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This article shows that the TEI tag set for feature structures can be adopted to represent a heterogeneous set of linguistic corpora. The majority of corpora is annotated using markup languages that are based on the Annotation Graph framework, the upcoming Linguistic Annotation Format ISO standard, or according to tag sets defined by or based upon the TEI guidelines. A unified representation comprises the separation of conceptually different annotation layers contained in the original corpus data (e.g. syntax, phonology, and semantics) into multiple XML files. These annotation layers are linked to each other implicitly by the identical textual content of all files. A suitable data structure for the representation of these annotations is a multi-rooted tree that again can be represented by the TEI and ISO tag set for feature structures. The mapping process and representational issues are discussed as well as the advantages and drawbacks associated with the use of the TEI tag set for feature structures as a storage and exchange format for linguistically annotated data.
We analyze the linguistic evolution of selected scientific disciplines over a 30-year time span (1970s to 2000s). Our focus is on four highly specialized disciplines at the boundaries of computer science that emerged during that time: computational linguistics, bioinformatics, digital construction, and microelectronics. Our analysis is driven by the question whether these disciplines develop a distinctive language use—both individually and collectively—over the given time period. The data set is the English Scientific Text Corpus (scitex), which includes texts from the 1970s/1980s and early 2000s. Our theoretical basis is register theory. In terms of methods, we combine corpus-based methods of feature extraction (various aggregated features [part-of-speech based], n-grams, lexico-grammatical patterns) and automatic text classification. The results of our research are directly relevant to the study of linguistic variation and languages for specific purposes (LSP) and have implications for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, for example, authorship attribution, text mining, or training NLP tools.
Recently, a claim was made, on the basis of the German Google Books 1-gram corpus (Michel et al., Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science 2010; 331: 176–82), that there was a linear relationship between six non-technical non-Nazi words and three ‘explicitly Nazi words’ in times of World War II (Caruana-Galizia. 2015. Politics and the German language: Testing Orwell’s hypothesis using the Google N-Gram corpus. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities [Online]. http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/fqv011 (accessed 15 April 2015)). Here, I try to show that apparent relationships like this are the result of misspecified models that do not take into account the temporal aspect of time-series data. The main point of this article is to demonstrate why such analyses run the risk of incorrect statistical inference, where potential effects are both meaningless and can potentially lead to wrong conclusions.
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.
Learning from Errors. Systematic Analysis of Complex Writing Errors for Improving Writing Technology
(2015)
In this paper, we describe ongoing research on writing errors with the ultimate goal to develop error-preventing editing functions in word-processors. Drawing from the state-of-the-art research in errors carried out in various fields, we propose the application of a general concept for action-slips as introduced by Norman. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by using a large corpus of writing errors in published texts. The concept of slips considers both the process and the product: some failure in a procedure results in an error in the product, i.e., is visible in the written text. In order to develop preventing functions, we need to determine causes of such visible errors.
The multiple gradations of German strong verbs are but manifestations of a rather uncomplicated system. There is a small number of ways to make up ablaut forms; these types of formation are identifiable in formal terms and, what is more, they have definite functions as morphological markers. Using classifications of stem forms according to quality, complexity and quantity of vowels, three types of operations involved in ablaut formation are identified. Ablaut always includes a change of quality type or a change of complexity type, and in addition it may include a change of quantity type. Ablaut forms are clearly distinguished as against bases (and against each other): their vocalism meets a defined standard of dissimilarity. On this basis, gradations are collected into inflectional classes that are defined in strictly synchronic terms. These classes continue the historical seven classes known from reference grammars. For the majority of strong verbs, membership in these classes (and thus ablaut) is predictable.
The paper gives an analysis of productively occurring dative constructions in German, attempting to unify what are known traditionally as Double Object and Experiencer Datives. The datives in question - cipients as we call them - are argued to be licensed under two conditions: One, predicates licensing cipients project a theme and a location argument internally; two, interpretation of the predication as a whole involves reference to two dissociated temporal intervals, or more generally, indexical truth intervals. It is argued that the location argument is needed because it provides the variable that is bound by the cipient argument - the variable in question ranges over superlocations of the location argument referent. Reference to two truth intervals is forced because interpreting the cipient structure involves evaluation of two propositional meanings that would contradict each other in a single context. The first propositional meaning is embedded in the predicate; it encodes that something is at a certain location (in quality space). The second propositional meaning is projected as a presupposition that corresponds just to the negation of the first one. The cipient, functioning as the logical subject of the construction, accommodates this second presuppositional meaning; this makes the construction as a whole interpretable. The analysis applies uniformly to what appear to be the two major contexts licensing cipients: ‘eventive’ and ‘foo-comparative’ predications, thereby accounting for some striking parallels between them.
As the nature of negative polarity items (NPIs) and their licensing contexts is still under much debate, a broad empirical basis is an important cornerstone to support further insights in this area of research. The work discussed in this paper is intended as a contribution to realizing this objective. The authors briefly introduce the phenomenon of NPIs and outline major theories about their licensing and also various licensing contexts before discussing our major topics: Firstly, a corpus-based retrieval method for NPI candidates is described that ranks the candidates according to their distributional dependence on the licensing contexts. Our method extracts single-word candidates and is extended to also capture multi-word candidates. The basic idea for automatically collecting NPI candidates from a large corpus is that an NPI behaves like a kind of collocate to its licensing contexts. Manual inspection and interpretation of the candidate lists identify the actual NPIs. Secondly, an online repository for NPIs and other items that show distributional idiosyncrasies is presented, which offers an empirical database for further (theoretical) research on these items in a sustainable way.
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.
Antonymy is a relation of lexical opposition which is generally considered to involve (i) the presence of a scale along which a particular property may be graded, and hence both (ii) gradability of the corresponding lexical items and (iii) typical entailment relations. Like other types of lexical opposites, antonyms typically differ only minimally: while denoting opposing poles on the relevant dimension of difference, they are similar with respect to other components of meaning. This paper presents examples of antonymy from the domain of speech act verbs which either lack some of these typical attributes or show problems in the application of these. It discusses several different proposals for the classification of these atypical examples.
Automatic recognition of speech, thought, and writing representation in German narrative texts
(2013)
This article presents the main results of a project, which explored ways to recognize and classify a narrative feature—speech, thought, and writing representation (ST&WR)—automatically, using surface information and methods of computational linguistics. The task was to detect and distinguish four types—direct, free indirect, indirect, and reported ST&WR—in a corpus of manually annotated German narrative texts. Rule-based as well as machine-learning methods were tested and compared. The results were best for recognizing direct ST&WR (best F1 score: 0.87), followed by indirect (0.71), reported (0.58), and finally free indirect ST&WR (0.40). The rule-based approach worked best for ST&WR types with clear patterns, like indirect and marked direct ST&WR, and often gave the most accurate results. Machine learning was most successful for types without clear indicators, like free indirect ST&WR, and proved more stable. When looking at the percentage of ST&WR in a text, the results of machine-learning methods always correlated best with the results of manual annotation. Creating a union or intersection of the results of the two approaches did not lead to striking improvements. A stricter definition of ST&WR, which excluded borderline cases, made the task harder and led to worse results for both approaches.
The project elexiko compiles an extensive, monolingual dictionary of Contemporary German. This contribution deals with the grammatical data in this dictionary; it is not only described how these are arranged content-wise depending on corpus data, but also how they were modelled.
Das Projekt elexiko erarbeitet ein umfangreiches, einsprachiges Wörterbuch des Gegenwartsdeutschen. In diesem Beitrag geht es um die grammatischen Angaben in diesem Wörterbuch; es wird nicht nur erläutert, wie diese inhaltlich in Abhängigkeit vom Prinzip der Korpusbasiertheit gestaltet sind, sondern auch, wie sie modelliert wurden.
Discourse segmentation is the division of a text into minimal discourse segments, which form the leaves in the trees that are used to represent discourse structures. A definition of elementary discourse segments in German is provided by adapting widely used segmentation principles for English minimal units, while considering punctuation, morphology, sytax, and aspects of the logical document structure of a complex text type, namely scientific articles. The algorithm and implementation of a discourse segmenter based on these principles is presented, as well an evaluation of test runs.
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.
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.
In this paper we present an evaluation of rule-based morphological components for German for use in an interactive editing environment. The criteria for the evaluation are deduced from the intended use of these components, namely availability, performance, programming interfaces, and analysis quality. We evaluated systems developed and maintained since decades as well as new systems. However, we note serious general shortcomings when looking closer at recent implementations and come to the conclusion that the oldest system is the only one that satisfies our requirements.
In this paper the authors briefly outline editing functions which use methods from computational linguistics and take the structures of natural languages into consideration. Such functions could reduce errors and better support writers in realizing their communicative goals. However, linguistic methods have limits, and there are various aspects software developers have to take into account to avoid creating a solution looking for a problem: Language-aware functions could be powerful tools for writers, but writers must not be forced to adapt to their tools.
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.
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.
‘Linguistic relativity’ has become a major keyword in debates on the psychological significance of language diversity. In this context, the term ‘relativity’ was originally taken on loan from Einstein’s then-recent theories by Edward Sapir (1924) and Benjamin L. Whorf (1940). The present paper assesses how far the idea of linguistic relativity does analogically build on relevant insights in modern physics, and fails to find any substantial analogies. The term was used rhetorically by Sapir and Whorf, and has since been incorporated into a cognitivist research programme that seeks to answer whether ‘language influences thought’. Contemporary research on ‘linguistic relativity’ has developed into a distinct way of studying language diversity, which shares a lot with the universalistic cognitivist framework it opposes, but little with relational approaches in science.
The authors establish a phenomenological perspective on the temporal constitution of experience and action. Retrospection and projection (i.e. backward as well as forward orientation of everyday action), sequentiality and the sequential organization of activities as well as simultaneity (i.e. participants’ simultaneous coordination) are introduced as key concepts of a temporalized approach to interaction. These concepts are used to capture that every action is produced as an inter-linked step in the succession of adjacent actions, being sensitive to the precise moment where it is produced. The adoption of a holistic, multimodal and praxeological perspective additionally shows that action in interaction is organized according to several temporal orders simultaneously in operation. Each multimodal resource used in interaction has its own temporal properties.
This paper shows how understanding in interaction is informed by temporality, and in particular, by the workings of retrospection. Understanding is a temporally extended, sequentially organized process. Temporality, namely, the sequential relationship of turn positions, equips participants with default mechanisms to display understandings and to expect such displays. These mechanisms require local management of turn-taking to be in order, i.e., the possibility and the expectation to respond locally and reciprocally to prior turns at talk. Sequential positions of turns in interaction provide an infrastructure for displaying understanding and accomplishing intersubjectivity. Linguistic practices specialized in displaying particular kinds of (not) understanding are adapted to the individual sequential positions with respect to an action-to-be-understood.
In Spoken Egyptian, the form of a linguistic sign is restricted by rules of root structure and consonant compatibility as well as word-formation patterns. Hieroglyphic Egyptian, however, displays additional principles of sign formation. Iconicity is one of the crucial features of a part of its sign inventory. In this article, hieroglyphic iconicity will be investigated by means of a preliminary comparative typology originally developed for German Sign Language (Kutscher 2010). The authors argue that patterns found in Egyptian hieroglyphic sign formation are systematically comparable to patterns of German Sign Language (DGS). These patterns determine what types of lexical meaning can be inferred from iconic linguistic signs.
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.
This paper analyses paramedic emergency interaction as multimodal multiactivity. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of emergency drills performed by professional paramedics during advanced training, the focus is on paramedics’ participation in multiple joint projects which become simultaneously relevant. Simultaneity and fast succession of multiactivity does not only characterise work on the team level, but also the work profile of the individual paramedic. Participants have to coordinate their own participation in more than one joint project intrapersonally. In the data studied, three patterns of allocating multimodal resources stood out as routine ways of coordinating participation in two simultaneous projects intrapersonally:
1. Talk and hearing vs. manual action monitored by gaze,
2. Talk and hearing vs. gazing (and pointing),
3. Manual action vs. gaze (and talk and hearing).
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.
"Standard language" is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers. This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed "standard usage". It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project "Variation in Spoken German", Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of "standard usage" in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of "standard usage" inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.
In dem Beitrag werden jüngste Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der Sprachpolitik, der Bildungspolitik und der Integrationspolitik in Deutschland dargestellt, die ein neues Verhältnis zur Mehrsprachigkeit erkennen lassen und die Schaffung zweisprachiger Bildungseinrichtungen ermöglichen. Dieser Beitrag wurde auch in einer englischen Version mit dem Titel "The political framework for creation and development of bilingual Kindergartens in Berlin" veröffentlicht. Sie ist über den Dokumentenserver des IDS zugänglich. Die deutsche Version des Beitrags trägt den Titel "Politische Rahmenbedingungen für zweisprachige Kindertagesstätten in Berlin". Sie ist nicht veröffentlicht, aber ebenfalls über den Dokumentenserver des IDS erhältlich.
In her overview, Margret Selting makes the case for the claim that dealing with authentic conversation necessarily lies at the heart of an interactionallinguistic approach to prosody (see Selting this volume, Section 3.3). However, collecting and transcribing corpora of authentic interaction is a time-consuming enterprise. This fact often severely restricts what the individual researcher is able to do in terms of analysis within the scope of his or her resources. Still, for dealing with many of the desiderata Margret Selting points out in Section 5 of her extensive overview, the use of larger corpora seems to be required. In this commenting paper, I want to argue that future progress in research on prosody in interaction will essentially rest on the availability and use of large public corpora. After reviewing arguments for and against the use of public corpora, I will discuss some upshots regarding corpus design and issues of transcription of public corpora.
One major issue in the accomplishment of contrasts in conversation is lexical choice of items which carry the semantic Ioad of the two states of affair which are represented as being opposed to one another. These items or expressions are co-selected to be understood as being contrastively related to each other. In this paper, it is argued that the activity of contrasting itself provides them with a specific local opposite meaning which they would not obtain in other contexts. Practices of contrastingare thus seen as an example of conversational activities which creatively and systematically affect situated meanings. Basedon data from various genres, such as meetings, mediation sessions and conversations, the paper discusses two practices of contrasting, their sequential construction and their interpretative effects. It is concluded that the interpretative effects of conversational contrasting rest on the sequential deployment oflinguistic resources and on the cognitive procedures of frame-based interpretation and constructing a maximally contrastive interpretation for the co-selected expressions.
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.