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"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 thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas:
1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation.
2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language.
3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis.
By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing.
The paper reports the results of the curation project ChatCorpus2CLARIN. The goal of the project was to develop a workflow and resources for the integration of an existing chat corpus into the CLARIN-D research infrastructure for language resources and tools in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (http://clarin-d.de). The paper presents an overview of the resources and practices developed in the project, describes the added value of the resource after its integration and discusses, as an outlook, to what extent these practices can be considered best practices which may be useful for the annotation and representation of other CMC and social media corpora.
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.
Song lyrics can be considered as a text genre that has features of both written and spoken discourse, and potentially provides extensive linguistic and cultural information to scientists from various disciplines. However, pop songs play a rather subordinate role in empirical language research so far - most likely due to the absence of scientifically valid and sustainable resources. The present paper introduces a multiply annotated corpus of German lyrics as a publicly available basis for multidisciplinary research. The resource contains three types of data for the investigation and evaluation of quite distinct phenomena: TEI-compliant song lyrics as primary data, linguistically and literary motivated annotations, and extralinguistic metadata. It promotes empirically/statistically grounded analyses of genre-specific features, systemic-structural correlations and tendencies in the texts of contemporary pop music. The corpus has been stratified into thematic and author-specific archives; the paper presents some basic descriptive statistics, as well as the public online frontend with its built-in evaluation forms and live visualisations.
In this paper, we will present a first attempt to classify commonly confused words in German by consulting their communicative functions in corpora. Although the use of so-called paronyms causes frequent uncertainties due to similarities in spelling, sound and semantics, up until now the phenomenon has attracted little attention either from the perspective of corpus linguistics or from cognitive linguistics. Existing investigations rely on structuralist models, which do not account for empirical evidence. Still, they have developed an elaborate model based on formal criteria, primarily on word formation (cf. Lăzărescu 1999). Looking from a corpus perspective, such classifications are incompatible with language in use and cognitive elements of misuse.
This article sketches first lexicological insights into a classification model as derived from semantic analyses of written communication. Firstly, a brief description of the project will be provided. Secondly, corpus-assisted paronym detection will be focused. Thirdly, in the main section the paper concerns the description of the datasets for paronym classification and the classification procedures. As a work in progress, new insights will continually be extended once spoken and CMC data are added to the investigations.
This paper presents a short insight into a new project at the "Institute for the German Language” (IDS) (Mannheim). It gives an insight into some basic ideas for a corpus-based dictionary of spoken German, which will be developed and compiled by the new project "The Lexicon of spoken German” (Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe). The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German” (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK), which is implemented in the "Database for Spoken German” (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch, DGD). Both resources, the database and the corpus, have been developed at the IDS.
This paper presents the prototype of a lexicographic resource for spoken German in interaction, which was conceived within the framework of the LeGeDe-project (LeGeDe=Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch). First of all, it summarizes the theoretical and methodological approaches that were used for the initial planning of the resource. The headword candidates were selected by analyzing corpus-based data. Therefore, the data of two corpora (written and spoken German) were compared with quantitative methods. The information that was gathered on the selected headword candidates can be assigned to two different sections: meanings and functions in interaction.
Additionally, two studies on the expectations of future users towards the resource were carried out. The results of these two studies were also taken into account in the development of the prototype. Focusing on the presentation of the resource’s content, the paper shows both the different lexicographical information in selected dictionary entries, and the information offered by the provided hyperlinks and external texts. As a conclusion, it summarizes the most important innovative aspects that were specifically developed for the implementation of such a resource.
Ph@ttSessionz and Deutsch heute are two large German speech databases. They were created for different purposes: Ph@ttSessionz to test Internet-based recordings and to adapt speech recognizers to the voices of adolescent speakers, Deutsch heute to document regional variation of German. The databases differ in their recording technique, the selection of recording locations and speakers, elicitation mode, and data processing.
In this paper, we outline how the recordings were performed, how the data was processed and annotated, and how the two databases were imported into a single relational database system. We present acoustical measurements on the digit items of both databases. Our results confirm that the elicitation technique affects the speech produced, that f0 is quite comparable despite different recording procedures, and that large speech technology databases with suitable metadata may well be used for the analysis of regional variation of speech.
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.
We present a descriptive analysis on the two datasets from the shared task on Source, Subjective Expression and Target Extraction from Political Speeches (STEPS), the only existing German dataset for opinion role extraction of its size. Our analysis discusses the individual properties of the three components, subjective expressions, sources and targets and their relations towards each other. Our observations should help practitioners and researchers when building a system to extract opinion roles from German data.
We present a testsuite for POS tagging German web data. Our testsuite provides the original raw text as well as the gold tokenisations and is annotated for parts-of-speech. The testsuite includes a new dataset for German tweets, with a current size of 3,940 tokens. To increase the size of the data, we harmonised the annotations in already existing web corpora, based on the Stuttgart-Tübingen Tag Set. The current version of the corpus has an overall size of 48,344 tokens of web data, around half of it from Twitter. We also present experiments, showing how different experimental setups (training set size, additional out-of-domain training data, self-training) influence the accuracy of the taggers. All resources and models will be made publicly available to the research community.
This paper presents three electronic collections of polarity items: (i) negative polarity items in Romanian, (ii) negative polarity items in German, and (iii) positive polarity items in German. The presented collections are a part of a linguistic resource on lexical units with highly idiosyncratic occurrence patterns. The motivation for collecting and documenting polarity items was to provide a solid empirical basis for linguistic investigations of these expressions. Our databe provides general information about the collected items, specifies their syntactic properties, and describes the environment that licenses a given item. For each licensing context, examples from various corpora and the Internet are introduced. Finally, the type of polarity (negative or positive) and the class (superstrong, strong, weak or open) associated with a given item is speci ed. Our database is encoded in XML and is available via the Internet, offering dynamic and exible access.
The authors present a multilingual electronic database of lexical items with idiosyncratic occurrence patterns. Currently, our database consists of: (1) a collection of 444 bound words in German; (2) a collection of 77 bound words in English; (3) a collection of 58 negative polarity items in Romanian; (4) a collection of 84 negative polarity items in German; and (5) a collection of 52 positive polarity items in German. The database is encoded in XML and is available via the Internet, offering dynamic and flexible access.
One of the most popular techniques used in HPSG-based studies to describe linguistic phenomena is the raising mechanism. Besides ordinary raising verbs or adjectives, this tool has been applied for handling verbal complexes and discontinuous constituents, among other phenomena. In this paper, a new application for raising within the HPSG paradigm will be discussed, thereby investigating data from the prepositional domain. We will analyze linguistic properties of word combinations in German consisting of a preposition, a noun, and another preposition (such as auf Grund von (‘by virtue of’)), thus arguing that raising is the most appropriate method for satisfactorily describing the crucial syntactic features which are typical for those expressions. The objective of this paper is thus to demonstrate the efficiency of the raising mechanism as used in HPSG, and therefore, to emphasize the importance of designing a satisfactory uniform theory of raising within this grammar framework.
One of the most popular techniques used in HPSG-based studies to describe linguistic phenomena is the raising mechanism. Besides ordinary raising verbs or adjectives, this tool has been applied for handling verbal complexes and discontinuous constituents, among other phenomena. In this paper, a new application for raising within the HPSG paradigm will be discussed, thereby investigating data from the prepositional domain. We will analyze linguistic properties of word combinations in German consisting of a preposition, a noun, and another preposition (such as auf Grund von (‘by virtue of’)), thus arguing that raising is the most appropriate method for satisfactorily describing the crucial syntactic features which are typical for those expressions. The objective of this paper is thus to demonstrate the efficiency of the raising mechanism as used in HPSG, and therefore, to emphasize the importance of designing a satisfactory uniform theory of raising within this grammar framework.
We present a new resource for German causal language, with annotations in context for verbs, nouns and adpositions. Our dataset includes 4,390 annotated instances for more than 150 different triggers. The annotation scheme distinguishes three different types of causal events (CONSEQUENCE, MOTIVATION, PURPOSE). We also provide annotations for semantic roles, i.e. of the cause and effect for the causal event as well as the actor and affected party, if present. In the paper, we present inter-annotator agreement scores for our dataset and discuss problems for annotating causal language. Finally, we present experiments where we frame causal annotation as a sequence labelling problem and report baseline results for the prediciton of causal arguments and for predicting different types of causation.
The paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
This paper describes the lexical database tool LOLA (Linguistic-Oriented Lexical database Approach) which has been developed for the construction and maintenance of lexicons for the machine translation system LMT. First, the requirements such a tool should meet are discussed, then LMT and the lexical information it requires, and some issues concerning vocabulary acquisition are presented. Afterwards the architecture and the components of the LOLA system are described and it is shown how we tried to meet the requirements worked out earlier. Although LOLA originally has been designed and implemented for the German-English LMT prototype, it aimed from the beginning at a representation of lexical data that can be reused for other LMT or MT prototypes or even other NLP applications. A special point of discussion will therefore be the adaptability of the tool and its components as well as the reusability of the lexical data stored in the database for the lexicon development for LMT or for other applications.
A Supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets from German text
(2019)
We present the first systematic supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets on German language data. A wide choice of different features is presented, particularly syntactic features and generalization features. We point out specific differences between opinion sources and targets. Moreover, we explain why implicit sources can be extracted even with fairly generic features. In order to ensure comparability our classifier is trained and tested on the dataset of the STEPS shared task.
This paper describes work in progress on I5, a TEI-based document grammar for the corpus holdings of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim and the text model used by IDS in its work. The paper begins with background information on the nature and purposes of the corpora collected at IDS and the motivation for the I5 project (section 1). It continues with a description of the origin and history of the IDS text model (section 2), and a description (section 3) of the techniques used to automate, as far as possible, the preparation of the ODD file documenting the IDS text model. It ends with some concluding remarks (section 4). A survey of the additional features of the IDS-XCES realization of the IDS text model is given in an appendix.
The paper presents an XML schema for the representation of genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC) that is compliant with the encoding framework defined by the TEI. It was designed for the annotation of CMC documents in the project Deutsches Referenzkorpus zur internetbasierten Kommunikation (DeRiK), which aims at building a corpus on language use in the most popular CMC genres on the German-speaking Internet. The focus of the schema is on those CMC genres which are written and dialogic―such as forums, bulletin boards, chats, instant messaging, wiki and weblog discussions, microblogging on Twitter, and conversation on “social network” sites.
The schema provides a representation format for the main structural features of CMC discourse as well as elements for the annotation of those units regarded as “typical” for language use on the Internet. The schema introduces an element <posting>, which describes stretches of text that are sent to the server by a user at a certain point in time. Postings are the main constituting elements of threads and logfiles, which, in our schema, are the two main types of CMC macrostructures. For the microlevel of CMC documents (that is, the structure of the <posting> content), the schema introduces elements for selected features of Internet jargon such as emoticons, interaction words and addressing terms. It allows for easy anonymization of CMC data for purposes in which the annotated data are made publicly available and includes metadata which are necessary for referencing random excerpts from the data as references in dictionary entries or as results of corpus queries.
Documentation of the schema as well as encoding examples can be retrieved from the web at http://www.empirikom.net/bin/view/Themen/CmcTEI. The schema is meant to be a core model for representing CMC that can be modified and extended by others according to their own specific perspectives on CMC data. It could be a first step towards an integration of features for the representation of CMC genres into a future new version of the TEI Guidelines.
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.
This paper presents Release 2.0 of the SALSA corpus, a German resource for lexical semantics. The new corpus release provides new annotations for German nouns, complementing the existing annotations of German verbs in Release 1.0. The corpus now includes around 24,000 sentences with more than 36,000 annotated instances. It was designed with an eye towards NLP applications such as semantic role labeling but will also be a useful resource for linguistic studies in lexical semantics.
The transition between phases of activities is a practical problem which participants in an interaction have to deal with routinely. In meetings, the sequence of phases of activity is often outlined by a written agenda. However, transitions still have to be accomplished by local interactional work of the participants. In a detailed conversation analytic case study based on video-data, it is shown how participants collaboratively accomplish an emergent interactional state of affairs (a break-like activity) which differs widely from the state of affairs which was projected by awritten agenda (the next presentation), although in doing so, the participants still show their continuous orientation to the agenda. The paper argues that the reconstruction of emergent developments in interaction calls for a multimodal analysis of interaction, because the fine-grained multimodal co-ordination of bodily and verbal resources provides for opportunities of sequentially motivated, relevant next actions. These, however, can amount to emergent activity sequences, which may be at odds with the activity types which are projected by an interactional agenda or expected on behalf of some institutional routine.
American English and German AI, AU observed in cognates such as Wein, wine, Haus, house are usually treated on a par, represented with the same initial vowel (cf. [ai], [au] for Am. Engl, and German [1]). Yet, acoustic measurements indicate differences as the relevant trajectories characteristically cross in Am. Engl, but not in German. These data may indicate consistency with the same initial target for these diphthongs in German, supporting the choice of the same Symbol /a/ in phonemic representation, as opposed to distinct targets (and distinct initial phonemes) in American English.
A model of grammar needs to reconcile the undesirability inherent to allomorphy, the apparent extra burden on learning and memory, with its occurrence and possible stability. OT approaches this task by positing an anti-allomorphy constraint, henceforth referred to as "OO-correspondence", which requires leveling (i.e. sameness of sound structure) in related word forms (Benua 1997). The occurrence of allomorphy then indicates crucial domination of OO-correspondence by other constraints. To assess the adequacy of this proposal it is necessary to establish the level of abstractness at which OO-correspondence applies and to examine the consequences of this decision for ranking order. While proponents of OT tacitly assume the level in question to be rather concrete, the notion of allomorphy as originally envisioned in Structuralism was defined by distinctness at a more abstract level referred to as "phonemic" (Harris 1942; Nida 1944). The basic intuition here is that the defining property of subphonemic sound properties, their conditionedness by context, entails that whatever burden they put on learning and memory is of a fundamentally different nature than that entailed by phonemic distinctness. The evidence from German supports that intuition in that leveling can be shown to target phonemic sound structure to the exclusion of subphonemic properties. Allomorphy, defined by phonemic alterna-tion, tends to serve phonological optimization in closed class items (function words, affixes) while serving to express morphological distinctions in open class items. The key to demonstrating the correlations in question lies in the discernment of phonemic structure, which is therefore at the core of the article.
Terminological resources play a central role in the organization and retrieval of scientific texts. Both simple keyword lists and advanced modelings of relationships between terminological concepts can make a most valuable contribution to the analysis, classification, and finding of appropriate digital documents, either on the web or within local repositories. This seems especially true for long-established scientific fields with elusive theoretical and historical branches, where the use of terminology within documents from different origins is often far from being consistent. In this paper, we report on the progress of a linguistically motivated project on the onomasiological re-modeling of the terminological resources for the grammatical information system grammis. We present the design principles and the results of their application. In particular, we focus on new features for the authoring backend and discuss how these innovations help to evaluate existing, loosely structured terminological content, as well as to efficiently deal with automatic term extraction. Furthermore, we introduce a transformation to a future SKOS representation. We conclude with a positioning of our resources with regard to the Knowledge Organization discourse and discuss how a highly complex information environment like grammis benefits from the re-designed terminological KOS.
The paper reports on a dictionary of German loanwords in the languages of the South Pacific that is compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. The loanwords described in this dictionary mainly result from language contact between 1884 and 1914, when the German empire was in possession of large areas of the South Pacific where overall more than 700 indigenous languages were spoken. The dictionary is designed as an electronic XML-based resource from which an internet dictionary and a printed dictionary can be derived. Its printed version is intended as an ‘inverted loanword dictionary’, that is, a dictionary that – in contrast to the usual praxis in loanword lexicography – lemmatizes the words of a source language that have been borrowed by other languages. Each of the loanwords will be described with respect to its form and meaning and the contact situation in which it was borrowed. Among the outer texts of the dictionary are (i) a list of all sources with bibliographic and archival information, (ii) a commentary on each source, (iii) a short history of the language contact with German for each target language, and perhaps (iv) facsimiles of source texts.The dictionary is supposed to (i) help to reconstruct the history of language contact of the source language, (ii) provide evidence for the cultural contact between the populations speaking the source and the target languages, (iii) enable linguistic theories about the systematic changes of the semantic, morphosyntactic, or phonological lexical properties of the source language when its words are borrowed into genetically and typologically different languages, and (iv) establish a thoroughly described case for testing typological theories of borrowing.
Just like most varieties of West Germanic, virtually all varieties of German use a construction in which a cognate of the English verb 'do' (standard German 'tun') functions as an auxiliary and selects another verb in the bare infinitive, a construction known as 'do'-periphrasis or 'do'-support. The present paper provides an Optimality Theoretic (OT) analysis of this phenomenon. It builds on a previous analysis by Bader and Schmid (An OT-analysis of 'do'-support in Modern German, 2006) but (i) extends it from root clauses to subordinate clauses and (ii) aims to capture all of the major distributional patterns found across (mostly non-standard) varieties of German. In so doing, the data are used as a testing ground for different models of German clause structure. At first sight, the occurrence of 'do' in subordinate clauses, as found in many varieties, appears to support the standard CP-IP-VP analysis of German. In actual fact, however, the full range of data turn out to challenge, rather than support, this model. Instead, I propose an analysis within the IP-less model by Haider (Deutsche Syntax - generativ. Vorstudien zur Theorie einer projektiven Grammatik, Narr, Tübingen, 1993 et seq.). In sum, the 'do'-support data will be shown to have implications not only for the analysis of clause structure but also for the OT constraints commonly assumed to govern the distribution of 'do', for the theory of non-projecting words (Toivonen in Non-projecting words, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2003) as well as research on grammaticalization.
MRI data of German vowels and consonants was acquired for 9 speakers. In this paper tongue contours for the vowels were analyzed using the three-mode factor analysis technique PARAFAC. After some difficulties, probably related to what constitutes an adequate speaker sample for this three-mode technique to work, a stable two-factor solution was extracted that explained about 90% of the variance. Factor 1 roughly captured the dimension low back to high front; Factor 2 that from mid front to high back. These factors are compared with earlier models based on PARAFAC. These analyses were based on midsagittal contours; the paper concludes by illustrating from coronal and axial sections how non-midline information could be incorporated into this approach.
Distributional models of word use constitute an indispensable tool in corpus based lexicological research for discovering paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic patterns (Belica et al. 2010). Recently, word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013) have revived the field by allowing to construct and analyze distributional models on very large corpora. This is accomplished by reducing the very high dimensionality of word cooccurrence contexts, the size of the vocabulary, to few dimensions, such as 100-200. However, word use and meaning can vary widely along dimensions such as domain, register, and time, and word embeddings tend to represent only the most prevalent meaning. In this paper we thus construct domain specific word embeddings to allow for systematically analyzing variations in word use. Moreover, we also demonstrate how to reconstruct domain specific co-occurrence contexts from the dense word embeddings.
Anaphora by pronouns
(1983)
An adequate conception of anaphora is still a desideratum. Considering the anaphoric use of third-person personal pronouns, the present study contributes to the solution of the question of what anaphora is. Major tenets of generative approaches to pronominal anaphora are surveyed; descriptive and methodological problems with transformational as well as interpretive treatments are discussed. The prevailing assumption that anaphora is a syntactically based phenomenon is shown tobe inadequate. In particular, it is argued that pronominal anaphora does not constitute a case of eilher a syntactic ( agreement) relation or a semantic ( coreference) relation between antecedents and anaphors, i.e. linguistic expressions. Infact, there is no grammatical antecedent-anaphor relation that is essential to the description of pronouns. Pronouns are to be treated in their own right rather than by recourse to supposed antecedents. An account of the use of pronouns has to be based on a notion of speaker reference and on a unified description of lexical entries for pronouns that specify their meanings. Sampie entries for English are suggested. It is emphasized that pronoun meanings rejlect social, not biological, classifications of possible referents. To the extent that pronouns are used according to morphosyntactic features, as in languages like German or French, lexical entries for pronouns should specify the pronouns' 'associative potential'. Associative potential has the samefunction as conceptual meaning, viz. delimiting the associated extension. In addition to this, pronouns turn out to differ from 'normal definite nominals' only in the low conceptual content of their meanings. Pronoun occurrences that apparently agree with and are coreferential with referential antecedents are found to form a restricted subclass of pronoun use in generat as weil as of anaphoric pronoun use. Thus one must refrainfromforcing each and every pronoun occurrence into this mold. Instead, anaphora by pronouns is characterized as a type of use where pronouns serve to refer to referents that the speaker considers to be retrievable from the universe-of-discourse.
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.
Between classical symbolic word sense disambiguation (wsd) using explicit deep semantic representations of sentences and texts and statistical wsd using word co-occurrence information, there is a recent tendency towards mediating methods. Similar to so-called lightweight semantics (Marek, 2009) we suggest to only make sparse use of semantic information. We describe an approximation model based upon flat underspecified discourse representation structures (FUDRSs, cf. Eberle, 2004) that weighs knowledge about context structure, lexical semantic restrictions and interpretation preferences. We give a catalogue of guidelines for human annotation of texts by corresponding indicators. Using this, the reliability of an analysis tool that implements the model can be tested with respect to annotation precision and disambiguation prediction and how both can be improved by bootstrapping the knowledge of the system using corpus information. For the balanced test corpus considered the recognition rate of the preferred reading is 80-90% (depending on the smoothing of parse errors).
This dissertation offers a qualitative analysis of verbal interactions in German television talk shows between 1989 and 1994. It investigates how Speakers of German formulate their own and others’ affiliation to national identities and social spaces. In particular, it examines classifications of place, person, and time that include group and place names as well as grammatically complex expressions, deictic pronouns and adverbs, and certain motion verbs. In addition, repair is discussed as a resource in re-formulating identities.
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
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.
Language attitudes may be differentiated into attitudes towards speakers and attitudes towards languages. However, to date, no systematic and differentiated instrument exists that measures attitudes towards language. Accordingly, we developed, validated, and applied the Attitudes Towards Languages (AToL) scale in four studies. In Study 1, we selected 15 items for the AToL scale, which represented the three dimensions of value, sound, and structure. The following studies replicated and validated the three-factor structure and differential mean profiles along the three dimensions for different languages (a) in a more diverse German sample (Study 2), (b) in different countries (Study 3), and (c) when participants based their evaluations on speech samples (Study 4). Moreover, we investigated the relation between the AToL dimensions and stereotypic speaker evaluations. Results confirm the reliability, validity, and generalizability of the AToL scale and its incremental value to mere speaker evaluations.
The effect of manipulation of a speaker’s voice as well as exposure to a native speaker’s utterance was investigated regarding the pronunciation of stops by German learners of French. Three subject groups, a Control (CG), a Manipulation (MG), and a Native Speaker (NG) Group, were recorded on two subsequent days. The MG was presented with a manipulation of their voice on the second day and the NG listened to a native French speaker, while the CG did not receive any feedback. Results show that speakers of the MG and NG were able to extract useful information from the respective feedback and successfully adapted to it. Participants were able to reduce their voice onset time values, although speakers of the NG reduced it to a greater extent.
We present data-driven methods for the acquisition of LFG resources from two German treebanks. We discuss problems specific to semi-free word order languages as well as problems arising from the data structures determined by the design of the different treebanks. We compare two ways of encoding semi-free word order, as done in the two German treebanks, and argue that the design of the TiGer treebank is more adequate for the acquisition of LFG resources. Furthermore, we describe an architecture for LFG grammar acquisition for German, based on the two German treebanks, and compare our results with a hand-crafted German LFG grammar.