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Speakers’ dialogical orientation to the particular others they talk to is implemented by practices of recipient-design. One such practice is the use of negation as a means to constrain interpretations of speaker’s actions by the partner. The paper situates this use of negation within the larger context of other recipient-designed uses of negation which negate assumptions the speaker makes about what the addressee holds to be true (second-order assumptions) or what the addressee assumes the speaker holds to be true (third- order assumptions). The focus of the study is on the ways in which speakers use negation to disclaim interpretations of their turns which partners have displayed or may possibly arrive at. Special emphasis is given to the positionally sensitive uses of negation, which may occur before, after or inserted between the nucleus actions whose interpretation is constrained by the negation. Interactional motivations and rhetorical potentials of the practice are pointed out, partly depending on the position of the negation vis-à-vis the nucleus action. The analysis shows that the concept of ‘recipient design’ is in need of distinctions which have not been in focus in prior research.
"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.
"What makes this so complicated?" On the value of disorienting dilemmas in language instruction
(2017)
This paper focusss on the first Slavonic-Romanian lexicons, compiled in the second half of the 17th century and their use(rs), proposing a method of investigating the manner in which lexical information available in the above corpus relates, if at all, to the vocabulary of texts from the same period. We chose to investigate their relation to an anonymous Old Testament translation made from Church Slavonic, also from the second half of the 17th century, which was supposed to be produced in the same geographical area, in the same Church Slavonic school or even by the same author as the lexicons. After applying a lemmatizer on both the Biblical text (Books of Genesis and Daniel) and the Romanian material from the lexicons, we analyse the results and double the statistical analysis with a series of case studies, focusing on some common lexemes that might be an indicator of the relatedness of the texts. Even if the analysis points out that the lexicons might not have been compiled as a tool for the translation of religious texts, it proves to be a useful method that reveals interesting data and provides the basis for more extensive approaches.
In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes from systematic variation in the design of imperative turns, relative to the fittedness of the imperatively mandated action to the addressee’s ongoing trajectory of actions, what we call the “dine of commitment”. We present four points on this dine: Responsive imperatives perform an operation on the deontic dimension of what the addressee has announced or already begun to do (in particular its permissibility); local-project imperatives formulate a new action advancing a course of action in which the addressee is already actively engaged; global-project-imperatives target a next task for which the addressee is available on the grounds of their participation in the overall event, and in the absence of any competing work; and competitive imperatives draw on a presently otherwise engaged addressee on the grounds of their social commitment to the relevant course of actions. These four turn shapes are increasingly complex, reflecting the interactional work required to bridge the increasing distance between what the addressee is currently doing, and what the imperative mandates. We present data from German and Polish informal and institutional settings.
The main objective of this article is to describe the current activities at the Mannheim Institute for German Language regarding the implementation of a domain-specific ontology for German grammar. We differentiate ontology bases from ontology management Systems, point out the benefits of database-driven Solutions, and go Step by Step through all phases of the ontology lifecycle. In Order to demonstrate the practical use of our approach, we outline the interface between our ontology and the grammis web Information System, and compare the ontology-based retrieval mechanism with traditional full text search.
This paper argues that there is a correlation between functional and purely grammatical patterning in language, yet the nature of this correlation has to be explored. This claim is based on the results of a corpus-driven study of the Slavic aspect, drawing on the socalled Distributional Hypothesis. According to the East-West Theory of the Slavic aspect, there is a broad east-west isogloss dividing the Slavic languages into an eastern group and a western group. There are also two transitional zones in the north and south, which share some properties with each group (Dickey 2000; Barentsen 1998, 2008). The East-West Theory uses concepts of cognitive grammar such as totality and temporal definiteness, and is based on various parameters of aspectual usage in discourse, including contexts such as habituals, general factuals, historical (narrative) present, performatives, sequenced events in the past etc. The purpose of the above-mentioned study is to challenge the semantic approach to the Slavic aspect by comparing the perfective and imperfective verbal aspect on the basis of purely grammatical co-occurrence patterns (see also Janda & Lyashevskaya 2011). The study focused on three Slavic languages: Russian, which, following the East-West Theory, belongs to the eastern group, Czech, which belongs to the western group, and Polish, which is considered as transitional in its aspectual patterning.
This paper argues that a lectometric approach may shed light on the distinction between destandardization and demotization, a pair of concepts that plays a key role in ongoing discussions about contemporary trends in standard languages. Instead of a binary distinction, the paper proposes three different types of destandardization, defined as quantitatively measurable changes in a stratigraphic language continuum. The three types are illustrated on the basis of a case study describing changes in the vocabulary of Dutch in The Netherlands and Flanders between 1990 and 2010.
Connectives are conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs and other particles which share the function of encoding semantic relations between sentences, or rather, between semantic objects some of which can be meanings of sentences. The relata linked by any such relation will fall into one of four distinct categories: they will be physical objects, states of affairs, propositions, or pragmatic options (the atoms of human interaction). Physical objects constitute the conceptual domain of space, states of affairs the domain of time, propositions the epistemic domain, and pragmatic options the deontic domain. The relations encodable in any of these domains can be divided into four basic types: similarity relations, situating relations, conditional relations, and causal relations. Conceptual domains and types of relations define the universe of possible connections between semantic objects.
Connectives differ as to the interpretations they permit in terms of conceptual domains and types of relations. Very few connectives are specialized on relata of one certain category and relations of one certain type. Possible examples in German are später (‘later on’) and zwischenzeitlich (‘in the meantime’), which encode situating relations between states of affairs. Other connectives are specialized on relata of one certain category, but are underspecified with respect to the type of relation. An example is German sobald (‘as soon as’), which can only connect states of affairs, but accepts situating, conditional and causal readings. Connectives of a third group are specialized on relations of a certain type, but are underspecified with respect to the category of the relata. Examples of this kind are German weil (‘because’) and trotzdem (‘nevertheless’), which encode causal relations, but accept states of affairs, propositions and pragmatic options as their relata. Connectives of a fourth group are underspecified both for the category of relata and the type of relation. An example is German da (‘there’), which accepts relata of any category and allows for situating, conditional and causal readings. Connectives like und (‘and’) and oder (‘or’) exhibit an even higher degree of under specification, in that they allow for all kinds of relations and relata.
We present a study on gaps in spoken language interaction as a potential candidate for syntactic boundaries. On the basis of an online annotation experiment, we can show that there is an effect of gap duration and gap type on its likelihood of being a syntactic boundary. We discuss the potential of these findings for an automation of the segmentation process.
A syntax-based scheme for the annotation and segmentation of German spoken language interactions
(2018)
Unlike corpora of written language where segmentation can mainly be derived from orthographic punctuation marks, the basis for segmenting spoken language corpora is not predetermined by the primary data, but rather has to be established by the corpus compilers. This impedes consistent querying and visualization of such data. Several ways of segmenting have been proposed,
some of which are based on syntax. In this study, we developed and evaluated annotation and segmentation guidelines in reference to the topological field model for German. We can show that these guidelines are used consistently across annotators. We also investigated the influence of various interactional settings with a rather simple measure, the word-count per segment and unit-type. We observed that the word count and the distribution of each unit type differ in varying interactional settings and that our developed segmentation and annotation guidelines are used consistently across annotators. In conclusion, our syntax-based segmentations reflect interactional properties that are intrinsic to the social interactions that participants are involved in. This can be used for further analysis of social interaction and opens the possibility for automatic segmentation of transcripts.
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.
The paper will give a concise account of the theory of Lexical Event Structures. The paper has three objectives which correspond to the following three sections. In section 2 I will sketch the theory and discuss the empirical goals the theory pursues (section 2.1) and the semantic components Lexical Event Structures consist of (section 2.2). Section 3 is devoted to linguistic phenomena whose explanation depends on Lexical Event Structures. In section 3.1 I will briefly illustrate in how far Lexical Event Structures are related to phenomena from five central empirical domains of lexical semantics and in section 3.2 it will be shown how Lexical Event Structures function in a linking theory. Section 4 aims to show how the central semantic concepts in Lexical Event Structures can be anchored to concepts which are well-founded in cognitive science. Section 4.1 discusses the event concept employed and illustrates the relation between the perception of movements and the use of verbs of movement. Section 4.2 deals with the concept of volition with respect to the licensing conditions for intransitive verb passives. In section 4.3 the distinction between durativity and punctuality, which has proven relevant for a number of verb semantic phenomena, is tied to the way we perceive events and structure our own actions. Section 5 provides a conclusion.
Abertura/Opening
(2010)
Action ascription can be understood from two broad perspectives. On one view, it refers to the ways in which actions constitute categories by which members make sense of their world, and forms a key foundation for holding others accountable for their conduct. On another view, it refers to the ways in which we accountably respond to the actions of others, thereby accomplishing sequential versions of meaningful social experience. In short, action ascription can be understood as matter of categorisation of prior actions or responding in ways that are sequentially fitted to prior actions, or both. In this chapter, we review different theoretical approaches to action ascription that have developed in the field, as well as the key constituents and resources of action ascription that have been identified in conversation analytic research, before going on to discuss how action ascription can itself be considered a form of social action.
The paper presents the process of developing the AirFrame database, a specialized lexical resource in which aviation terminology is defined in the form of semantic frames, following the methodology of the Berkeley FrameNet (FN). First, the structure of the database is presented, and then the methodology applied in developing and populating the database is described. The link between specialized aviation frames and general language semantic frames, of which frames defining entities, processes, attributes and events are particularly relevant, is discussed on the example of the semantic frame of Flight and its related frames. The paper ends with discussing possibilities of using AirFrame as a model for further developing resources in which general and specialized knowledge are linked.
The English language has taken advantage of the Digital Revolution to establish itself as the global language; however, only 28.6 %of Internet users speak English as their native language. Machine Trans-lation (MT) is a powerful technology that can bridge this gap. In devel-opment since the mid-20th century, MT has become available to every Internet user in the last decade, due to free online MT services. This paper aims to discuss the implications that these tools may have for the privacy of their users and how they are addressed by EU data protec-tion law. It examines the data-flows in respect of the initial processing (both from the perspective of the user and the MT service provider) and potential further processing that may be undertaken by the MT service provider.
Wortgeschichte digital (Digital Word History) is an emerging historical dictionary of the German language that focuses on describing semantic shifts from about 1600 through today. This article provides deeper insight into the dictionary’s “cross-reference clusters,” one of its software tools that performs visualization of its reference network. Hence, the clusters are a part of the project’s macrostructure. They serve as both a means for users to find entries of interest and a tool to elucidate relations among dictionary entries. Rather than delve into technical aspects, this article focuses on the applied logics of the software and discusses the approach in light of the dictionary’s microstructure. The article concludes with some considerations about the clusters’ advantages and limitations.
Taking a usage-based perspective, lexical-semantic relations and other aspects of lexical meaning are characterised as emerging from language use. At the same time, they shape language use and therefore become manifest in corpus data. This paper discusses how this mutual influence can be taken into account in the study of these relations. An empirically driven methodology is proposed that is, as an initial step, based on self-organising clustering of comprehensive collocation profiles. Several examples demonstrate how this methodology may guide linguists in explicating implicit knowledge of complex semantic structures. Although these example analyses are conducted for written German, the overall methodology is language-independent.
The paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation and analysis of multimodality. Each of the tools has specific strengths so that a variety of different tools, working on the same data, can be desirable for project work. However this usually requires tedious conversion between formats. We propose a common exchange format for multimodal annotation, based on the annotation graph (AG) formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools. In the current version of this format the common denominator information can be reliably exchanged between the tools, and additional information can be stored in a standardized way.
This paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation and analysis of multimodality. Each of the tools has specific strengths so that a variety of differ-ent tools, working on the same data, can be desirable for project work. However this usually re-quires tedious conversion between formats. We propose a common exchange format for multi-modal annotation, based on the annotation graph (AG) formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools. In the current version of this format the common de-nominator information can be reliably exchanged between the tools, and additional information can be stored in a standardized way.
The paper presents the results of a survey on lexicographic practices and lexicographers’ needs across Europe that was conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project European Lexicographic Infrastructure (ELEXIS) among the observer institutions of the project. The survey is a revised and upgraded version of the survey which was originally conducted among ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in 2018 (Kallas et al. 2019a). The main goal of this new survey was to complement the data from the ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in order to get a more complete picture of lexicographic practices both for born-digital and retro-digitised resources in Europe. The results offer a detailed insight into many aspects of the lexicographic process at European institutions, such as funding, training, staff, lexicographic expertise, software and tools. In addition, the survey reflects on current trends in lexicography and reveals what institutions see as the most important emerging trends that will affect lexicography in the short-term and long-term future. Overall, the results provide valuable input informing the development of tools, resources, guidelines and training materials within ELEXIS.
Lexical chaining has become an important part of many NLP tasks. However, the goodness of a chaining process and hence its annotation output depends on the quality of the chaining resource. Therefore, a framework for chaining is needed which integrates divergent resources in order to balance their deficits and to compare their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper we present an application that incorporates the framework of a meta model of lexical chaining exemplified on three resources and its generalized exchange format.
This paper discusses an investigation of how senses are ordered across eight dictionaries. A dataset of 75 words was used for this purpose, and two senses were examined for each word. The words are divided into three groups of 25 words each according to the relationship between the senses: Homonymy, Metaphor, and Systematic Polysemy. The primary finding is that WordNet differs from the other dictionaries in terms of Metaphor. The order of the senses was more often figurative/literal, and it had the highest percentage of figurative senses that were not found. We discuss leveraging another dictionary, COBUILD, to re-order the senses according to frequency.
The grammatical information system grammis combines descriptive texts on German grammar with dictionaries of specific word classes and grammatical terminology. In this paper, we describe the first attempts at analyzing user behavior for an online grammar of the German language and the implementation of an analysis and data extraction tool based on Matomo, a web analytics tool. We focus on the analysis of the keywords the users search for, either within grammis or via an external search platform like Google, and the analysis of the interaction between the text components within grammis and the integrated dictionaries. The overall results show that about 50% of the searches are for grammatical terms, and that the users shift from texts to dictionaries, mainly by using the integrated links to the dictionary of terminology within the texts. Based on these findings, we aim to improve grammis by extending its integrated dictionaries.
Annotating Spoken Language
(2014)
As a consequence of a recent curation project, the Dortmund Chat Corpus is available in CLARIN-D research infrastructures for download and querying. In a legal expertise it had been recommended that standard measures of anonymisation be applied to the corpus before its republication. This paper reports about the anonymisation campaign that was conducted for the corpus. Anonymisation has been realised as categorisation, and the taxonomy of anonymisation categories applied is introduced and the method of applying it to the TEI files is demonstrated. The results of the anonymisation campaign as well as issues of quality assessment are discussed. Finally, pseudonymisation as an alternative to categorisation as a method of the anonymisation of CMC data is discussed, as well as possibilities of an automatisation of the process.
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.
Applying terminological methods to lexicography helps lexicographers deal with the terms occurring in general language dictionaries, especially when it comes to writing the definitions of concepts belonging to special fields. In the context of the lexicographic work of the Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, an updated digital version of the last Academia das Ciências de Lisboa’ dictionary published in 2001, we have assumed that terminology – in its dual dimension, both linguistic and conceptual – and lexicography are complementary in their methodological approaches. Both disciplines deal with lexical items, which can be lexical units or terms. In this paper, we apply terminological methods to improve the treatment of terms in general language dictionaries and to write definitions as a form of achieving more precision and accuracy, and also to specify the domains to which they belong. Additionally, we highlight the consistent modelling of lexicographic components, namely the hierarchy of domain labels, as they are term identification markers instead of a flat list of domains. The need to create and make available structured, organised and interoperable lexicographic resources has led us to follow a path in which the application of standards and best practices of treating and representing specialised lexicographic content are fundamental requirements.
It is well known that the distribution of lexical and grammatical patterns is size- and register-sensitive (Biber 1986, and later publications). This fact alone presents a challenge to many corpus-oriented linguistic studies focusing on a single language. When it comes to cross-linguistic studies using corpora, the challenge becomes even greater due to the lack of high-quality multilingual corpora (Kupietz et al. 2020; Kupietz/Trawiński 2022), which are comparable with respect to the size and the register. That was the motivation for the creation of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo, an initiative started in 2013 at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) together with several European partners (Kupietz et al. 2020). EuReCo is an emerging federated corpus, with large virtual comparable corpora across various languages and with an infrastructure supporting contrastive research. The core of the infrastructure is KorAP (Diewald et al. 2016), a scalable open-source platform supporting the analysis and visualisation of properties of texts annotated by multiple and potentially conflicting information layers, and supporting several corpus query languages. Until recently, EuReCo consisted of three monolingual subparts: the German Reference Corpus DeReKo (Kupietz et al. 2018), the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (Barbu Mititelu/Tufiş/Irimia 2018), and the Hungarian National Corpus (Váradi 2002). The goal of the present submission is twofold. On the one hand, it reports about the new component of EuReCo: a sample of the National Corpus of Polish (Przepiórkowski et al. 2010). On the other hand, it presents the results of a new pilot study using the newly extended EuReCo. This pilot study investigates selected Polish collocations involving light verbs and their prepositional / nominal complements (Fig. 1) and extends the collocation analyses of German, Romanian and Hungarian (Fig. 2) discussed in Kupietz/Trawiński (2022).
This paper presents ongoing research which is embedded in an empirical-linguistic research program, set out to devise viable research strategies for developing an explanatory theory of grammar as a psychological and social phenomenon. As this phenomenon cannot be studied directly, the program attempts to approach it indirectly through its correlates in language corpora, which is justified by referring to the core tenets of Emergent Grammar. The guiding principle for identifying such corpus correlates of grammatical regularities is to imitate the psychological processes underlying the emergent nature of these regularities. While previous work in this program focused on syntagmatic structures, the current paper goes one step further by investigating schematic structures that involve paradigmatic variation. It introduces and explores a general strategy by which corpus correlates of such structures may be uncovered, and it further outlines how these correlates may be used to study the nature of the psychologically real schematic structures.
Phonesthemes (Firth 1930) are sublexical constructions that have an effect on the lexico-grammatical continuum: they are recurring form-meaning associations that occur more often than by chance but not systematically (Abramova/Fernandez/Sangati 2013). Phonesthemes have been shown (Bergen 2004) to affect psycholinguistic language processing; they organise the mental lexicon. Phonesthemes appear over time to emerge as driven by language use as indexical rather than purely iconic constructions in the lexicon (Smith 2016; Bergen 2004; Flaksman 2020). Phonesthemes are acknowledged in construction morphology (Audring/Booij/Jackendoff 2017) as motivational schemas. Some phonesthemes also tend to have lexicographic acknowledgment, as shown by etymologist Liberman (2010), although this relevance and cohesion appears to be highly variable as we will show in this paper.
The contribution will focus on aspects of pluricentricity in spoken Standard German. After a brief overview over the historical and dialectal background of the linguistic diversity in the German speaking area, the regionally balanced speech-corpus "German today” is presented, which has been collected for the analysis of the (regional) variation of spoken Standard German. Aspects of pluricentric German will be discussed by means of both the distribution of certain phonetic variables and a short analysis of regional differences in the use of certain conversational constructions. It is argued that pluricentric structures are constituted by a set of linguistic features on different levels of description. Above all, the analysis tries to reveal traces of the impact of both traditional dialects and national or even subnational political units on the constitution of the standard varieties.
In this paper we address the question of what is needed, in terms of morphosyntactic encoding, to relate a so-called verb-specific modifier to a nominal head. For the purposes of this paper we shall assume that the notion of a verb-specific modifier includes adverbs and their phrasal or clausal projections, adpositional phrases, and noun phrases featuring a particular semantic case such as locative or instrumental. Noun-specific modifiers, in turn, are considered to be first and foremost adjectives and adjective phrases, next participles and their phrasal projections and, finally, relative clauses.1 The basic motivation underlying this distinction relates to markedness.
We use a convolutional neural network to perform authorship identification on a very homogeneous dataset of scientific publications. In order to investigate the effect of domain biases, we obscure words below a certain frequency threshold, retaining only their POS-tags. This procedure improves test performance due to better generalization on unseen data. Using our method, we are able to predict the authors of scientific publications in the same discipline at levels well above chance.
The project Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch (‘Old German Reference Corpus’) aims to es- tablish a deeply-annotated text corpus of all extant Old German texts. As the automated part-of-speech and morphological pre-annotation is amended by hand, a quality control system for the results seems a desirable objective. To this end, standardized inflectional forms, generated using the morphological information, are compared with the attested word forms. Their creation is described by way of example for the Old High German part of the corpus. As is shown, in a few cases, some features of the attested word forms are also required in order to determine as exactly as possible the shape of the inflected lemma form to be created.
In this paper we present the results of an automatic classification of Russian texts into three levels of difficulty. Our aim is to build a study corpus of Russian, in which a L2 student is able to select texts of a desired complexity. We are building on a pilot study, in which we classified Russian texts into two levels of difficulty. In the current paper, we apply the classification to an extended corpus of 577 labelled texts. The best-performing combination of features achieves an accuracy of 0,74 within at most one level difference.
In this paper we use methods for creating a large lexicon of verbal polarity shifters and apply them to German. Polarity shifters are content words that can move the polarity of a phrase towards its opposite, such as the verb “abandon” in “abandon all hope”. This is similar to how negation words like “not” can influence polarity. Both shifters and negation are required for high precision sentiment analysis. Lists of negation words are available for many languages, but the only language for which a sizable lexicon of verbal polarity shifters exists is English. This lexicon was created by bootstrapping a sample of annotated verbs with a supervised classifier that uses a set of data- and resource-driven features. We reproduce and adapt this approach to create a German lexicon of verbal polarity shifters. Thereby, we confirm that the approach works for multiple languages. We further improve classification by leveraging cross-lingual information from the English shifter lexicon. Using this improved approach, we bootstrap a large number of German verbal polarity shifters, reducing the annotation effort drastically. The resulting German lexicon of verbal polarity shifters is made publicly available.