Open Access

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.

An ongoing academic and research program, the “Vocabula Grammatica” lexicon, implemented by the Centre for the Greek Language (Thessaloniki, Greece), aims at lemmatizing all the philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and metrical terms in the written texts of scholars (philologists and scholiasts) who curated the ancient Greek literature from the beginning of the Hellenistic period (4th/3rd c. BC) until the end of the Byzantine era (15th c. AD). In particular, it aspires to fill serious gaps (a) in the study of ancient Greek scholarship and (b) in the lexicography of the ancient Greek language and literature. By providing specific examples, we will highlight the typical and methodological features of the forthcoming dictionary.

Wortgeschichte digital (‘digital word history’) is a new historical dictionary of New High German, the most recent period of German reaching from approximately 1600 AD up to the present. By contrast to many historical dictionaries, Wortgeschichte digital has a narrated text – a “word history” – at the core of its entries. The motivation for choosing this format rather than traditional microstructures is briefly outlined. Special emphasis it put on the way these word histories interact with other components of the dictionary, notably with the quotation section. As Wortgeschichte digital is an online only project, visualizations play an important role for the design of the dictionary. Two examples are presented: first, the “quotation navigator” which is relevant for the microstructure of the entries, and, second, a timeline (“Zeitstrahl”) which is part of the macrostructure as it gives access to the lemma inventory from a diachronic point of view.

In theater as a bodily-spatial art form, much emphasis is placed on the way actors perform movements in space as an important multimodal resource for creating meaning. In theater rehearsals, movements are created in series of directors' instructions and actors' implementations. Directors' instructions on how to conduct a movement often draw on embodied demonstrations in contrast to verbal descriptions. For instance, to instruct an actress to act like a school girl a director can use depictive (he demonstrates the expected behavior) instead of descriptive (“can you act like a school girl”) means. Drawing on a corpus of 400 h video recordings of rehearsal interactions in three German professional theater productions, from which we selected 265 cases, we examine ways to instruct movement-based actions in theater rehearsals. Using a multimodally extended ethnomethodological-conversation analytical approach, we focus on the multimodal details that constitute demonstrations as complex action types. For the present article, we have chosen nine instances, through which we aim to illuminate (1) The difference in using embodied demonstrations versus verbal descriptions to instruct; (2) typical ways directors combine verbal descriptions with embodied demonstrations in their instructions. First, we ask what constitutes a demonstration and what it achieves in comparison to verbal descriptions. Using a typical case, we illustrate four characteristics of demonstrations that all of the cases we studied share. Demonstrations (1) are embedded in instructional activities; (2) show and do not tell; (3) are responded to by emulating what was shown; (4) are rhetorically shaped to convey the instruction's focus. However, none of the 265 demonstrations we investigated were produced without verbal descriptions. In a second step we therefore ask in which typical ways verbal descriptions accompany embodied demonstrations when directors instruct actors how to play a scene. We distinguish four basic types. Verbal descriptions can be used (1) to build the demonstration itself; (2) to delineate a demonstration verbally within an instruction; (3) to indicate positive (what should be done) and negative (what should be avoided) versions of demonstrations; (4) as an independent means to describe the instruction's focus in addition to the demonstration. Our study contributes to research on how embodied resources are used to create meaning and how they combine with and depend on verbal resources.

Metadata provides important information relevant both to finding and understanding corpus data. Meaningful linguistic data requires both reasonable annotations and documentation of these annotations. This documentation is part of the metadata of a dataset. While corpus documentation has often been provided in the form of accompanying publications, machinereadable metadata, both containing the bibliographic information and documenting the corpus data, has many advantages. Metadata standards allow for the development of common tools and interfaces. In this paper I want to add a new perspective from an archive’s point of view and look at the metadata provided for four learner corpora and discuss the suitability of established standards for machine-readable metadata. I am are aware that there is ongoing work towards metadata standards for learner corpora. However, I would like to keep the discussion going and add another point of view: increasing findability and reusability of learner corpora in an archiving context.

In this paper, we deal with register-driven variation from a probabilistic perspective, as proposed in Schäfer, Bildhauer, Pankratz, Müller (2022). We compare two approaches to analyse this variation within HPSG. On the one hand, we consider a multiple-grammar approach and combine it with the architecture proposed in the CoreGram project Müller (2015) - discussing its advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, we take into account a single-grammar approach and argue that it appears to be superior due to its computational efficiency and cognitive plausibility.

Vorgestellt wird das Korpus deutschsprachiger Songtexte als innovative Sprachdatenquelle für interdisziplinäre Untersuchungsszenarien und speziell für den Einsatz im Fremd- und Zweitsprachenunterricht. Die Ressource dokumentiert Eigenschaften konzeptioneller Schriftlichkeit und konzeptioneller Mündlichkeit und erlaubt empirisch begründete Analysen sprachlicher Phänomene bzw. Tendenzen in den Texten moderner Popmusik. Vorgestellt werden Design, Annotationen und Anwendungsbeispiele des in thematische und autorenspezifische Archive stratifizierten Korpus.

In diesem Beitrag stellen wir die Ergebnisse einer Studie über die Intonation von Frageaktivitäten in deutschen Alltagsgesprächen vor. Unsere Untersuchung erforscht, inwieweit die Intonation zur Kontextualisierung von konversationellen Fragen beiträgt. In der Analyse stützen wir uns auf das autosegmental-metrische Modell von Peters und das taxonomische Modell der interaktionalen Prosodieforschung von Selting. Diese Modelle beschreiben jeweils phonologische oder pragmatische Aspekte der Frageintonation, zwei Dimensionen, die für sich genommen, keine vollständige Beschreibung liefern können. Auf der Grundlage authentischer Gesprächsdaten aus dem Korpus FOLK argumentieren wir für die Kompatibilität des autosegmental-metrischen Modells von Peters und des taxonomischen Modells der Frageintonation von Selting. Die Merkmale aus beiden Modellen lassen sich zu Bündeln kombinieren, die es erlauben, die Intonation von Fragen zu erfassen.

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.