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A central goal of linguistics is to understand the diverse ways in which human language can be organized (Gibson et al. 2019; Lupyan/Dale 2016). In our contribution, we present results of a large scale cross-linguistic analysis of the statistical structure of written language (Koplenig/Wolfer/Meyer 2023) we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. To this end, we conduct a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6,500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections, so-called corpora, consisting of ~3.5 billion words or ~9.0 billion characters and covering 2,069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of un. To this end, we have trained a language model on more than 6,500 different documents as represented in 41 parallel/multilingual corpora consisting of ~3.5 billion words or ~9.0 billion characters and covering 2,069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population or ~46% of all languages that have a standardized written representation. Figure 1 shows that our database covers a large variety of different text types, e.g. religious texts, legalese texts, subtitles for various movies and talks, newspaper texts, web crawls, Wikipedia articles, or translated example sentences from a free collaborative online database. Furthermore, we use word frequency information from the Crúbadán project that aims at creating text corpora for a large number of (especially under-resourced) languages (Scannell 2007). We statistically infer the entropy rate of each language model as an information-theoretic index of (un)predictability/complexity (Schürmann/Grassberger 1996; Takahira/Tanaka-Ishii/Dębowski 2016). Equipped with this database and information-theoretic estimation framework, we first evaluate the so-called ‘equi-complexity hypothesis’, the idea that all languages are equally complex (Sampson 2009). We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. This constitutes evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective. We then present, discuss and evaluate evidence for a complexity-efficiency trade-off that unexpectedly emerged when we analysed our database: high-entropy languages tend to need fewer symbols to encode messages and vice versa. Given that, from an information theoretic point of view, the message length quantifies efficiency – the shorter the encoded message the higher the efficiency (Gibson et al. 2019) – this indicates that human languages trade off efficiency against complexity. More explicitly, a higher average amount of choice/uncertainty per produced/received symbol is compensated by a shorter average message length. Finally, we present results that could point toward the idea that the absolute amount of information in parallel texts is invariant across different languages.
One of the fundamental questions about human language is whether all languages are equally complex. Here, we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. We present a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections consisting of ~ 3.5 billion words or ~ 9.0 billion characters and covering 2069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of what we call average prediction complexity. We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. In addition, we show that speaker population size predicts entropy. We argue that both results constitute evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective.
Bislang gibt es keine akkuraten, repräsentativen Statistiken dazu, welche Sprachen in Deutschland gesprochen werden. Zwar wird in verschiedenen Erhebungen nach Muttersprachen oder nach zuhause gesprochenen Sprachen gefragt; aufgrund einiger Mängel im Erhebungsdesign bilden die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Erhebungen jedoch die sprachliche Realität der in Deutschland lebenden Bevölkerung nicht angemessen ab. Im Beitrag wird anhand von drei Erhebungen gezeigt, dass bereits die Instrumente zur Erhebung von Sprache von Spracheinstellungen geprägt sind und dass dadurch die Gültigkeit der Ergebnisse stark eingeschränkt wird. Diese Mängel gelten für Sprachstatistiken im Hinblick auf die gesamte Bevölkerung Deutschlands – Kinder und Jugendliche eingeschlossen.
In der Korpuslinguistik und der Quantitativen Linguistik werden ganz verschiedenartige formale Maße verwendet, mit denen die Gebrauchshäufigkeit eines Wortes, eines Ausdrucks oder auch abstrakter oder komplexer sprachlicher Elemente in einem gegebenen Korpus gemessen und ggf. mit anderen Gebrauchshäufigkeiten verglichen werden kann. Im Folgenden soll für eine Auswahl dieser Maße (absolute Häufigkeit, relative Häufigkeit, Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilung, Differenzenkoeffizient, Häufigkeitsklasse) zusammengefasst werden, wie sie definiert sind, welche Eigenschaften sie haben und unter welchen Bedingungen sie (sinnvoll) anwendbar und interpretierbar sind – dabei kann eine Rolle spielen, ob das Häufigkeitsmaß auf ein Korpus als Ganzes angewendet wird oder auf einzelne Teilkorpora. Zusätzlich zu den bei den einzelnen Häufigkeitsmaßen genannten Einschränkungen gilt generell der folgende vereinfachte Zusammenhang: Je seltener ein Wort im gegebenen Korpus insgesamt vorkommt und je kleiner dieses Korpus ist, desto stärker hängt die beobachtete Gebrauchshäufigkeit des Wortes von zufälligen Faktoren ab, d.h., desto geringer ist die statistische Zuverlässigkeit der Beobachtung.
This paper explores how attitudes affect the seemingly objective process of counting speakers of varieties using the example of Low German, Germany’s sole regional language. The initial focus is on the basic taxonomy of classifying a variety as a language or a dialect. Three representative surveys then provide data for the analysis: the Germany Survey 2008, the Northern Germany Survey 2016, and the Germany Survey 2017. The results of these surveys indicate that there is no consensus concerning the evaluation of Low German’s status and that attitudes towards Low German are related to, for example, proficiency in the language. These attitudes are shown to matter when counting speakers of Low German and investigating the status it has been accorded.
Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size
(2020)
Recently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences where α is a free parameter. Varying this parameter makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting, because textual data are characterized by Zipf’s law, i.e., there are very few word types that occur very often (e.g., function words expressing grammatical relationships) and many word types with a very low frequency (e.g., content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel (consisting of approximately 365,000 articles and 237,000,000 words that were published between 1947 and 2017). We show that, analogous to most other measures in quantitative linguistics, similarity measures based on generalized entropies depend heavily on the sample size (i.e., text length). We argue that this makes it difficult to quantify lexical dynamics and language change and show that standard sampling approaches do not solve this problem. We discuss the consequences of the results for the statistical analysis of languages.
Classical null hypothesis significance tests are not appropriate in corpus linguistics, because the randomness assumption underlying these testing procedures is not fulfilled. Nevertheless, there are numerous scenarios where it would be beneficial to have some kind of test in order to judge the relevance of a result (e.g. a difference between two corpora) by answering the question whether the attribute of interest is pronounced enough to warrant the conclusion that it is substantial and not due to chance. In this paper, I outline such a test.
Who understands Low German today and who can speak it? Who makes use of media and cultural events in Low German? What images do people in northern Germany associate with Low German and what is their view of their regional language?
These and further questions are answered in this brochure with the help of representative data collected in a telephone survey of a total of 1,632 people from eight federal states (Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein as well as Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt).
Status und Gebrauch des Niederdeutschen 2016. Erste Ergebnisse einer repräsentativen Erhebung
(2016)
Wer versteht heute Plattdeutsch, und wer spricht es? Wer nutzt die plattdeutschen Medien- und Kulturangebote? Welche Vorstellungen verbinden die Menschen in Norddeutschland mit dem Niederdeutschen, und wie stehen sie zu ihrer Regionalsprache?
Diesen und weiteren Fragen widmet sich die vorliegende Broschüre mithilfe von repräsentativen Daten, die durch eine telefonische Befragung von insgesamt 1.632 Personen aus acht Bundesländern (Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein sowie Brandenburg, Nordrhein-Westfalen und Sachsen-Anhalt) gewonnen wurden.
Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size
(2019)
Recently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences where α is a free parameter. Varying this parameter makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting, because textual data are characterized by Zipf’s law, i.e., there are very few word types that occur very often (e.g., function words expressing grammatical relationships) and many word types with a very low frequency (e.g., content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel (consisting of approximately 365,000 articles and 237,000,000 words that were published between 1947 and 2017). We show that, analogous to most other measures in quantitative linguistics, similarity measures based on generalized entropies depend heavily on the sample size (i.e., text length). We argue that this makes it difficult to quantify lexical dynamics and language change and show that standard sampling approaches do not solve this problem. We discuss the consequences of the results for the statistical analysis of languages.
This contribution presents a quantitative approach to speech, thought and writing representation (ST&WR) and steps towards its automatic detection. Automatic detection is necessary for studying ST&WR in a large number of texts and thus identifying developments in form and usage over time and in different types of texts. The contribution summarizes results of a pilot study: First, it describes the manual annotation of a corpus of short narrative texts in relation to linguistic descriptions of ST&WR. Then, two different techniques of automatic detection – a rule-based and a machine learning approach – are described and compared. Evaluation of the results shows success with automatic detection, especially for direct and indirect ST&WR.
Die Arbeiten in diesem Band zeigen anhand ausgewählter morphosyntaktischer Phänomene exemplarisch auf, wie ein korpuslinguistischer Zugang genutzt werden kann, um die Vielfalt und Variabilität des Sprachgebrauchs in einer größeren Detailschärfe zu beschreiben, als dies bisher möglich war. Ausgangspunkt ist die Überlegung, dass sprachliche Variation als integraler Bestandteil der (Standard-)Sprache anzusehen ist und somit auch deskriptiv erfasst werden muss. Dabeigeht es zunächst um eine möglichst genaue Beschreibung der Verteilung und Häufigkeit verschiedener Ausprägungen ausgewählter Variablen. Eine umfassende Beschreibung eines Variationsphänomens beinhaltet zudem die Ermittlung und Gewichtung der Faktoren, die die Distribution der Variantensteuern. In diesem Zusammenhang werden Hypothesen aus der einschlägigen Forschungsliteratur unter Verwendung moderner statistischer Verfahren überprüft. Darüber hinaus enthalten die vorliegenden Studien eine explorative Komponente, die sich mit der Aufdeckung neuer Muster, Regularitäten und linguistischer Zusammenhänge befasst. Dabei werden verschiedene korpuslinguistische und statistische Ansätze und Verfahren erprobt und evaluiert.
Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed.
Es gibt viele linguistische Forschungsfragen, für deren Beantwortung man Korpusdaten qualitativ und quantitativ auswerten möchte. Beide Auswertungsmethoden können sich auf den Korpustext, aber auch auf Annotationsebenen beziehen. Jede Art von Annotation, also Kategorisierung, stellt einen kontrollierten und notwendigen Informationsverlust dar. Das bedeutet, dass jede Art von Kategorisierung auch eine Interpretation der Daten ist. In den meisten großen Korpora wird zu jeder vorgesehenen Annotationsebene, wie z. B. Wortart-Ebene oder Lemma-Ebene, genau eine Interpretation angeboten. In den letzten Jahren haben sich neben den großen, ,,flach“ annotierten Korpora Korpusmodelle herausgebildet, mit denen man konfligierende Informationen kodieren kann, die so genannten Mehrebenen-Modelle (multilevel standoff corpora), in denen alle Annotationsebenen unabhängig vom Text gespeichert werden und nur auf bestimmte Textanker verweisen. Ich argumentiere anhand der Fehlerannotation in einem Lernerkorpus dafür, dass zumindest Korpora, in denen es stark variierende Annotationsbedürfnisse und umstrittene Analysen geben kann, davon profitieren, in Mehrebenen-Modellen kodiert zu werden.
In diesem Beitrag versuchen wir darzulegen, unter welchen Umständen introspektive Urteile objektive, quantifizierbare, und empirisch adäquate linguistische Daten sein können. Dazu skizzieren wir, wie die Resultate unserer experimentell erhobenen, relativen Urteilsstudien aussehen, und argumentieren, dass sie eine unverzichtbare Evidenzquelle für die Syntax bilden, weil sie Einsichten in die Architektur der Grammatik erlauben, die mit anderen Mitteln nicht möglich sind.
Quantitativ ausgerichtete empirische Linguistik hat in der Regel das Ziel, grose Mengen sprachlichen Materials auf einmal in den Blick zu nehmen und durch geeignete Analysemethoden sowohl neue Phanomene zu entdecken als auch bekannte Phanomene systematischer zu erforschen. Das Ziel unseres Beitrags ist es, anhand zweier exemplarischer Forschungsfragen methodisch zu reflektieren, wo der quantitativ-empirische Ansatz fur die Analyse lexikalischer Daten wirklich so funktioniert wie erhofft und wo vielleicht sogar systembedingte Grenzen liegen. Wir greifen zu diesem Zweck zwei sehr unterschiedliche Forschungsfragen heraus: zum einen die zeitnahe Analyse von produktiven Wortschatzwandelprozessen und zum anderen die Ausgleichsbeziehung von Wortstellungsvs. Wortstrukturregularitat in den Sprachen der Welt. Diese beiden Forschungsfragen liegen auf sehr unterschiedlichen Abstraktionsebenen. Wir hoffen aber, dass wir mit ihnen in groser Bandbreite zeigen konnen, auf welchen Ebenen die quantitative Analyse lexikalischer Daten stattfinden kann. Daruber hinaus mochten wir anhand dieser sehr unterschiedlichen Analysen die Moglichkeiten und Grenzen des quantitativen Ansatzes reflektieren und damit die Interpretationskraft der Verfahren verdeutlichen.
Sprecher haben (oft unbewusste) Meinungen und Einstellungen zu Sprachen und Varietäten. Ein Weg, solche Spracheinstellungen zu erfassen, führt über quantitative Verfahren (Fragebogen mit offenen und geschlossenen Fragen), mit denen man Daten großer Gruppen – im Idealfall repräsentativ – erheben kann. Im Beitrag werden solche Erhebungen, die am Institut für Deutsche Sprache durchgeführt wurden, vorgestellt, und es werden zwei Instrumente der Spracheinstellungsforschung, die dabei zum Einsatz kamen, naher erläutert: das Allgemeine Sprachbewertungsinstrument (ASBI) und die Attitudes-Towards-Languages-Skala (AToL). Außerdem wird gezeigt, wie dialektometrische Auswertungs- und Visualisierungsverfahren auf Einstellungsdaten angewendet werden können.
Die ansprechende und geeignete Visualisierung linguistischer Daten gewinnt analog zum steigenden Einfluss quantitativer Methoden in der Linguistik immer mehr an Bedeutung. R ist eine flexible und freie Entwicklungsumgebung zur Umsetzung von statistischen Analysen, die zahlreiche Optionen zur Datenvisualisierung bereithält und sehr gut für große Datensätze geeignet ist. Statistische Analysen und Visualisierungen von Daten werden auf diese Weise in einer Umgebung verzahnt. Durch die zahlreichen Zusatzpakete stehen auch weiterhin zeitgemäße Methoden zur Verfügung, um (linguistische) Daten zu analysieren und darzustellen.
Der Beitrag vermittelt einen stark anwendungsorientierten Einstieg in das Programm und legt mithilfe von vielen praktischen Übungen und Anwendungsbeispielen die Grundlagen für ein eigenständiges Weiterentwickeln der individuellen Fähigkeiten im Umgang mit der Software. Neben einer kurzen, eher theoretisch angelegten Einleitung zu explorativen und explanatorischen Visualisierungsstrategien von Daten werden verschiedene Pakete vorgestellt, die für die Visualisierung in R benutzt werden können.
Visualisierungen spielen in den Wissenschaften eine wichtige Rolle im Forschungsprozess. Sie dienen der Illustration von gewonnener Erkenntnis, aber auch als eigenständiges Mittel der Erkenntnisgewinnung. Auch in der Linguistik sind solche Visualisierungen bedeutend. Beispielsweise in Form von Karten, Baumgraphen und Begriffsnetzen. Bei korpuslinguistischen Methoden sind explorative Visualisierungen oft ein wichtiges Mittel, um die Daten überblickbar und interpretierbar zu machen. Das Buch reflektiert die theoretischen Grundlagen wissenschaftlicher Visualisierungen in der Linguistik, zeigt Praxisbeispiele und stellt auch Visualisierungswerkzeuge vor.
This dissertation investigates discourse-pragmatic differences between variably linked arguments appearing in alternating argument structure constructions in the sense of Goldberg (1995) and Kay (manuscript). The properties that are studied include givenness, pragmatic relation (topic/focus), salience of referents, animacy, and others. They derive from the literature on sentence-type constructions such as topicalization and from research on the referential properties of NP form types.
The research carried out here has multiple uses. At the most basic level, it serves as an empirical check on existing characterizations of the pragmatic properties of the relevant arguments that are the result of syntactic and semantic analysis based on introspection alone. For instance, for the epistemic raising alternation involving verbs like seem, the predicted topicality difference between the subjects of the raised and unraised constructions (Langacker 1995) could not be confirmed.
This dissertation also addresses the question what kinds of pragmatic factors, if any, are relevant to argument structure constructions. Based on the evidence of the dative alternation, it does not seem to be the case that the kind of pragmatic influences on argument structure constructions are different or limited compared to the ones found to be relevant to sentence-type constructions.
The kind of research undertaken here can also inform the syntactic and semantic analysis of constructions. In the case of the dative alternation, the discourse-pragmatic characteristics of the variably linked arguments provide evidence that Basilico’s (1998) analysis of the difference between the alternates in terms of VP-shells and a difference between thetic and categorical ‘inner’ predication, on the one hand does not account for all the data and on the other can be re-stated in pragmatic terms other than the thetic-categorical distinction.
In addition to studies of valence alternations, this dissertation also discusses various null instantiation phenomena, which provide further evidence for the need to specify discourse-pragmatic properties as part of argument structure constructions and lexical entries.
Finally, it is suggested that the use of randomly sampled corpus data and statistical modelling throughout this dissertation improves both empirical and analytical coverage.
In the NLP literature, adapting a parser to new text with properties different from the training data is commonly referred to as domain adaptation. In practice, however, the differences between texts from different sources often reflect a mixture of domain and genre properties, and it is by no means clear what impact each of those has on statistical parsing. In this paper, we investigate how differences between articles in a newspaper corpus relate to the concepts of genre and domain and how they influence parsing performance of a transition-based dependency parser. We do this by applying various similarity measures for data point selection and testing their adequacy for creating genre-aware parsing models.
In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/ cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005. 1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing.
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. Or put differently, if less information is carried within the word, more information has to be spread among words in order to communicate successfully. In addition, we find that–despite differences in the way information is expressed–there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways.
The author presents a study using eye-tracking-while-reading data from participants reading German jurisdictional texts. I am particularly interested in nominalisations. It can be shown that nominalisations are read significantly longer than other nouns and that this effect is quite strong. Furthermore, the results suggest that nouns are read faster in reformulated texts. In the reformulations, nominalisations were transformed into verbal structures. Reformulations did not lead to increased processing times of verbal constructions but reformulated texts were read faster overall. Where appropriate, results are compared to a previous study of Hansen et al. (2006) using the same texts but other methodology and statistical analysis.
This paper presents the current results of an ongoing research project on corpus distribution of prepositions and pronouns within Polish preposition-pronoun contractions. The goal of the project is to provide a quantitative description of Polish preposition-pronoun contractions taking into consideration morphosyntactic properties of their components. It is expected that the results will provide a basis for a revision of the traditionally assumed inflectional paradigms of Polish pronouns and, thus, for a possible remodeling of these paradigms. The results of corpus-based investigations of the distribution of prepositions within preposition-pronoun contractions can be used for grammar-theoretical and lexicographic purposes.
In order to demonstrate why it is important to correctly account for the (serial dependent) structure of temporal data, we document an apparently spectacular relationship between population size and lexical diversity: for five out of seven investigated languages, there is a strong relationship between population size and lexical diversity of the primary language in this country. We show that this relationship is the result of a misspecified model that does not consider the temporal aspect of the data by presenting a similar but nonsensical relationship between the global annual mean sea level and lexical diversity. Given the fact that in the recent past, several studies were published that present surprising links between different economic, cultural, political and (socio-)demographical variables on the one hand and cultural or linguistic characteristics on the other hand, but seem to suffer from exactly this problem, we explain the cause of the misspecification and show that it has profound consequences. We demonstrate how simple transformation of the time series can often solve problems of this type and argue that the evaluation of the plausibility of a relationship is important in this context. We hope that our paper will help both researchers and reviewers to understand why it is important to use special models for the analysis of data with a natural temporal ordering.
We present a corpus-driven approach to the study of multi-word expressions, which constitute a significant part of. As a data basis, we use collocation profiles computed from DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), the largest available collection of written German which has approximately two billion word tokens and is located at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). We employ a strongly usage-based approach to multi-word expressions, which we think of as conventionalised patterns in language use that manifest themselves in recurrent syntagmatic patterns of words. They are defined by their distinct function in language. To find multi-word expressions, we allow ourselves to be guided by corpus data and statistical evidence as much as possible, making interpretative steps carefully and in a monitored fashion. We develop a procedure of interpretation that leads us from the evidence of collocation profiles to a collection of recurrent word patterns and finally to multi-word expressions. When building up a collection of multi-word expressions in this fashion, it becomes clear that the expressions can be defined on different levels of generalisation and are interrelated in various ways. This will be reflected in the documentation and presentation of the findings. We are planning to add annotation in a way that allows grouping the multi-word expressions according to different features and to add links between them to reflect their relationships, thus constructing a network of multi-word expressions.
Physicists look at language
(2006)
Ein vergleichender Blick auf die Buchstabenverteilung im Anlaut und im Auslaut von Rufnamen, Familiennamen und Appellativa zeigt, dass die Rufnamen hinsichtlich ihrer Anlaut- und Auslautstruktur besonders distinkt sind. Familiennamen hingegen zeigen sowohl Charakteristika der alphabetischen Verteilung von Appellativen wie von Rufnamen, sind also weniger distinkt, durch die Mischung dieser Charakteristika aber auch als Gruppe gekennzeichnet.
The article investigates the conditions under which the w-relativizer was appears instead of the d-relativzer das in German relative clauses. Building on Wiese 2013, we argue that was constitutes the elsewhere case that applies when identification with the antecedent cannot be established by syntactic means via upward agreement with respect to phi-features. Corpuslinguistic results point to the conclusion that this is the case whenever there is no lexical nominal in the antecedent that, following Geach 1962 and Baker 2003, supplies a criterion of identity needed to establish sameness of reference between the antecedent and the relativizer.