosyntactic rules, etc.). The dictionary comprises a modular system, where each module fulfils one of the necessary functions.
Just like most varieties of West Germanic, virtually all varieties of German use a construction in which a cognate of the English verb 'do' (standard German 'tun') functions as an auxiliary and selects another verb in the bare infinitive, a construction known as 'do'-periphrasis or 'do'-support. The present paper provides an Optimality Theoretic (OT) analysis of this phenomenon. It builds on a previous analysis by Bader and Schmid (An OT-analysis of 'do'-support in Modern German, 2006) but (i) extends it from root clauses to subordinate clauses and (ii) aims to capture all of the major distributional patterns found across (mostly non-standard) varieties of German. In so doing, the data are used as a testing ground for different models of German clause structure. At first sight, the occurrence of 'do' in subordinate clauses, as found in many varieties, appears to support the standard CP-IP-VP analysis of German. In actual fact, however, the full range of data turn out to challenge, rather than support, this model. Instead, I propose an analysis within the IP-less model by Haider (Deutsche Syntax - generativ. Vorstudien zur Theorie einer projektiven Grammatik, Narr, Tübingen, 1993 et seq.). In sum, the 'do'-support data will be shown to have implications not only for the analysis of clause structure but also for the OT constraints commonly assumed to govern the distribution of 'do', for the theory of non-projecting words (Toivonen in Non-projecting words, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2003) as well as research on grammaticalization.
Although there is a growing interest of policy makers in higher education issues (especially on an international scale), there is still a lack of theoretically well-grounded comparative analyses of higher education policy. Even broadly discussed topics in higher education research like the potential convergence of European higher education systems in the course of the Bologna Process suffer from a thin empirical and comparative basis. This paper aims to deal with these problems by addressing theoretical questions concerning the domestic impact of the Bologna Process and the role national factors play in determining its effects on cross-national policy convergence. It develops a distinct theoretical approach for the systematic and comparative analysis of cross-national policy convergence. In doing so, it relies upon insights from related research areas — namely literature on Europeanization as well as studies dealing with cross-national policy convergence.
Distributional models of word use constitute an indispensable tool in corpus based lexicological research for discovering paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic patterns (Belica et al. 2010). Recently, word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013) have revived the field by allowing to construct and analyze distributional models on very large corpora. This is accomplished by reducing the very high dimensionality of word cooccurrence contexts, the size of the vocabulary, to few dimensions, such as 100-200. However, word use and meaning can vary widely along dimensions such as domain, register, and time, and word embeddings tend to represent only the most prevalent meaning. In this paper we thus construct domain specific word embeddings to allow for systematically analyzing variations in word use. Moreover, we also demonstrate how to reconstruct domain specific co-occurrence contexts from the dense word embeddings.
In HDK-1 und in HDK-2 werden Perfektpartizipien wie angenommen und vorausgesetzt in der ‚absoluten‘ Verwendung ohne Auxiliar als vollständig grammatikalisierte Konnektoren mit konditionaler Semantik behandelt. Zwar werden sie von semantisch unterschiedlichen Verben gebildet, in der Verwendung als Konnektor lassen sich aber zumindest hinsichtlich der Wahrheitsbedingungen kaum semantische Unterschiede mehr erkennen. Deutliche Unterschiede zeigen sich aber im Sprachgebrauch: Basierend auf einer groß angelegten Korpusstudie wird gezeigt, dass sich angenommen und vorausgesetzt stark unterscheiden hinsichtlich a) ihrer Präferenz für die Einbettung von V2- vs. dass-Nebensätzen, b) des präferierten Verbmodus im Nebensatz, c) der topologischen Präferenz des untergeordneten Satzes sowie d) der Kookkurrenz mit anderen Ausdrücken. Es wird versucht, diese Unterschiede mit einem pragmatisch-funktionalen Ansatz zu erklären.
We continue the study of the reproducibility of Propp’s annotations from Bod et al. (2012). We present four experiments in which test subjects were taught Propp’s annotation system; we conclude that Propp’s system needs a significant amount of training, but that with sufficient time investment, it can be reliably trained for simple tales.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, about 2000 new lexical units have entered the German lexicon. These concern a multitude of coinings and word formations (Kuschelkontakt, rumaerosolen, pandemüde) as well as lexical borrowings mainly from English (Lockdown, Hotspot, Superspreader). In a special way, these neologisms function as keywords and lexical indicators sketching the development of the multifaceted corona discourse in Germany. They can be detected systematically by corpus-linguistic investigations of reports and debates in contemporary public communication. Keyword analyses not only exhibit new vocabulary, they also reveal discursive foci, patterns of argumentation and topicalisations within the diverse narratives of the discourse. With the help of quickly established and dominant neologisms, this paper will outline typical contexts and thematic references, but it will also identify speakers' attitudes and evaluations.
Theateraufführungen sind ohne Zuschauer nicht denkbar. Zugleich erweisen sich Proben aber als öffentlichkeitsabgeschirmte und intime Vorgänge, da eine (zu frühe) Orientierung an möglichen Publikums-Effekten den kreativen Prozess stört. Auf der Grundlage von über 30 Stunden Videoaufnahmen von Theaterproben zeige ich an ausgewählten Ausschnitten, wie Theatermachende sich sprachlich und körperlich im Probenprozess auf das Publikum beziehen, wie dies interaktiv realisiert wird und welche Rückschlüsse das auf die Weisen der Publikumskonstruktion im Kontext von Proben zulässt.
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
Precise multimodal studies require precise synchronisation between audio and video signals. However, raw audio and audio from video recordings can be out of sync for several reasons. In order to re-synchronise them, a dynamic programming (DP) approach is presented here. Traditionally, DP is performed on the rectangular distance matrix comparing each value in signal A with each value in signal B. Previous work limited the search space using for example the Sakoe Chiba Band (Sakoe and Chiba, 1978). However, the overall space of the distance matrix remains identical. Here, a tunnel matrix and its according DP-algorithm are presented. The matrix contains merely the computed distance of two signals to a pre-specified bandwidth and the computational cost is equally reduced. An example implementation demonstrates the functionality on artificial data and on data from real audio and video recordings.
Feminine forms of job titles raise great interest in many countries. However, it is still unknown how they shape stereotypical impressions on warmth and competence dimensions among female and male listeners. In an experiment with fictitious job titles men perceived women described with feminine job titles as significantly less warm and marginally less competent than women with masculine job titles, which led to lower willingness to employ them. No such effects were observed among women.
Besser als gedacht
(2021)
Das grammatische Wissen von Lehramtsstudierenden ist besser als gedacht. Im Basisartikel (s. Döring/Elsner in diesem Band) wird darauf verwiesen, dass Studien zeigten, dass bei Studierenden zu Studienbeginn das grammatische Wissen nicht in dem gewünschten Maße vorhanden ist und dass auch die universitäre Lehre keinen Ausgleich dieser Defizite bewirken muss. Dennoch bleibt die Frage, ob das, was in den Studien gemessen wird, nicht eher dem terminologischen Wissen entspricht, was bei Studienbeginn nicht vorhanden sein muss, weil der Grammatikunterricht viel zu lang zurückliegt und im Studienverlauf genau diese Termini entweder keine Rolle spielen oder kritisch diskutiert werden, sodass die Fragen auch nicht mehr so einfach beantwortet werden können. Hinter diesen Studien steckt doch letztlich die Frage, welcher Wissensbestand und welcher Wissenszuwachs gemessen werden soll und ob die verwendeten Methoden das geeignete Mittel darstellen. Daher möchten wir in diesem Kommentar aufzeigen, in welcher Weise unserer Meinung nach Lehramtsstudierende solide grammatische Kenntnisse aufweisen (können), in welcher Hinsicht epistemische Überzeugungen von Lehrenden einen Einfluss haben können und welche Aspekte in der unversitären Lehre (im Bereich der Grammatik) zusätzlich berücksichtigt werden sollten, um einen nachhaltigeren Lernerfolg zu ermöglichen. Dies ist durchaus als optimistischer Beitrag zu verstehen, insofern als sich die universitäre Hochschullehre für Lehramtsstudierende im Bereich der Grammatik im positiven Sinne auf den Weg gemacht hat.
Beyond the stars: exploiting free-text user reviews to improve the accuracy of movie recommendations
(2009)
In this paper we show that the extraction of opinions from free-text reviews can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations. We present three approaches to extract movie aspects as opinion targets and use them as features for the collaborative filtering. Each of these approaches requires different amounts of manual interaction. We collected a data set of reviews with corresponding ordinal (star) ratings of several thousand movies to evaluate the different features for the collaborative filtering. We employ a state-of-the-art collaborative filtering engine for the recommendations during our evaluation and compare the performance with and without using the features representing user preferences mined from the free-text reviews provided by the users. The opinion mining based features perform significantly better than the baseline, which is based on star ratings and genre information only.