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Situiertheit
(1993)
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.
Durch den Dezentralisierungsprozess in Großbritannien gibt es seit etwa einem Jahr neue Hoffnung für ein dauerhaftes Überleben der gälischen Sprache in Schottland. Mit der Einrichtung eines schottischen Parlaments, das seit Mai 1999 für innere Belange Schottlands verantwortlich ist, ist die gälischsprachige Bevölkerung viel näher an das Machtzentrum heran gerückt.
In the context of the HyTex project, our goal is to convert a corpus into a hypertext, basing conversion strategies on annotations which explicitly mark up the text-grammatical structures and relations between text segments. Domain-specific knowledge is represented in the form of a knowledge net, using topic maps. We use XML as an interchange format. In this paper, we focus on a declarative rule language designed to express conversion strategies in terms of text-grammatical structures and hypertext results. The strategies can be formulated in a concise formal syntax which is independend of the markup, and which can be transformed automatically into executable program code.
Der Kurzbeitrag berichtet über ein Projekt ”Hypertextualisierung auf textgrammatischer Grundlage“ (HyTex), in dem erforscht wird, wie sich linear organisierte Dokumente mit semiautomatischen Methoden auf der Grundlage von textgrammatischem Markup und der linguistisch motivierten Modellierung terminologischen Wissens in delinearisierte Hyperdokumente überführen lassen. Ziel ist es, eine Sammlung von Fachtexten so in einen Hypertext zu überführen, dass terminologiebedingte Verständnisschwierigkeiten beim Lesen durch entsprechende Linkangebote aufgelöst werden, so dass die Fachtexte auch von Semi-Experten der Domäne selektiv gelesen werden können. Der Schwerpunkt des Beitrags liegt auf der Modellierung terminologischen Wissens mit XML Topic Maps und dessen Stellenwert für die automatische Erzeugung von Hyperlinks.
Generierung von Linkangeboten zur Rekonstruktion terminologiebedingter Wissensvoraussetzungen
(2002)
Dieser Beitrag skizziert Strategien zur (semi-)automatischen Annotation von definitorischen Textsegmenten und Termverwendungsinstanzen auf der Grundlage grammatisch annotierter Korpora. Ziel unserer Überlegungen ist es, bei der selektiven Rezeption von Fachtexten in einer Hypertextumgebung die je spezifischen Wissensvoraussetzungen, die der Verwendung von Fachtermini unterliegen und die für das Textverständnis eine entscheidende Rolle spielen, über automatisch generierte Linkangebote rekonstruierbar zu machen.
The paper investigates the evolution of document grammars from a linguistic point of view. Document grammars have been developed in the past decades in order to formalize knowledge on the structure of textual information. A well-known instance of a document grammar is the »Document Type Definition« (DTD) as part of the Extensible Markup Language (XML). DTDs allow to define so-called tree grammars that constrain the application of tag-sets in the process of annotation of a document. In an XML-based document workflow, DTDs play a crucial role for validation and transforming huge amounts of texts in standardized data formats. An interesting point in the development of XML DTDs is the fact that the restriction of the formal expressiveness paved the way to understand the formal properties of document grammars better and to develop more a powerful version like XML Schema recently. In this sense, the simplicity of the original approach, resulting from the necessary restriction of previous approaches, yielded new complexity on formally understood grounds.
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.
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.
Automatic summarization systems usually are trained and evaluated in a particular domain with fixed data sets. When such a system is to be applied to slightly different input, labor- and cost-intensive annotations have to be created to retrain the system. We deal with this problem by providing users with a GUI which allows them to correct automatically produced imperfect summaries. The corrected summary in turn is added to the pool of training data. The performance of the system is expected to improve as it adapts to the new domain.
In this contribution we present some work of the R&D European project “LIRICS” and of the ISO/TC 37/SC 4 committee related to the topic of interoperability and re-use of language resources. We introduce some basic mechanisms of the standardization work in ISO and describe in more details the general approach on how to cope with the annotation of language data within ISO.
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.
The present study examines the dynamics of the kanji combinations that form common (or general) and proper nouns in Japanese. The following three results were obtained. First, the degree of distribution results from two similar processes which are based on a steady-state of birth-and-death processes with different birth and death rates, resulting in a positive negative binomial distribution with the proper nouns and in a positive Waring distribution with common nouns. Second, all rank-frequency distributions follow the negative hypergeometric distribution used very frequently in ranking problems. Third, the building of kanji compounds follows a dissortative strategy. The higher the outdegree of a kanji, the more it prefers kanji with lower indegrees. A linear dependence can be observed with common nouns, whereas the relationship between compounded kanji is rather curvilinear with proper nouns. The actual analytical expression is not yet known.
Although there is a growing interest of policy makers in higher education issues (especially on an international scale), there is still a lack of theoretically well-grounded comparative analyses of higher education policy. Even broadly discussed topics in higher education research like the potential convergence of European higher education systems in the course of the Bologna Process suffer from a thin empirical and comparative basis. This paper aims to deal with these problems by addressing theoretical questions concerning the domestic impact of the Bologna Process and the role national factors play in determining its effects on cross-national policy convergence. It develops a distinct theoretical approach for the systematic and comparative analysis of cross-national policy convergence. In doing so, it relies upon insights from related research areas — namely literature on Europeanization as well as studies dealing with cross-national policy convergence.
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.
Complex common names such as Indian elephant or green tea denote a certain type of entity, viz. kinds. Moreover, those kinds are always subkinds of the kind denoted by their head noun. Establishing such subkinds is essentially the task of classifying modifiers that are a defining trait of endocentrically structured complex common names. Examining complex common names of different lexico-syntactic types(NN compounds, N+N syntagmas, NP/PP syntagmas, A+N syntagmas) and from different languages (particularly English, German and French) it can be shown that complex common names are subject to language- independent formal and semantic constraints. In particular, complex common names qualify as name-like expressions in that they tend to be deficient in terms of formal complexity and semantic compositionality.
Beyond the stars: exploiting free-text user reviews to improve the accuracy of movie recommendations
(2009)
In this paper we show that the extraction of opinions from free-text reviews can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations. We present three approaches to extract movie aspects as opinion targets and use them as features for the collaborative filtering. Each of these approaches requires different amounts of manual interaction. We collected a data set of reviews with corresponding ordinal (star) ratings of several thousand movies to evaluate the different features for the collaborative filtering. We employ a state-of-the-art collaborative filtering engine for the recommendations during our evaluation and compare the performance with and without using the features representing user preferences mined from the free-text reviews provided by the users. The opinion mining based features perform significantly better than the baseline, which is based on star ratings and genre information only.
Cette contribution discute différents enjeux dégagés lors d’une étude des pratiques professionnelles plurilingues : ces enjeux ont émergé d’une analyse menée collaborativement par deux équipes de chercheurs, à Lyon et à Paris, participant au projet européen DYLAN (6e programme cadre) et élaborant ensemble l’analyse empirique d’un extrait d’une réunion de travail, enregistrée dans le cadre d’une collaboration sur un même terrain. Cette analyse est l’occasion de thématiser de manière exemplaire un certain nombre de questions surgissant de l’étude des contacts des langues dans les contextes professionnels, concernant aussi bien les enjeux épistémologiques que l'engagement du chercheur sur le terrain.
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
Authors like Fillmore 1986 and Goldberg 2006 have made a strong case for regarding argument omission in English as a lexical and construction-based affordance rather than one based on general semantico-pragmatic constraints. They do not, however, address the question of how grammatical restrictions on null complementation might interact with broader narrative conventions, in particular those of genre. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this oversight by presenting a comprehensive overview of genre-based argument omissions and offering a construction-based analysis of genre-based omission conventions. We consider five genre-based omission types: instructional imperatives (Culy 1996, Bender 1999), labelese, diary style (Haegeman 1990), match reports (Ruppenhofer 2004) and quotative clauses. We show that these omission types share important traits; all, for example, have anaphoric rather than indefinite construals. We also show, however, that the omission types differ from each other in idiosyncratic ways. We then address several interrelated representational problems posed by the grammatical treatment of genre-based omissions. For example, the constructions that represent genre-based omission conventions must interact with the lexical entries of verbs, many of which do not generally permit omitted arguments. Accordingly, we offer constructional analyses of genre-based omissions that allow constructions to override lexical valence constraints.
On the basis of a single case analysis of the emergence of an ethnic joke, this paper explores issues related to laughter in international business meetings. More particularly, it deals with ways in which a person's name is correctly pronounced. Speakers and co-participants seem to orient towards ‘proper’ ways of vocalizing names and to consequent ‘variations’ or ‘deviations’ from them, making different ways of pronunciation available as a laughable. In making such pronunciation variations available, accountable and recognizable, participants reflexively establish as relevant the multilingual character of the activity, of the participants’ competences and of the setting; conversely, they exploit these multilingual features within specific social practices, leading to laughter.
Our analysis focuses on the contexts of action, the sequential environments and the interactional practices by which the uttering of a name becomes a ‘laughable’ and then a resource for an ethnic joke. Moreover, it explores the implications of transforming the pronunciation into a laughable in terms of the organization of the ongoing activity, changing participation frameworks and membership categorizations. In this sense, it highlights the flexible structure of groups and the way in which laughter reconfigures them through local affiliating and disaffiliating moves, and by making various national categories available and relevant.
How to propose an action as an objective necessity. The case of Polish trzeba x (‘one needs to x’)
(2011)
The present study demonstrates that language-specific grammatical resources can afford speakers language-specific ways of organizing cooperative practical action. On the basis of video recordings of Polish families in their homes, we describe action affordances of the Polish impersonal modal declarative construction trzeba x (“one needs to x”) in the accomplishment of everyday domestic activities, such as cutting bread, bringing recalcitrant children back to the dinner table, or making phone calls. Trzeba-x turns in first position are regularly chosen by speakers to point to a possible action as an evident necessity for the furthering of some broader ongoing activity. Such turns in first position provide an environment in which recipients can enact shared responsibility by actively involving themselves in the relevant action. Treating the necessity as not restricted to any particular subject, aligning responsive actions are oriented to when the relevant action will be done, not whether it will be done. We show that such sequences are absent from English interactions by analyzing (a) grammatically similar turn formats in English interaction (“we need to x,” “the x needs to y”), and (b) similar interactive environments in English interactions. We discuss the potential of this research to point to a new avenue for researchers interested in the relationship between language diversity and diversity in human action and cognition.
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.
This article deals with three interrelated phenoma in the information structure of German sentences: the focusing of negative markers, of finite verb forms and of the particles ja, doch, wohl and schon. Focusing of the finite verb is the most important marker of verum focus, as described by Höhle (1988). Focusing of particles can be an alternative means for similar purposes, while focusing of negation seems to be the contradictory opposite of verum focus. It is shown that negation- independently of its information structural status - can be interpreted on three distinct levels of sentence meaning: as an indicator of the non-facticity of a state of affairs, the non-truth of a proposition, or the non-desirability of a speech act. Focusing of the negative marker puts contrastive emphasis on the negative value assigned to sentence meaning on one of these levels. Ve rum focus can be interpreted on the same three levels: as a marker of contrastive emphasis on a positive value of facticity, truth or desirability. The particles ja, doch, wohl and schon refer to sufficient epistemic or interactional conditions for the assignment of a positive or negative value. By focusing such a particle, the speaker indicates that (s)he believes the assigned value to be well justified and insists on establishing it as common ground for further interaction.
This paper deals with the constructional variation of emotion predicates in Estonian. It gives an overview on the constructional types, including information of their quantitative distribution. It is shown that one characteristic of Estonian is the formation of pairs of converses, i.e. pairs of emotion verbs, which have the same emotion semantics but different argument realisation patterns. These converses are based on derivational morphology such as the causative morphem –ta ‘CAUS’. Causative derivation has been adduced in the theoretical literature as support for the assumption that the cross-linguistically wide-spread constructional variation in emotion predicates has its origin in a difference of the causal structure in the verbal semantics. This paper shows that the data of Estonian contradicts this assumption.
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.
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.
This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analysis. An interactional episode involving mock stories to reveal and reproach an inadequate identity-claim of a co-participant is analysed both in terms of practices of membership categorization and positioning. It is concluded that membership categorization is a core element of positioning. Still, positioning goes beyond membership categorization in a) revealing biographical dimensions accomplished by narration and b) by uncovering implicit performative claims of identity, which are not established by categorization or description.
Sexual harassment severely impacts the educational system in the West African country Benin and the progress of women in this society that is characterized by great gender inequality. Knowledge of the belief systems rooting in the sociocultural context is crucial to the understanding of sexual harassment. However, no study has yet investigated how sexual harassment is related to fundamental beliefs in Benin or West African countries. We conducted a field study on 265 female and male students from several high schools in Benin to investigate the link between sexual harassment and measures of ambivalent sexism, gender identity, and rape myth acceptance. Almost half of the sample reported having experienced sexual harassment personally or among peers. Levels of sexism and rape myth acceptance were very high compared to other studies. These attitudes appeared to converge in a sexist belief system that was linked to personal experiences, the perceived probability of experiencing and fear of sexual harassment. Results suggest that sexual harassment is a societal problem and that interventions need to address fundamental attitudes held in societies low in gender equality.
In this article, we examine the effectiveness of bootstrapping supervised machine-learning polarity classifiers with the help of a domain-independent rule-based classifier that relies on a lexical resource, i.e., a polarity lexicon and a set of linguistic rules. The benefit of this method is that though no labeled training data are required, it allows a classifier to capture in-domain knowledge by training a supervised classifier with in-domain features, such as bag of words, on instances labeled by a rule-based classifier. Thus, this approach can be considered as a simple and effective method for domain adaptation. Among the list of components of this approach, we investigate how important the quality of the rule-based classifier is and what features are useful for the supervised classifier. In particular, the former addresses the issue in how far linguistic modeling is relevant for this task. We not only examine how this method performs under more difficult settings in which classes are not balanced and mixed reviews are included in the data set but also compare how this linguistically-driven method relates to state-of-the-art statistical domain adaptation.
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.
Drawing on naturalistic video and audio recordings of international meetings, and within the framework of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and interactional linguistics, this chapter studies how multilingual resources are mobilized in social interactions among professionals, how available linguistic and embodied resources are identified and used by the participants, which solutions are locally elaborated by them when they are confronted with various languages spoken but not shared among them, and which definition of multilingualism they adopt for all practical purposes. Focusing on the multilingual solutions emically elaborated in international professional meetings, we show that the participants orient to a double principle: on the one hand, they orient to the progressivity of the interaction, adopting all the possible resources that enable them to go on within the current activity; on the other hand, they orient to the intersubjectivity of the interaction, treating, preventing and repairing possible troubles and problems of understanding. Specific multilingual solutions can be adopted to keep this difficult balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity; they vary according to the settings, the competences at hand, the linguistic and embodied resources locally defined by the participants as publicly available, the multilingual resources treated as totally or partially shared, as transparent or opaque, and as needing repair or not. The paper begins by sketching the analytical framework, including the methodology and the data collected; it then presents some general findings, before offering an analysis of various ways in which participants keep the balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity in different multilingual interactional contexts.
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.
Dropping out of overlap is a frequent practice for overlap resolution (Schegloff, 2000, Jefferson, 2004) in interaction, as it re-establishes the “one-at-a-time” principle of the turn-taking system (Sacks et al., 1974). While it is appropriate to analyze the practice of dropping out of overlap as a verbal and thus audible phenomenon, a close look at video data reveals that withdrawing from an action trajectory is also an embodied practice. Based on a fine-grained multimodal analysis (C. Goodwin, 1981, Mondada, 2007a, Mondada, 2007b) of videotaped interactions in French, this paper illustrates how overlapped speakers organize the momentary suspension of their action trajectory in visible ways. Indeed, participants do not instantly withdraw from their action trajectory when they stop talking. By using bodily resources, they are able to display continuous monitoring of the availability of their co-participants and of the next possible slot for resuming their suspended action. I therefore suggest analyzing the drop out of overlap as the first step of withdrawal, as definitive, embodied withdrawal can occur later, or, in case of resumption, not at all. Consequently, my paper analyzes withdrawal as a good example of strengthening the analytic concept of embodiment with regard to turn-taking practices in interaction.
We continue the study of the reproducibility of Propp’s annotations from Bod et al. (2012). We present four experiments in which test subjects were taught Propp’s annotation system; we conclude that Propp’s system needs a significant amount of training, but that with sufficient time investment, it can be reliably trained for simple tales.
We present a technique called event mapping that allows to project text representations into event lists, produce an event table, and derive quantitative conclusions to compare the text representations. The main application of the technique is the case where two classes of text representations have been collected in two different settings (e.g., as annotations in two different formal frameworks) and we can compare the two classes with respect to their systematic differences in the event table. We illustrate how the technique works by applying it to data collected in two experiments (one using annotations in Vladimir Propp’s framework, the other using natural language summaries).
Communication of stereotypes in the classroom: biased language use of German and Turkish adolescents
(2014)
Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon of describing stereotypes more abstractly. The LIB is the tendency to use language abstraction for in-group protective reasons. Results revealed an unmoderated LEB, whereas the LIB only occurred when foreigners were in the numerical majority, the classroom composition was perceived as a learning disadvantage, or the interethnic conflict frequency was high. These findings provide first evidence for the use of both LEB and LIB in an interethnic classroom setting.
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.
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.
Feminine forms of job titles raise great interest in many countries. However, it is still unknown how they shape stereotypical impressions on warmth and competence dimensions among female and male listeners. In an experiment with fictitious job titles men perceived women described with feminine job titles as significantly less warm and marginally less competent than women with masculine job titles, which led to lower willingness to employ them. No such effects were observed among women.
Precise multimodal studies require precise synchronisation between audio and video signals. However, raw audio and audio from video recordings can be out of sync for several reasons. In order to re-synchronise them, a dynamic programming (DP) approach is presented here. Traditionally, DP is performed on the rectangular distance matrix comparing each value in signal A with each value in signal B. Previous work limited the search space using for example the Sakoe Chiba Band (Sakoe and Chiba, 1978). However, the overall space of the distance matrix remains identical. Here, a tunnel matrix and its according DP-algorithm are presented. The matrix contains merely the computed distance of two signals to a pre-specified bandwidth and the computational cost is equally reduced. An example implementation demonstrates the functionality on artificial data and on data from real audio and video recordings.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, wie Konnektoren als sprachliche Mittel zur Aktualisierung von zwei Arten konversationeller Aktivitäten eingesetzt werden können, nämlich von intersubjektiven bzw. gesprächsorganisatorischen Verfahren. Auf intersubjektive Verfahren greift ein Sprecher zurück, um in Kooperation mit seinem Gesprächspartner einen gemeinsamen Wissenshintergrund (common ground) zu schaffen. Durch gesprächsorganisatorische Verfahren greift der Sprecher in die gesprächsthematische Struktur des Interaktionsgeschehens ein. In diesem Beitrag wird die Aktualisierung dieser beiden konversationellen Verfahren am Beispiel der kommunikativen Gattung autobiographisches Interview betrachtet. Diese Gattung ist für eine solche Analyse m. E. besonders geeignet, denn sie zeichnet sich durch eine relativ scharfe Trennung der Gesprächsrollen aus, die das Nachvollziehen des Interaktionsgeschehens erleichtert. An einem autobiographischen Interview sind zwei Subjekte beteiligt: der Interviewte, der als Wissensträger gilt, und der Interviewer, der durch seine Rolle als Gesprächsleiter die Wissensvermittlung begünstigen soll. Der Interviewer ist also mit einer zweifachen Aufgabe konfrontiert, denn er muss die anfängliche Wissensasymmetrie ausgleichen und ist zugleich für die Gesprächsorganisation zuständig. Im Folgenden soll am Beispiel des Konjunktors und veranschaulicht werden, wie der Gebrauch von Konnektoren zur Bewältigung dieser beiden kommunikativen Aufgaben beitragen kann.