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As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
Aims and objectives:
Language debates in Latvia often focus on the role of Latvian as official and main societal language. Yet, Latvian society is highly multilingual, and families with home languages other than Latvian have to choose between different educational trajectories for their children. In this context, this paper discusses the results of two studies which addressed the question of why families with Russian as a home language choose (pre)schools with languages other than Russian as medium of instruction (MOI). The first study analyses family narratives which provide insight into attitudes and practices which lead to the decision to send children to Latvian-MOI institutions. The second study investigates language attitudes and practices by families in the international community of Riga German School.
Methodology:
The paper discusses data gathered during two studies: for the first, semi-structed interviews were conducted with Russian-speaking families who choose Latvian-medium schools for their children. For the second study, a survey was carried out in the community of an international school in Riga, sided by ethnographic observations and interviews with teachers and the school leadership.
Data and analysis:
Interviews and ethnographic observations were subjected to a discourse analysis with a focus on critical events and structures of life trajectory narratives. Survey data were processed following simple statistical analysis and qualitative content analysis.
Findings/conclusions:
Our data reveal that families highly embrace multilingualism and see the development of individual plurilingualism as important for integration into Latvian society as well as for educational and professional opportunities in the multilingual societies of Latvia and Europe. At the same time, multilingualism and multiculturalism, including Russian, are seen as a value in itself. In addition, our studies reflect the bidirectionality of family language policies in interplay with practices in educational institutions: family decisions influence children’s language acquisition at school, but the school also has an impact on the families’ language practices at home. In sum, we argue that educational policies should therefore pay justice to the wishes of families in Latvia to incorporate different language aspects into individual educational trajectories.
Originality:
Language policy is a frequent topic of investigation in the Baltic states. However, there has been a lack in research on family language policy and school choices. In this vein, our paper adds to the understanding of educational choices and language policy processes among Russian-speaking families and the international community in Latvia.
Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrags steht die Frage nach Ursprung und Genese der im geltenden amtlichen Regelwerk niedergelegten Regel, die eine Zusammenschreibung von Adjektiv-Verb-Verbindungen bei Vorliegen einer nicht literalen Bedeutung vorsieht. Ausgangspunkt bilden dabei Sprachtheoretiker und Akteure wie Johann Christoph Adelung, Wilhelm Wilmanns und Konrad Duden, die die Diskussion beherrscht und (dadurch) maßgeblich die erste gesamtdeutsche Rechtschreibregelung im Jahre 1902 mitgestaltet haben. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Umsetzung der Rechtschreibregelung in den orthographischen Wörterbüchern. Erst in dieser zeigt sich, inwiefern der gefundene Kompromiss trägt und inwieweit sich die Beteiligten daran gebunden fühlen, in Sonderheit Duden, der mit seinen Wörterbüchern alsbald eine marktführende Position einnahm und über dessen Duden-Rechtschreibung die Regel einer bedeutungsunterscheidenden Zusammenschreibung bei Adjektiv-Verb-Verbindungen letztlich für alle verbindlich wurde.
In einem der zentralen Projekte der Abteilung Grammatik des IDS, Korpusgrammatik – grammatische Variation im standardsprachlichen und standardnahen Deutsch, wird derzeit u.a. die Wortbildung bearbeitet. Es werden auch Erkenntnisse und weiterführende Fragestellungen berücksichtigt, die sich aus dem Ende 2014 abgeschlossenen Projekt zur Semantik der deutschen Konnektoren ergeben haben. Das neue Projekt stützt sich noch stärker als schon das Konnektoren-Projekt auf Korpusauswertungen. Methodik und erste Ergebnisse werden im vorliegenden Text an zwei exemplarischen Fallgruppen demonstriert: Zunächst geht es um eine Reihe konzessiver Subjunktoren der Bildungsmuster ob-/wenn-/wiewohl etc.; sodann um Bildungen auf -falls, die zu den Adverbkonnektoren gehören. Bestand und sich aus dessen Systematisierung ergebende Wortbildungsmuster werden aus Korpusbelegen vervollständigt, und unterliegende Wortbildungsverfahren (im Kontrast zu der Lage bei den Hauptwortarten) werden diskutiert. Dabei zeigen sich unerwartete Mustervarianten, die auch Hinweise auf die Produktivität der Wortbildungsverfahren geben. Schließlich werden die Varianten mit grammatikexternen Metadaten korreliert, wobei die Möglichkeiten des statistischen Tools KoGra-R genutzt werden.
This paper deals with the distribution of word length in short native mythological and historical Eskimo narrative texts. To my knowledge, no Eskimo‐Aleut data have been the object of quantitative linguistic investigation so far. Due to the strong linguistic and Stylistic homogeneity of the examined texts it was assumed that these texts can be subsumed under a single law of word length distribution, if word length distribution of a text is considered as a function of certain of its properties, such as author, language, and genre. So far, word length distribution in texts of a wide variety of languages and genres has been demonstrated to follow distributions of the compound Poisson family of discrete probability distributions. In view of the morphological idiosyncrasies of the Eskimo language in general, which are responsible for an unusually high mean word length of about 4.5 to 5.2 syllables per word in the texts, it is interesting to see whether Eskimo texts show a significantly different behaviour with respect to word length. The results demonstrate that the Eskimo data employed in this study can be fitted well by the Hyperpoisson distribution. Two further discrete probability distributions will be deduced from certain morphology‐based assumptions about Eskimo. It turns out that most of the Eskimo data can be fitted by these two distributions. The question to what extent these results point to a more grammar‐oriented theory of word length is also discussed.
Our paper discusses family language policies among multilingual families in Latvia with Russian as home language. The presentation is based on three case studies, i.e. interviews conducted with Russophones who have chosen to send their children to Latvian-medium pre-schools and schools. The main aim is to understand practices and regards among such families “from below,” i.e. which family-internal and family-external factors influenced the choice of Latvian-medium education and what impact this choice has on linguistic practices.
The paper shows that there have been critical events which both encouraged and discouraged the choice of Latvian-medium education. The wish to integrate into mainstream society has been met by obstacles both from ethnic Russians and Latvians. Yet, the three families consider their choices to be the right ones for the future development of their children in a multiethnic Latvia in which Latvian serves as the unifying language of society.
Prejudice against a social group may lead to discrimination of members of this group. One very strong cue of group membership is a (non)standard accent in speech. Surprisingly, hardly any interventions against accent-based discrimination have been tested. In the current article, we introduce an intervention in which what participants experience themselves unobtrusively changes their evaluations of others. In the present experiment, participants in the experimental condition talked to a confederate in a foreign language before the experiment, whereas those in the control condition received no treatment. Replicating previous research, participants in the control condition discriminated against Turkish-accented job candidates. In contrast, those in the experimental condition evaluated Turkish- and standard-accented candidates as similarly competent. We discuss potential mediating and moderating factors of this effect.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native–nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
Klassische Namen der Offline-Welt sind bei weitem umfangreicher erforscht als die eher kurzlebigen und auch noch sehr jungen Namen der digitalen Welt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden virtuelle Namen als eigene Namenklasse postuliert und unter Verweis auf bestehende Namentypologien verortet. Anschließend werden drei unterschiedliche Typen frei wählbarer virtueller Namen in Videospielen am Beispiel des populären Browserspiels ‚Forge of Empires‘ graphematisch und semantisch analysiert: Gilden-, Städte- und Benutzernamen. Hierfür werden drei Korpora mit je 100 Namen des jeweiligen Typs auf unterschiedliche Muster zunächst hinsichtlich Sprachwahl, Zeichenverwendung und graphematischen Besonderheiten untersucht. Anschließend erfolgt eine Untersuchung der den Namen zugrundeliegenden Benennungsmotive durch induktiv-explorative Kategorienbildung. Zwischen den untersuchten Namentypen kristallisiert sich in der Analyse ein funktionaler Unterschied heraus: Gildennamen priorisieren eine kommunikativ-phatische Funktion, wohingegen Benutzernamen primär Individualität ausdrücken. Städtenamen nehmen dabei eine Zwischenposition ein. Insgesamt fügen sich die verschiedenen Teilergebnisse in das Bild der bisherigen spärlichen Studien zur Namenwahl in Videospielen ein und rufen zugleich zur weiteren Erforschung auf.
Lexicographic data are normally linked with each other in a complex manner. Especially, within the electronic lexicographic context, the following issues are addressed: How to encode these cross-reference structures so that both the lexicographers‘ editorial work with the linking-up is easy to handle and the options of the presentation are adequately flexible. The objective of this paper is to elucidate the presentation of an XML-modelling of cross-reference structures as part of a complete modelling concept. Thereby, the modelling potential of the XML-connected standard XLink and a new lexicographic concept will be brought together with cross-project guidelines for the modelling of link-structures.
Die 21. Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung mit dem Rahmenthema „Vergleichende Gesprächsforschung“ fand vom 21.–23. März 2018 am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim statt. Das Ziel der Tagung war es, Forscherinnen und Forscher zusammenzubringen, die authentische Interaktionsdaten aus vergleichender Perspektive untersuchen. Das Rahmenthema der Tagung ergab sich aus dem steigenden Interesse an vergleichenden Fragestellungen innerhalb konversations- und gesprächsanalytischer Untersuchungen. Die Tagung nahm gezielt Vorgehensweisen und Methoden bei der Durchführung vergleichender Untersuchungen in den Blick. Die Vorträge, Projektpräsentationen und Datensitzungen erörterten 1. das Vergleichen als analytische Grundoperation der Konversations- und Gesprächsanalyse, 2. Vergleiche alternativer Ressourcen und Praktiken für spezifische Handlungen und Aktivitäten in der Interaktion sowie 3. methodologische Herausforderungen einer vergleichenden Gesprächsforschung.
Basic grammatical categories may carry social meanings irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs—a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages—are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension of social perception. In an archival analysis of actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and older people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not with communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and an integral part of social perception.
Using the Google Ngram Corpora for six different languages (including two varieties of English), a large-scale time series analysis is conducted. It is demonstrated that diachronic changes of the parameters of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law (and the parameter of the Zipf law, all estimated by maximum likelihood) can be used to quantify and visualize important aspects of linguistic change (as represented in the Google Ngram Corpora). The analysis also reveals that there are important cross-linguistic differences. It is argued that the Zipf–Mandelbrot parameters can be used as a first indicator of diachronic linguistic change, but more thorough analyses should make use of the full spectrum of different lexical, syntactical and stylometric measures to fully understand the factors that actually drive those changes.
Unterschiede bei Dialektübersetzungen in Abhängigkeit von schriftlichen und mündlichen Stimuli
(2016)
When collecting linguistic data using translation tasks, stimuli can be presented in written or in oral form. In doing so, there is a possibility that a systematic source of error can occur that can be traced back to the selected survey method and which can influence the results of the translation tasks. This contribution investigates whether and to what extent both of the aforementioned survey methods result in divergent results when using translation tasks. For this investigation, 128 informants provided linguistic data; each informant had to translate 25 Wenker sentences from Standard German into either East Swabian, Lechrain or West Central Bavarian dialect, as the case may be. The results show two tendencies. First, written stimuli lead to a slightly higher number of dialectal translation in segmental variables. Second, when oral stimuli are used, syntactic and lexical variables are translated significantly more often in such a manner that they diverge from the template. The results can be explained in terms of varying cognitive processing operations and the constraints of human working memory. When collecting data in the future, these tendencies should be taken into account.
This article deals with narratives of traumatic experiences of parental violence in childhood, told by adult narrators in the context of clinical adult attachment interviews. The study rests on a corpus of interviews with 20 patients suffering from fibromyalgia, who were interviewed in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Nine of the patients reported repeated experiences of parental violence. The article focuses on extracts from two interviews, which provide for a maximal contrast concerning the practices of telling experiences of violence and which are ‘clear cases’ of the practices that are characteristic of the whole corpus. The main differences between the different ways of telling concern:
• With respect to the ascription of guilt and responsibility, parental violence is portrayed as legitimate pedagogic action versus as being evil-minded and guilty without rational justification.
• With respect to the process of the telling, we find narrative trajectories over which an initial vague gloss is increasingly unpacked by reports of highly violent actions versus narratives in which violence is overtly stated and morally ascribed from its very first mention.
Die Veränderung der individuellen politischen Kommunikation ist ein wesentliches Element des Konzepts der Mediatisierung des Politischen. Immer mehr Politikerinnen und Politiker sowie Bürgerinnen und Bürger nutzen digitale Plattformen, um sich politisch auszutauschen und zu informieren. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, inwiefern Politiker/-innen selbst Austauschmöglichkeiten im Netz bieten und somit direkt Kommunikation fördern. Für die vorliegende Studie wurde die Nutzung des Microblogging-Dienstes Twitter durch Politiker/-innen während ausgewählter Landtagswahlkämpfe des Jahres 2011 auf partizipationsermöglichende Elemente hin untersucht. Diese Elemente wurden mithilfe des „Funktionalen Operatorenmodells“ systematisiert und kategorisiert. Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen nicht nur eine individuell ausgeprägte Nutzungsfrequenz der einzelnen Politiker/-innen, sondern auch unterschiedliche Stile der Twitternutzung, die sich als „persönlich-interaktiv“ und „thematisch-informativ“ klassifizieren lassen. In Einblick auf deliberative Strukturen ist die Twitterkommunikation im Politiker-Bürger-Dialog hingegen noch ausbaufähig.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
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.
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.
Lexical resources are often represented in table form, e. g., in relational databases, or represented in specially marked up texts, for example, in document based XML models. This paper describes how it is possible to model lexical structures as graphs and how this model can be used to exploit existing lexical resources and even how different types of lexical resources can be combined.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in the perceptual quality of a text-to-speech system. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of a symbolic representation which was either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic representation is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, post-lexical segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to derive an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.
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.
Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.
The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.
The Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) was established in Mannheim in 1964. Since then, it has been at the forefront of innovation in German linguistics as a hub for digital language data. This chapter presents various lessons learnt from over five decades of work by the IDS, ranging from the importance of sustainability, through its strong technical base and FAIR principles, to the IDS’ role in national and international cooperation projects and its expertise on legal and ethical issues related to language resources and language technology.
We present an empirical study addressing the question whether, and to which extent, lexicographic writing aids improve text revision results. German university students were asked to optimise two German texts using (1) no aids at all, (2) highlighted problems, or (3) highlighted problems accompanied by lexicographic resources that could be used to solve the specific problems. We found that participants from the third group corrected the largest number of problems and introduced the fewest semantic distortions during revision. Also, they reached the highest overall score and were most efficient (as measured in points per time). The second group with highlighted problems lies between the two other groups in almost every measure we analysed. We discuss these findings in the scope of intelligent writing environments, the effectiveness of writing aids in practical usage situations and teaching dictionary skills.
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.
In a recent article, Meylan and Griffiths (Meylan & Griffiths, 2021, henceforth, M&G) focus their attention on the significant methodological challenges that can arise when using large-scale linguistic corpora. To this end, M&G revisit a well-known result of Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson (2011, henceforth, PT&G) who argue that average information content is a better predictor of word length than word frequency. We applaud M&G who conducted a very important study that should be read by any researcher interested in working with large-scale corpora. The fact that M&G mostly failed to find clear evidence in favor of PT&G's main finding motivated us to test PT&G's idea on a subset of the largest archive of German language texts designed for linguistic research, the German Reference Corpus consisting of ∼43 billion words. We only find very little support for the primary data point reported by PT&G.
Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories concerned with different notional facets of the event or situation conveyed by a given clause. They are prototypically expressed by the verbal system. Tense can be defined as a category that relates points or intervals in time to one another; in a most basic model, those include the time of the event or situation referred to and the speech time. The former may precede the latter (“past”), follow it (“future”), or be simultaneous with it (or at least overlap with it; “present”). Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of the event or situation, which may be viewed as a single whole (“perfective”) or with particular reference to its internal structure (“imperfective”), including its being ongoing at a certain point in time (“progressive”). Mood, in a narrow, morphological sense, refers to the inflectional realization of modality, with modality encompassing a large and varying set of sub-concepts such as possibility, necessity, probability, obligation, permission, ability, and volition. In the domain of tense, all Germanic languages make a distinction between non-past and past. In most languages, the opposition can be expressed inflectionally, namely, by the present and preterite (indicative). All modern languages also have a periphrastic perfect as well as periphrastic forms that can be used to refer to future events. Aspect is characteristically absent as a morphological category across the entire family, but most, if not all, modern languages have periphrastic forms for the expression of aspectual categories such as progressiveness. Regarding mood, Germanic languages are commonly described as distinguishing up to three such form paradigms, namely, indicative, imperative, and a third one referred to here as subjunctive. Morphologically distinct subjunctive forms are, however, more typical of earlier stages of Germanic than they are of most present-day languages.
Unter Neologismen finden sich bedeutungsgleiche Ausdrücke (im weitesten Sinne Synonyme), die unter bestimmten Bedingungen sprachliche Unsicherheiten hervorrufen. Das liegt u. a. an ihrer semantisch-konzeptuellen Ähnlichkeit, an nicht abgeschlossenen Lexikalisierungsprozessen, aber es treten auch Zweifel auf, weil es Unterschiede zwischen der Allgemein- und der Fachsprache gibt. Für einige Neologismen ist es auch charakteristisch, dass mehrere morphologische Varianten gleichzeitig in den Wortschatz eintreten, sodass nicht immer klar ist, wann welche präferiert werden. Dass all diese Ausdrücke lexikalischem Wettbewerb und situationsgebundenen Gebrauchsbedingungen ausgesetzt sind und dass sie zu Zweifel führen können, wird in Onlineforen sichtbar. Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie solche Paare/Gruppen korpusgestützt semantisch analysiert und wie sie in deskriptiven Wörterbüchern angemessen beschrieben werden können, um sowohl Gemeinsamkeiten als auch Unterschiede für Nachschlagende sichtbar zu machen. Dazu werden konkrete Beispiele und ein gegenüberstellendes Wörterbuchdarstellungsformat für neologistische Synonyme vorgeschlagen.
Der Beitrag beschreibt einen spezifisch diskurslinguistischen Zugang zu der sprachgeschichtlichen Frage nach durch gesellschaftlich-politische Faktoren hervorgerufenen Umbrüchen. Orientiert an den Foucaultschen Kategorien der Serialität und der Diskontinuität werden diese methodischen Implikaturen auf die Umbrüche 1918/19 und 1945ff bezogen. Das Methodenmodell besteht im Wesentlichen aus zwei Aspekten: Als Faktor von hoher Umbruchrelevanz wird zum einen der soziopragmatische Bezug zu Diskursakteuren hergestellt. Exemplarisch werden zum andern diese Epochen kennzeichnende demokratiegeschichtliche Institutionalisierungsakte im Sinne Searles beschrieben. Damit wird ein Beitrag zur diskurslinguistischen Methodenreflexion geleistet.
Objective: Discrimination against nonnative speakers is widespread and largely socially acceptable. Nonnative speakers are evaluated negatively because accent is a sign that they belong to an outgroup and because understanding their speech requires unusual effort from listeners. The present research investigated intergroup bias, based on stronger support for hierarchical relations between groups (social dominance orientation [SDO]), as a predictor of hiring recommendations of nonnative speakers.
Method: In an online experiment using an adaptation of the thin-slices methodology, 65 U.S. adults (54% women; 80% White; M[age] = 35.91, range = 18–67) heard a recording of a job applicant speaking with an Asian (Mandarin Chinese) or a Latino (Spanish) accent. Participants indicated how likely they would be to recommend hiring the speaker, answered questions about the text, and indicated how difficult it was to understand the applicant.
Results: Independent of objective comprehension, participants high in SDO reported that it was more difficult to understand a Latino speaker than an Asian speaker. SDO predicted hiring recommendations of the speakers, but this relationship was mediated by the perception that nonnative speakers were difficult to understand. This effect was stronger for speakers from lower status groups (Latinos relative to Asians) and was not related to objective comprehension.
Conclusions: These findings suggest a cycle of prejudice toward nonnative speakers: Not only do perceptions of difficulty in understanding cause prejudice toward them, but also prejudice toward low-status groups can lead to perceived difficulty in understanding members of these groups.
Situiertheit
(1993)
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
We present a supervised machine learning AND system which tackles semantic similarity between publication titles by means of word embeddings. Word embeddings are integrated as external components, which keeps the model small and efficient, while allowing for easy extensibility and domain adaptation. Initial experiments show that word embeddings can improve the Recall and F score of the binary classification sub-task of AND. Results for the clustering sub-task are less clear, but also promising and overall show the feasibility of the approach.
Oralität ist gegenüber Literalität historisch primär, und der Übergang hin zur Literalität ist sprach- wie kulturwissenschaftlich einschneidend. Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German), eine erst knapp über 100 Jahre junge, originär ausschließlich mündlich verwendete Kreolsprache, befindet sich gegenwärtig an der Schwelle hin zur Verschriftung. Eine Sammlung von rund 180 spontan schriftlich produzierten Äußerungen dieser noch auf allen Ebenen unnormierten Sprache zeigt von den Unserdeutsch-SchreiberInnen intuitiv zugrunde gelegte Graphem-Phonem-Korrespondenzen. Die Schriftbelege lassen dabei Rückschlüsse zu auf graphematische Kontakteinflüsse sowie auf die mentale Repräsentation von Wörtern bei den SprecherInnen. Diese Erkenntnisse sind, neben ihrer sprachtheoretischen Relevanz, vor allem auch für die noch ausstehende Erarbeitung einer Orthographie von Unserdeutsch von Bedeutung.
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.
This paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementing Reichenbach’s (1947) classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics.
In the context of a Nordic Conference on Bilingualism, it can be a rewarding task to look at issues such as language planning, policy and legislation from a perspective of the southern neighbours of the Nordic world. This paper therefore intends to point attention towards a case of societal multilingualism at the periphery of the Nordic world by dealing with recent developments in language policy and legislation with regard to the North Frisian speech community in the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein. As I will show, it is striking to what degree there are considerable differences in the discourse on minority protection and language legislation between the Nordic countries and a cultural area which may arguably be considered to be part of the Nordic fringe - and which itself occasionally takes Scandinavia as a reference point, e.g. in the recent adoption of a pan-Frisian flag modelled on the Nordic cross (Falkena 2006).
The main focus of the paper will be on the Frisian Act which was passed in the Parliament of Schleswig-Holstein in late 2004. It provides a certain legal basis for some political activities with regard to Frisian, but falls short of creating a true spirit of minority language protection and/or revitalisation. In contrast to the traditions of the German and Danish minorities along the German-Danish border and to minority protection in Northern Scandinavia (in particular to Sámi language rights), the approach chosen in the Frisian Act is extremely weak and has no connotation of long-term oriented language-planning, let alone a rights-based perspective.
The paper will then look at policy developments in the time since the Act was passed, e.g. in the Schleswig-Holstein election campaign in 2005, and on latest perceptions of the Frisian language situation in the discourse on North Frisian Policy in Schleswig-Holstein majority society. In the final part of the paper, I will discuss reasons for the differences in minority language policy discourse between Germany and the Nordic countries, and try to provide an outlook on how Frisian could benefit from its geographic proximity to the Nordic world.
Growing globalisation of the world draws attention to cultural differences between people from different countries or from different cultures within the countries. Notwithstanding the diversity of people’s worldviews, current cross-cultural research still faces the challenge of how to avoid ethnocentrism; comparing Western-driven phenomena with like variables across countries without checking their conceptual equivalence clearly is highly problematic. In the present article we argue that simple comparison of measurements (in the quantitative domain) or of semantic interpretations (in the qualitative domain) across cultures easily leads to inadequate results. Questionnaire items or text produced in interviews or via open-ended questions have culturally laden meanings and cannot be mapped onto the same semantic metric. We call the culture-specific space and relationship between variables or meanings a ’cultural metric’, that is a set of notions that are inter-related and that mutually specify each other’s meaning. We illustrate the problems and their possible solutions with examples from quantitative and qualitative research. The suggested methods allow to respect the semantic space of notions in cultures and language groups and the resulting similarities or differences between cultures can be better understood and interpreted.
Aversion to loanwords may express itself in various ways: deliberate and motivated by ideology of linguistic purism or more implicit and motivated by the strength of one’s national identification and ethnolinguistic vitality. A study of Polish philology students assessed their tendency to choose loanwords versus synonymous native words. The results supported a two-path model of linguistic purism. Social identity (strength of identification) directly predicted avoidance of loanwords, whereas ideological concerns (conservative political views) predicted it indirectly, through purist ideology.
As immigration and mobility increases, so do interactions between people from different linguistic backgrounds. Yet while linguistic diversity offers many benefits, it also comes with a number of challenges. In seven empirical articles and one commentary, this Special Issue addresses some of the most significant language challenges facing researchers in the 21st century: the power language has to form and perpetuate stereotypes, the contribution language makes to intersectional identities, and the role of language in shaping intergroup relations. By presenting work that aims to shed light on some of these issues, the goal of this Special Issue is to (a) highlight language as integral to social processes and (b) inspire researchers to address the challenges we face. To keep pace with the world’s constantly evolving linguistic landscape, it is essential that we make progress toward harnessing language’s power in ways that benefit 21st century globalized societies.