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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.
У дисертації розроблено нову теоретико-методологічну концепцію для виконання когнітивно-дискурсивної реконструкції комунікативних девіацій в українсько- і німецькомовних відеоінтерв’ю. Обґрунтовано статус відеоінтерв’ю як інтегрованого мовленнєвого жанру, який включає теле- і спеціальні інтерв’ю, збережені на відеохостингу YouTube в мережі Інтернет. Уточнено визначення поняття “комунікативної девіації” на тлі суміжних термінів як динамічного й складного когнітивно-дискурсивного явища. Реконструйовано причини виникнення комунікативних девіацій і побудовано їхню модель, характерну для українсько- та німецькомовних відеоінтерв’ю. Результати дисертації можна застосовувати у зіставно-типологічних дослідженнях, у дослідженнях із теорії мови, психо- і соціолінгвістики, лінгвопрагматики, когнітивної і комунікативної лінгвістик, методології мовознавства, у курсах зіставного мовознавства, загального мовознавства, теоретичної граматики німецької мови, сучасної української літературної мови, а також у викладанні відповідних навчальних дисциплін. Підсумки дослідження можуть бути також корисними для представників мас-медійної сфери, фахівців, які спеціалізуються у галузі теорії комунікації, а також представників сфери соціальних комунікацій, дипломатичних служб, державних і приватних інституцій різного профілю з метою запобігання конфліктним ситуаціям і покращення соціальної та міжкультурної комунікації.
Ziel dieser Arbeit war es, eine Software zu entwickeln, die quantitative und qualitative korpuslinguistische Methoden miteinander verbindet. Die Gesamtarbeit besteht daher aus zwei Teilen: einer Open-Source-Software und dem schriftlichen Teil. Der hier vorgelegte schriftliche Teil ist eine vollständige Dokumentation (Handbuch), ergänzt um eigene Publikationen, die im Rahmen des Dissertationsprojekts entstanden. In Kapitel 1.2 Korpora und beispielhafte Fragestellungen (S. 8) erfolgt eine Illustration beispielhafter Forschungsfragen anhand bereitgestellter und im Corpus- Explorer integrierter Korpora. Außerdem werden unter "?? ?? (S. ??)" Analysen mit verschiedensten prototypischen Forschungsfragen verknüpft, die sowohl quantitative als auch qualitative Perspektiven einnehmen. Der CorpusExplorer wurde besonders nutzerfreundlich gestaltet. Dabei ist die Zielgruppe der Software sehr breit defniert: Die Nutzung soll sowohl in der Forschung als auch in der Lehre möglich sein. Daher richtet sich der CorpusExplorer gleichermaßen an Studierende und Forschende mit ihren jeweils spezifschen Bedürfnissen. Die Nutzung für die Forschung zeigt sich (A) an den integrierten Artikeln sowie daran, dass (B) andere Forschende den CorpusExplorer bereits für ihre Arbeit aufgegriffen haben. Der Nutzen für die Lehre wurde mehrfach selbst erprobt und optimiert. Im Lehr-Einsatz ist es wichtig, dass Korpora mit wenigen Mausklicks analysefertig sind und verschiedene Analysen und Visualisierungen direkt genutzt werden können. Studierende erhalten so die Möglichkeit, eigenes Korpusmaterial direkt und selbst auszuwerten. Für Forschende bietet der CorpusExplorer ein sehr breites Funktionsspektrum. Im Vergleich zu anderer (öffentlich verfügbarer) korpuslinguistischer Software verfügt er aktuell über das wohl breiteste Anwendungsspektrum (51 Analysemodule (inkl. weiterentwickelter Verfahren), über 100 unterstützte Dateiformate für Im- und Export, unterschiedliche Tagger mit 69 unterstützten Sprachmodellen). Er kann so in bestehende Skripte, Toolchains und Workflows für sehr unterschiedliche Forschungsfragen integriert werden. Im CorpusExplorer wurden nicht nur bestehende Funktionen gebündelt, es wurden auch bisherige Verfahren weiterentwickelt. Hierzu zählen z. B. (1) die Entwicklung einer eigenen, an korpuslinguistischen Bedürfnissen ausgerichteten Datenbank- Struktur, (2) die Weiterentwicklung bzw. Optimierung des Verfahrens der Kookkurrenz- Analyse hin zu einer quantitativen Kookkurrenz-Analyse (keine Parameter wie Suchfenstergröße oder Suchwort nötig, Berechnung aller Kookkurrenzen zu allen Token in einem Korpus) und (3) die Verknüpfung unterschiedlicher Analyseressourcen, wie z. B. der NGram- und der Kookkurrenz-Analyse.
Bauchschmerzen bei Kindern sind häufig, aber glücklicherweise meist ohne schwerwiegende Ursache. Sogar starke oder wiederkehrende Bauchschmerzen haben oftmals keinen organischen Ursprung. Dennoch erfolgt bei Kindern mit häufigen Bauchschmerzen in der Regel eine umfangreiche und für alle Beteiligten belastende diagnostische Abklärung – teilweise sogar ohne seriösen, hilfreichen Befund. Idealerweise sollte bereits im Gespräch mit einem fachkundigen Arzt deutlich werden, ob die Schmerzen somatischen oder psychosomatischen Ursprungs sind, um überflüssige und teure Untersuchungsmaßnahmen einzusparen. An dieser Stelle kommt die Gesprächsforschung zum Einsatz: Für die Unterscheidung von organischen und psychisch bedingten Anfallsereignissen konnte gezeigt werden, dass die entscheidenden Hinweise zur Diagnose nicht nur in den geschilderten Fakten liegen, sondern auch in der Art, wie die Betroffenen selbst über ihr Problem reden und mit dem Arzt interagieren. Diese Hinweise lassen sich zielgenau durch gesprächslinguistische Analysen erfassen (vgl. Opp/Frank-Job/Knerich 2015). Für epileptische vs. dissoziative Anfälle konnte dies bereits belegt und in klinischen Studien validiert werden (vgl. Schwabe/Howell/Reuber 2007). In Anknüpfung an das genannte Projekt wird in dieser Dissertation überprüft, ob und inwieweit die Befunde aus der Anfallsforschung auch auf eine andere Erkrankung und Patientinnengruppe übertragen werden können. Für diesen Zweck werden dyadische Interaktionen junger Patientinnen mit Medizinerinnen während einer spezifischen Form und Phase der Anamnese analysiert: Der analytische Kern der Arbeit thematisiert die Interaktion der Beteiligten beim zeichnerischen Umsetzen von Bauchschmerzen. Dabei zeigt sich die interaktiv hervorgebrachte Positionierung der Patientinnen zur Malaufgabe als zentral und entsprechend diagnostisch relevant: Während Patientinnen, deren Schmerzen organischen Ursprungs sind, dazu tendieren, die Malaufgabe mit redundanten Informationen pflichtgemäß zu erfüllen, neigen Patientinnen, die an funktionellen Beschwerden leiden, hingegen dazu, die Malaufgabe als Chance zur Aktualisierung der Beschwerdenschilderung zu sehen. Diese Erkenntnisse lassen sich in Form einer Diagnosetabelle zusammenfassen und konstituieren damit die Basis für einen gesprächsanalytischen Anwendungsbezug, der die medizinische Forschung und Ausbildung um ein innovatives Diagnostikverfahren bereichern kann.
This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas:
1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation.
2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language.
3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis.
By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing.
This thesis describes work in three areas: grammar engineering, computer-assisted language learning and grammar learning. These three parts are connected by the concept of a grammar-based language learning application. Two types of grammars are of concern. The first we call resource grammars, extensive descriptions a natural languages. Part I focuses on this kind of grammars. The other are domain-specific or application-specific grammars. These grammars only describe a fragment of natural language that is determined by the domain of a certain application. Domain-specific grammars are relevant for Part II and Part III. Another important distinction is between humans learning a new natural language using computational grammars (Part II) and computers learning grammars from example sentences (Part III). Part I of this thesis focuses on grammar engineering and grammar testing. It describes the development and evaluation of a computational resource grammar for Latin. Latin is known for its rich morphology and free word order, both have to be handled in a computationally efficient way. A special focus is on methods how computational grammars can be evaluated using corpus data. Such an evaluation is presented for the Latin resource grammar. Part II, the central part, describes a computer-assisted language learning application based on domain-specific grammars. The language learning application demonstrates how computational grammars can be used to guide the user input and how language learning exercises can be modeled as grammars. This allows us to put computational grammars in the center of the design of language learning exercises used to help humans learn new languages. Part III, the final part, is dedicated to a method to learn domain- or application-specific grammars based on a wide-coverage grammar and small sets of example sentences. Here a computer is learning a grammar for a fragment of a natural language from example sentences, potentially without any additional human intervention. These learned grammars can be based e.g. on the Latin resource grammar described in Part II and used as domain-specific lesson grammars in the language learning application described Part II.
Skatesticker sind grafisch gestaltete Aufkleber, die von Skatelabels – den Herstellern von Skateboards und Zubehör – distribuiert werden. Ursprünglich zu reinen Werbezwecken produziert, haben sich Skatesticker als Symbole der Szene etabliert: Befragte Skater bekennen, dass Skatesticker ein „Ausdruck eines Lebensgefühls“, ein „visueller Eindruck unserer Gefühle“ und eine „[e]infache Möglichkeit[,] sich einer Gruppe zuzuordnen“ sind. Sie werden von Skatern gesammelt, gehandelt und wertgeschätzt. Die vorliegende Arbeit verfolgt einen bildwissenschaftlich orientierten Forschungsansatz, der es ermöglicht, die komplexen – oftmals bildende Kunst adaptierenden – Bildmotive dieser Grafikdesignobjekte und ihre zunehmend autonomisierten Funktionen als visuelle Medien einer Szene zu analysieren und anzuerkennen.
The thesis describes a fully automatic system for the resolution of the pronouns 'it', 'this', and 'that' in English unrestricted multi-party dialog. Referential relations considered include both normal NP-antecedence as well as discourse-deictic pronouns. The thesis contains a theoretical part with a comprehensive empiricial study, and a practical part describing machine learning experiments.
When humans have a conversation with one-another, they generally take turns speaking one after the other without overlapping each others talk or leaving silence between turns for long stretches of time. Previous research has shown that conversation is a structured practice following rules that help interlocutors to manage the flow of conversation interactively. While at the beginning of a conversation it remains open who will speak when about what and for how long, interlocutors regulate the flow of conversation as it unfolds. One basic set of rules that interlocutors operate with governs the allocation of speaking turns, with the central rule stating that whoever starts speaking first at a point in time when speaker change becomes relevant has the rights and obligations to produce the next turn. The organization of turn allocation, therefore, is one reason for conversational turn taking to be so remarkably fast, with the beginnings of turns most often being quite accurately aligned with the ends of the previous turns. Observations of this outstanding speed of turn taking gave rise to a number of questions concerning language processing in conversational situations. The studies presented in this thesis investigate some of these questions from the perspective of the current listener preparing to be the next speaker who will respond to the current turn.
The study presented in Chapter 2 investigates when next speakers begin to plan their own turn with respect to two points in time, (i) the moment when the incoming turn’s message becomes clear enough to make response planning possible and (ii) the moment when the incoming turn terminates. Results of previous studies were inconclusive about the timing of language planning in conversation, with evidence in favour of both late and early response planning. Furthermore, previous studies presented both evidence as well as counter evidence indicating that response planning depends or does not depend on an accurate prediction of the timing of the incoming turn’s end. The study presented here makes use of a novel experimental paradigm which includes a dialogic task that participants need to fulfil in response to critical utterances by a confederate. These critical utterances were structured, on the one hand, so that their message became clear either only at the end of the turn or before the end of the turn, and, on the other hand, so that it was either predictable or not predictable when exactly the turn would end. Participant’s eye-movements as well as their response latencies indicated that they always planned their next turn as early as possible, irrespective of the predictability of the incoming turn’s end. The presented results provide evidence in favour of models of turn taking that predict speech planning to happen in overlap with the incoming turn.
Having established that next speakers begin to plan their turn in overlap, the study presented in Chapter 3 goes more into detail investigating to which depth language planning progresses while the incoming turn is still unfolding. To this end, a number of psycholinguistic paradigms were combined. In the study’s main experiment, participants had to fulfil a switch-task in which they switched from picture naming in response to an auditorily presented question to making a lexical decision. By manipulating the relatedness of the word for lexical decision with the picture that was prepared to be named before the task-switch it was possible to draw inferences on which processing stages were entered during the speech production process in overlap with the incoming turn. Participants’ behavioural responses in the lexical decision task revealed that they entered the stage of phonological encoding while the incoming turn was still unfolding, showing that planning in overlap is not limited to conceptual preparation but includes all sub-processes of formulation.
Given that speech production regularly enters the stages of formulation in overlap with the incoming turn, as shown in Chapters 2 and 3, the question arises whether planning the next turn in overlap is cognitively more demanding than during the gap between turns. This question is approached in the study presented in Chapter 4 by measuring pupillometric responses of participants in a dialogic task. An increase in pupil diameter during a cognitive task is indicative of increased processing load, and pupillometric responses to planning in overlap with the incoming turn were found to be greater than responses to planning in the gap between turns. These results show that planning in overlap is more demanding than planning during the gap, even though it is highly practiced by speakers.
After Chapters 2 to 4 investigated the timing and mechanisms of speech planning in conversation, Chapter 5 turns towards the timing of articulation of a planned turn, asking the question what sources of information next speakers use to time the articulation of a planned utterance to start closely after the incoming turn comes to an end. In this Chapter’s study, participants taking turns with a confederate responded to utterances containing or not containing different cues to the location of the incoming turn’s end. Participants made use of lexical and turn-final intonational cues, but not of turn-initial intonational cues, responding faster when the relevant cues were present than when they were not present. These results show that the timing of turn initiation in next speakers depends on the recognition of the incoming turn’s point of completion and not merely on the progress in planning the next turn.
All evidence presented in Chapters 2 to 5 is summed up and bundled together in a cognitive model of turn taking, which is being presented in Chapter 6. This model assumes, centrally, that the planning of a turn and the timing of its articulation are separate cognitive processes that run in parallel in any next speaker during conversation. Planning generally starts as early as possible, often in overlap with the incoming turn, while the timing of articulation depends on the next speaker’s level of certainty that speaker change has become relevant at a particular moment, with a number of cues to the end of the incoming turn leading to an increase of certainty. Next turns are assumed to often be planned down to fully formulated utterance plans including their phonological form as early as possible on the basis of anticipations of the incoming turn’s message, which are created with the help of the general and situational knowledge about the world, the current speaker and her intentions, as well as the input that has been received so far. The level of certainty that speaker change becomes relevant rises or decreases as lexico-syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic projections about the development of the current turn are fulfilled or not fulfilled. As the incoming turn progresses towards its end as was projected by the current listener, he becomes certain that speaker change becomes relevant and will initiate articulation of the prepared next turn. Viewing these two processes, planning a next turn and timing of its articulation, as separate makes it possible to explain the observable fast timing of turn taking while still modelling the allocation of turns as interactionally managed by interlocutors — a considerable advantage of the presented model compared to more traditional perspectives on turn taking and conversation.
Le chevauchement, c’est-à-dire la prise de parole simultanée d'au moins deux locuteurs, est un phénomène omniprésent dans la conversation. Inscrit dans le cadre théorique de l'Analyse Conversationnelle et de la linguistique interactionnelle, notre travail se penche sur la parole simultanée considérée comme un phénomène systématique et ordonné qui appartient aux pratiques routinières de l'alternance des tours de parole. Nos analyses se fondent sur des transcriptions d'enregistrements vidéo de données interactionnelles naturelles, des conversations ordinaires en français et en allemand. Nous ne portons pas uniquement un regard sur le chevauchement en tant que phénomène audible, mais le concevons comme une pratique incarnée en interaction, qui est également implémentée par des ressources visibles. À l'analyse séquentielle s'ajoute donc une analyse multimodale, qui nous permet de tenir compte des constellations participatives dynamiques lors du chevauchement. Le travail analytique se focalise sur trois phénomènes spécifiques dans lesquels la parole simultanée intervient de manière significative : d'abord l'auto-répétition faisant suite au chevauchement, ensuite l'abandon de tour de parole d'un locuteur lors de la parole simultanée et enfin la complétion différée, la continuation retardée d'une prise de parole en chevauchement avec l'intervention d'un interlocuteur. Cette thèse contribue à une compréhension approfondie de ces trois phénomènes et démontre que l'organisation de la parole simultanée est étroitement liée à la gestion de trajectoires d'action complexes et de cadres participatifs dynamiques.
In der atelischen an-Konstruktion im Deutschen treten die Verben mit einer an-Präpositionalphrase auf (an etwas malen/essen/basteln). Basierend auf Korpusdaten wird in diesem Band gegen die verbreitete Alternationsanalyse der an-Konstruktion als präpositionales Pendant der transitiven Verbverwendung argumentiert. Stattdessen werden an-Phrasen als ereignisinterne Modifikatoren von einstelligen Activity-Verbvarianten analysiert, die eine in der lokalen Bedeutung der Präposition wurzelnde boundary-Relation einführen. Aus empirischer Perspektive wird ein Inventar von korpusbasierten Methoden und Maßen für die Untersuchung von (vermeintlichen) Argumentalternationen vorgestellt. Schließlich wird der bisher wenig diskutierte Zusammenhang von Argumentrealisierung und Metaphernbildung diskutiert.
Die Studie wurde mit dem Wilhelm von Humboldt Preis des Jahres 2022 der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft ausgezeichnet.
A tale of many stories: explaining policy diffusion between European higher education systems
(2013)
The thesis ”A Tale of Many Stories - Explaining Policy Diffusion between European Higher Education Systems" systematically examines diffusion processes and their effects with regard to a rather neglected policy area – the case of European higher education policy. The thesis contributes to the slowly growing number of comparative and mechanism-based studies on policy diffusion and represents the first study on the diffusion of policies between European Higher Education Systems. The main aim is to contrast and compare testable and coherent explanatory models on the functioning of different diffusion mechanisms. Three sets of explanatory models on the relationship between variables triggering and conditioning diffusion mechanisms and their impact on policy adoption are drawn from mechanism-based thinking on policy diffusion: on learning, socialization, and externalities. These approaches conceptualize the policy process in terms of interdependencies between international and national actors. Explanatory models based on assumptions about domestic policies and the common responses of countries to similar policy problems extend this theoretical framework. The thesis is based on event history modelling of policy change and adoption in higher education systems of 16 West European countries between the yeas 1980 and 1998. Overall 14 policy items describing performance-orientated reforms for public universities ranging from the adoption of external quality assurance systems to tuition fees are examined. Empirically, the main research question is what international, national and policy-specific factors cause and condition diffusion processes and the adoption of public policies? Evidence can be found for and against all of the four theoretical approaches tested. In comparison, many of the assumptions related to interdependencies lack robustness, whereas the common response model is the most stable one. This does not mean that explanatory models based on interdependent decision-making are not suitable for analysing policy diffusion in higher education. Rather interdependency is a multi- dimensional concept that requires a comparative assessment of diffusion mechanisms. Some of explanatory factors based on interdependent decision- making are still supported by the empirical analysis though. From this point of view, the recommendation for analysing diffusion is to start with a model based on domestic politics, that is successively extended by explanatory factors dealing with interdependencies between international and national actors. Diffusion variables matter – but it is only one side of the tale on policy diffusion.
A central question in psycholinguistics is how the human brain processes language in real time. To answer this question, the differences between auditory and visual processing have to be considered. The present dissertation examines the extent to which event-related potentials (ERPs) in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) interact with different modes of presentation during sentence comprehension. Besides the two classical modalities, auditory and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), the monitoring of readers’ eye movements was chosen as a new mode of presentation. Here, the temporal paradox between neuronal ERP effects and behavioral effects in the eye movement record were of particular interest. Specifically, by concurrently measuring ERPs and eye movements in natural reading, the dissertation aimed to shed light on the counterintuitive fact that difficulties in sentence comprehension arise earlier in eye movement measures than in the corresponding neuronal ERP effects. In contrast to RSVP and the auditory modality, reading offers a parafoveal preview of upcoming words (Rayner 1998), which enables the brain to process information of words before these are fixated for the first time (in foveal vision). When the word Gegenteil in example (1) below is fixated and processed, the brain concurrently processes some information of the upcoming parafoveal words von and weiß. (1) Schwarz ist das Gegenteil von weiß. (2) Schwarz […] blau. (3) Schwarz […] nett. The parafoveal preview mostly provides orthographic (word form) information, while semantic information is not conveyed (Inhoff & Starr 2004; White 2008). Whereas word form and lexical meaning are processed simultaneously with RSVP and auditory presentation, the parafoveal preview in natural reading allows for a temporal decoupling such that word forms are processed before meaning. This is one reason for the faster information uptake in reading. The present dissertation is the first to systematically investigate the influence of the parafoveal preview in sentence processing. Participants read sentences such as in (1)-(3), in which two adjectives were either antonyms (1), semantically related non-antonyms (2), or semantically unrelated non-antonyms (3). ERPs were computed for the last fixation before the target word (the sentence-final word in 1-3), which was assumed to capture parafoveal processing, and for the first fixation on the target, that should reflect foveal processing. The results were compared to two experiments using identical stimuli with auditory and RSVP presentation, and the parafoveal preview clearly led to different ERP results. While the RSVP and auditory presentations replicated the finding of a P300 to the second antonym in (1) (Kutas & Iragui 1998; Roehm et al. 2007), there was no P300 in response to antonyms at any fixation position in natural reading. However, the dissociation of parafoveal and foveal processing in reading also made it possible to disentangle different processes underlying the N400. There was a reduced parafoveal N400 for (1,2) compared with (3), which could be attributed to the preactivation of the word forms of the expected antonyms and of semantically related non-antonyms. In foveal vision, all non-antonyms (2,3) showed an enhanced N400 compared with (1) because they were unexpected and implausible in the sentence context. This dissociation between the preactivation of a word-form and the contextual fit of a word’s meaning is impossible with the other two modes of presentation, because orthographic and semantic information become available almost at the same time and are thus processed simultaneously. Furthermore, the parafoveal N400 effect was not accompanied by changes in the duration of the corresponding fixation, whereas the foveal N400 was. Similarly, with the concurrent measurement of ERPs and eye movements, the temporal paradox described above remained, as effects in the eye movement record preceded the neuronal ERP effects. Further support for these central findings came from two additional experiments that investigated different stimuli with concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures. Altogether, the experiments revealed that the previous findings on the language-related N400 can be replicated with natural reading, but they can also be differentiated qualitatively by virtue of the characteristics of natural reading. Although the behavioral and neuronal effects mirrored one another, not every neuronal effect necessarily translates into a behavioral output. Finally, even concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures cannot resolve the temporal paradox.
This thesis investigates temporal and aspectual reference in the typologically unrelated African languages Hausa (Chadic, Afro–Asiatic) and Medumba (Grassfields Bantu).
It argues that Hausa is a genuinely tenseless language and compares the interpretation of temporally unmarked sentences in Hausa to that of morphologically tenseless sentences in Medumba, where tense marking is optional and graded.
The empirical behavior of the optional temporal morphemes in Medumba motivates an analysis as existential quantifiers over times and thus provides new evidence suggesting that languages vary in whether their (past) tense is pronominal or quantificational (see also Sharvit 2014).
The thesis proposes for both Hausa and Medumba that the alleged future tense marker is a modal element that obligatorily combines with a prospective future shifter (which is covert in Medumba). Cross-linguistic variation in whether or not a future marker is compatible with non-future interpretation is proposed to be predictable from the aspectual architecture of the given language.
Die vorliegende Arbeit geht der Frage nach, wie bzw. mit welchen sprachlichen Mitteln der Islam im öffentlichen Diskurs konstituiert wird. Hierfür wurde ein Korpus aus überregionalen Medientexten erstellt und qualitativ analysiert. Die Auswertung des gesamten Korpus weist darauf hin, welche inhaltlichen Merkmale im Islamdiskurs sprachlich nachweisbar sind und sich im gesamten Diskurs stets wiederholen. Schlüsselwörter wie Islam, Islamismus, Islamisierung, Muslim, Dschihad, Scharia oder Koran wurden detailliert präsentiert. Außerdem wurden die aus dem untersuchten Korpus entstandenen Stereotype rekonstruiert. Weiterhin wurden Metaphern bzw. Metaphernkonzepte untersucht, die sich im Islamdiskurs abbilden lassen. Exemplarisch anhand der drei Weltereignisse Iranische Revolution 1978/79, 11. September 2001 und Arabischer Frühling 2011 hat die vorliegende Arbeit gezeigt, wie der Islam in unterschiedlichen Zeitabständen wahrgenommen wird und inwieweit gesellschaftspolitische Ereignisse und Auseinandersetzungen die Thematisierung des Islams beeinflussen können.
Sentiment Analysis is the task of extracting and classifying opinionated content in natural language texts. Common subtasks are the distinction between opinionated and factual texts, the classification of polarity in opinionated texts, and the extraction of the participating entities of an opinion(-event), i.e. the source from which an opinion emanates and the target towards which it is directed. With the emerging Web 2.0 which describes the shift towards a highly user-interactive communication medium, the amount of subjective content on the World Wide Web is steadily increasing. Thus, there is a growing need for automatically processing this type of content which is provided by sentiment analysis. Both natural language processing, which is the task of providing computational methods for the analysis and representation of natural language, and machine learning, which is the task of building task-specific classification models on the basis of empirical data, may be instrumental in mastering the challenges of the automatic sentiment analysis of written text. Many problems in sentiment analysis have been proposed to be solved with machine learning methods exclusively using a fairly low-level feature design, such as bag of words, containing little linguistic information. In this thesis, we examine the effectiveness of linguistic features in various subtasks of sentiment analysis. Thus, we heavily draw from the insights gained by natural language processing. The application of linguistic features can be applied on various classification methods, be it in rule-based classification, where the linguistic features are directly encoded as a classifier, in supervised machine learning, where these features complement basic low-level features, or in bootstrapping methods, where these features form a rule-based classifier generating a labeled training set from which a supervised classifier can be trained. In this thesis, we will in particular focus on scenarios where the combination of linguistic features and machine learning methods is effective. We will look at common text classification tasks, both coarse-grained and fine-grained, and extraction tasks.
Handlungsanweisungen werden traditionell als sprachlich geäußerte Aktionspläne aufgefasst, denen ein Akteur strikt zu folgen hat. Diese Auffassung führt allerdings dann zu Problemen, wenn der Akteur teilweise autonom handeln kann. Wie soll eine Handlungsanweisung in diesem Fall das Verhalten des Akteurs lenken, ohne zugleich seine Autonomie in der Handlungsausführung einzuschränken?
Henning Lobin wählt in seinem Buch einen alternativen Ansatz: Handlungsanweisungen werden lediglich als Basis für einen Planungsprozess verstanden, zu dem auch andere Kompetenzen des Akteurs wie visuelle Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung und Wissen beitragen. Der Autor vergleicht die sprachlichen Instruktionsformen mit konzeptuellen Strukturen und leitet daraus bestimmte Regeln ab, die zu Aktivitätsschemata als Planungsressourcen führen können. Abschließend diskutiert der Autor die Nutzung von derartigen Planungsressourcen in konkreten Systemen.