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"Standard language" is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers. This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed "standard usage". It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project "Variation in Spoken German", Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of "standard usage" in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of "standard usage" inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.
In 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.
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).
Eine korpuslinguistische Untersuchung mit umfassender Analyse der häufiger vorkommenenden Adverbbildungsmuster des Deutschen legt nahe, dass die Sättigung des internen Argumentplatzes eines ursprünglich relationalen Ausdrucks eine wichtige Rolle bei der Adverbproduktion spielt (Brandt 2020). Eine genauere Betrachtung der Unterschiede zwischen -ermaßen- vs. -erweise-Adverbien deutet auf eine grammatische Unterscheidung zwischen Satzadverbien und Adverbien der Art und Weise: Im Fall von -ermaßen erfolgt die Sättigung über Token-Reflexivität, während der interne Slot von -erweise- Bildungen über häufigere und möglicherweise expansive Mechanismen geschlossen wird. Darüber hinaus fördert die pleonastische Qualität von Bildungen auf der Basis gerundivaler Partizipien die Produktivität von -erweise Adverbien.
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.
Terminological resources play a central role in the organization and retrieval of scientific texts. Both simple keyword lists and advanced modelings of relationships between terminological concepts can make a most valuable contribution to the analysis, classification, and finding of appropriate digital documents, either on the web or within local repositories. This seems especially true for long-established scientific fields with elusive theoretical and historical branches, where the use of terminology within documents from different origins is often far from being consistent. In this paper, we report on the progress of a linguistically motivated project on the onomasiological re-modeling of the terminological resources for the grammatical information system grammis. We present the design principles and the results of their application. In particular, we focus on new features for the authoring backend and discuss how these innovations help to evaluate existing, loosely structured terminological content, as well as to efficiently deal with automatic term extraction. Furthermore, we introduce a transformation to a future SKOS representation. We conclude with a positioning of our resources with regard to the Knowledge Organization discourse and discuss how a highly complex information environment like grammis benefits from the re-designed terminological KOS.
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.
MRI data of German vowels and consonants was acquired for 9 speakers. In this paper tongue contours for the vowels were analyzed using the three-mode factor analysis technique PARAFAC. After some difficulties, probably related to what constitutes an adequate speaker sample for this three-mode technique to work, a stable two-factor solution was extracted that explained about 90% of the variance. Factor 1 roughly captured the dimension low back to high front; Factor 2 that from mid front to high back. These factors are compared with earlier models based on PARAFAC. These analyses were based on midsagittal contours; the paper concludes by illustrating from coronal and axial sections how non-midline information could be incorporated into this approach.
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.
Korpora sind – als idealerweise digital verfüg- und auswertbare Sammlungen von Texten – eine wertvolle empirische Grundlage linguistischer Studien. Eigene Korpora aufzubauen ist, je nach Sprachausschnitt, mit unterschiedlichen Herausforderungen verbunden. Zu allen Texten sollten Metadaten zu den Textentstehungsbedingungen (Zeit, Quelle usw.) erhoben werden, um diese als Variablen in Auswertungen einbeziehen zu können. Andere Informationen wie etwa die Themenzugehörigkeit (oder Annotationen auch unterhalb der Textebene) sind auch hilfreich, in vielerlei Hinsicht aber schwieriger pauschal taxonomisch vorzugeben, geschweige denn, operationell zu ermitteln. Jenseits der »materiellen« Verfügbarkeit der Texte und der technischen Aufbereitung sind es das Urheberrecht, vor allem Lizenz- bzw. Nutzungsrechte, sowie ethische Verantwortung und Persönlichkeitsrechte, die beachtet werden müssen, auch um zu gewährleisten, dass die Daten für die Reproduktion der Studien Dritten rechtssicher zugänglich gemacht werden dürfen. Bevor für ein Vorhaben ein neues Korpus aufgebaut wird, sollte deshalb am besten geprüft werden, ob nicht ein geeignetes bereits zur Verfügung steht. Wenn ein Korpus aufgebaut wird, sollte für eine nachhaltige Aufbewahrung und Zugänglichmachung gesorgt und die Existenz an geeigneter Stelle dokumentiert werden.
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.
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.
Antonymy is a relation of lexical opposition which is generally considered to involve (i) the presence of a scale along which a particular property may be graded, and hence both (ii) gradability of the corresponding lexical items and (iii) typical entailment relations. Like other types of lexical opposites, antonyms typically differ only minimally: while denoting opposing poles on the relevant dimension of difference, they are similar with respect to other components of meaning. This paper presents examples of antonymy from the domain of speech act verbs which either lack some of these typical attributes or show problems in the application of these. It discusses several different proposals for the classification of these atypical examples.
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.
„Actual words are of theoretical interest” (Audring 2021: 3). Unter Zugrundelegung dieser gebrauchsbasierten Prämisse geht der vorliegende Beitrag der Frage nach, wie sich die Nominalkomposition im Deutschen auf der Basis sprachlicher Massendaten als Konstruktionsfamilie, d.h. als ein hierarchisches Netzwerk von Konstruktionen unterschiedlichen Abstraktionsgrads, beschreiben lässt. Der Beitrag knüpft in theoretischer Hinsicht an Booijs (2010) „Construction Morphology” an, geht jedoch insofern über diese hinaus, als versucht wird, deren Grundannahmen auch auf automatisch erhobene sprachliche Massendaten anzuwenden. Konkret wird mit einem Inventar von rund 185.000 Zusammensetzungen aus zwei simplizischen Nomen gearbeitet, die systematisch aus dem Deutschen Referenzkorpus (DeReKo) (vgl. Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache 2007) extrahiert und im Anschluss (semi)automatisch weiterverarbeitet wurden.
Automatic recognition of speech, thought, and writing representation in German narrative texts
(2013)
This article presents the main results of a project, which explored ways to recognize and classify a narrative feature—speech, thought, and writing representation (ST&WR)—automatically, using surface information and methods of computational linguistics. The task was to detect and distinguish four types—direct, free indirect, indirect, and reported ST&WR—in a corpus of manually annotated German narrative texts. Rule-based as well as machine-learning methods were tested and compared. The results were best for recognizing direct ST&WR (best F1 score: 0.87), followed by indirect (0.71), reported (0.58), and finally free indirect ST&WR (0.40). The rule-based approach worked best for ST&WR types with clear patterns, like indirect and marked direct ST&WR, and often gave the most accurate results. Machine learning was most successful for types without clear indicators, like free indirect ST&WR, and proved more stable. When looking at the percentage of ST&WR in a text, the results of machine-learning methods always correlated best with the results of manual annotation. Creating a union or intersection of the results of the two approaches did not lead to striking improvements. A stricter definition of ST&WR, which excluded borderline cases, made the task harder and led to worse results for both approaches.
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.