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With the advent of mobile devices, mediatized political discourse became more dynamic. I assume that the microblog Twitter can be considered as a medium for spatial coordination during protests. Therefore, the case of neo-Nazi demonstrations and counter-protests in the city of Dresden that occurred in February 2012 is analysed. Data consists of microposts that occurred during the event. Quantitative analysis of hashtag and retweet frequencies was performed as well as qualitative speech act pattern analysis and a tempo-spatial discourse analysis on selected subsets of microposts. Results show that a common linguistic practice is verbal georeferencing and by that constructing space. Empirical analysis indicates a strong relation between communicational online space and physical offline place: Protest participants permanently reconfigure spatial context discursively and thus the contested protest area becomes a temporarily meaningful place.
The understanding of story variation, whether motivated by cultural currents or other factors, is important for applications of formal models of narrative such as story generation or story retrieval. We present the first stage of an experiment to elicit natural narrative variation data suitable for evaluation with respect to story similarity, to qualitative and quantitative analysis of story variation, and also for data processing. We also present few preliminary results from the first stage of the experiment, using Red Riding Hood and Romeo and Juliet as base texts.
Im Beitrag werden ausgewählte semantische und syntaktische Eigenschaften von AcI-Konstruktionen bei Wahrnehmungsverben im Deutschen, Italienischen und Ungarischen anhand einer Korpusanalyse dargestellt. Dabei wird in erster Linie auf Eigenschaften eingegangen, denen in der bisherigen Forschung wenig Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet wurde. Das Hauptziel ist, syntaktische Eigenschaften der Konstruktion aufzudecken, die sich von den Eigenschaften von Sätzen mit einer weniger markierten syntaktischen Struktur unterscheiden. Des Weiteren wird auch auf den Grammatikalisierungsgrad der Konstruktion in den einzelnen Vergleichssprachen eingegangen.
Raksta mērķis ir izvērtēt lingvistiskās ainavas laukā paveikto, apkopojot piecu gadu pieredzi un ieskicējot nākotnes perspektīvas turpmākajos pētījumos un studiju procesa satura plānojumā. Rakstā pamatā ir izmantota deskriptīvā pētniecības metode un kontentanalīze. Būtiskākie secinājumi: Lingvistiskās ainavas izpēte dažādās teritoriālajās vienībās Baltijas valstīs ir notikusi kopš 2008. gada, iesaistot arī studentus un vidusskolēnus. Lingvistiskās ainavas izpētes un metodoloģijas pilnveides rezultātā Rēzeknes Augstskolā (turpmāk – RA) ir izveidota kvantitatīvo un kvalitatīvo datu bāze, izstrādāti daudzveidīgi individuālie un kolektīvie pētījumi.Turpmāk ir plānots lielāku uzmanību veltīt Latgales skolu ainavai un citu iestāžu mikrovides izpētei, Latgales pilsētu datu salīdzinājumam ar citu Eiropas valstu reģionu lingvistisko ainavu, korelējot kvantitatīvos datus ar diskursa analīzes daudzveidīgo pieeju iespējām.
In this article, we examine the effectiveness of bootstrapping supervised machine-learning polarity classifiers with the help of a domain-independent rule-based classifier that relies on a lexical resource, i.e., a polarity lexicon and a set of linguistic rules. The benefit of this method is that though no labeled training data are required, it allows a classifier to capture in-domain knowledge by training a supervised classifier with in-domain features, such as bag of words, on instances labeled by a rule-based classifier. Thus, this approach can be considered as a simple and effective method for domain adaptation. Among the list of components of this approach, we investigate how important the quality of the rule-based classifier is and what features are useful for the supervised classifier. In particular, the former addresses the issue in how far linguistic modeling is relevant for this task. We not only examine how this method performs under more difficult settings in which classes are not balanced and mixed reviews are included in the data set but also compare how this linguistically-driven method relates to state-of-the-art statistical domain adaptation.
Editorial
(2013)
Der Aufsatz diskutiert die Syntax und Semantik von Konstruktionen im Deutschen mit es- und präpositionalen Korrelaten wie "Leo bedauert es, dass Mia krank ist" oder "Leo freut sich darüber, dass Mia gesund ist". Er argumentiert gegen Breindls (1989), Sudhoffs (2003, i.Vorb.), und Freys (2011) Homonymiehypothese, nach der es-Korrelate und präpositionale Korrelate sich jeweils in unterschiedliche syntaktische Kategorien aufsplitten. Es wird eine uniforme Analyse präsentiert, die generell ein Korrelat als eine Proform ansieht, die auf ein abstraktes Objekt referiert. Letzteres ist entweder eine Aussage σ, auf die ein eingebetteter Deklarativsatz oder das Radikal eines eingebetteten wenn- oder ob-Satzes referiert, oder es handelt sich bei ihm um eine kontextgegebene Aussage μ, die eine Antwort auf die eingebettete w-Frage darstellt. Die uniforme Analyse offeriert syntaktische und semantische Erklärungen für die Beobachtungen, die zu der Homonymiehypothese geführt haben.
Dropping out of overlap is a frequent practice for overlap resolution (Schegloff, 2000, Jefferson, 2004) in interaction, as it re-establishes the “one-at-a-time” principle of the turn-taking system (Sacks et al., 1974). While it is appropriate to analyze the practice of dropping out of overlap as a verbal and thus audible phenomenon, a close look at video data reveals that withdrawing from an action trajectory is also an embodied practice. Based on a fine-grained multimodal analysis (C. Goodwin, 1981, Mondada, 2007a, Mondada, 2007b) of videotaped interactions in French, this paper illustrates how overlapped speakers organize the momentary suspension of their action trajectory in visible ways. Indeed, participants do not instantly withdraw from their action trajectory when they stop talking. By using bodily resources, they are able to display continuous monitoring of the availability of their co-participants and of the next possible slot for resuming their suspended action. I therefore suggest analyzing the drop out of overlap as the first step of withdrawal, as definitive, embodied withdrawal can occur later, or, in case of resumption, not at all. Consequently, my paper analyzes withdrawal as a good example of strengthening the analytic concept of embodiment with regard to turn-taking practices in interaction.
Sexual harassment severely impacts the educational system in the West African country Benin and the progress of women in this society that is characterized by great gender inequality. Knowledge of the belief systems rooting in the sociocultural context is crucial to the understanding of sexual harassment. However, no study has yet investigated how sexual harassment is related to fundamental beliefs in Benin or West African countries. We conducted a field study on 265 female and male students from several high schools in Benin to investigate the link between sexual harassment and measures of ambivalent sexism, gender identity, and rape myth acceptance. Almost half of the sample reported having experienced sexual harassment personally or among peers. Levels of sexism and rape myth acceptance were very high compared to other studies. These attitudes appeared to converge in a sexist belief system that was linked to personal experiences, the perceived probability of experiencing and fear of sexual harassment. Results suggest that sexual harassment is a societal problem and that interventions need to address fundamental attitudes held in societies low in gender equality.
An experiment on the English caused motion construction in adult- and child-directed speech was conducted to assess in how far (i) verbal frequency biases and (ii) a register-specific preference for explicit and redundant coding influence speakers' selection of argument structure constructions during speaking. Subjects retold the contents of short cartoon video clips to adult and child interaction partners. The stimuli showed events of caused motion which suggested designations with verbs for which caused motion-complementation was either (i) uncommon/unattested, (ii) conventional or (iii) the dominant usage in a sample extracted from the BNC. The results show a significant tendency to avoid more compacted coding (using the caused motion construction instead of a possible two-clause paraphrase) in child-directed speech. At the same time, they also point to an interaction between the register-specific preference for explicitness and verbs' relative conventionality in the construction that neutralizes the effect for verbs that are highly frequent in the target environment.
This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analysis. An interactional episode involving mock stories to reveal and reproach an inadequate identity-claim of a co-participant is analysed both in terms of practices of membership categorization and positioning. It is concluded that membership categorization is a core element of positioning. Still, positioning goes beyond membership categorization in a) revealing biographical dimensions accomplished by narration and b) by uncovering implicit performative claims of identity, which are not established by categorization or description.
Dieser Aufsatz führt in Grundbegriffe der deutschen Intonation ein und diskutiert ihre Relevanz für den Unterricht des Deutschen als Fremdsprache, vor allem in Brasilien. Für Muttersprachler des Portugiesischen, die Deutsch lernen, ist die Intonation wahrscheinlich eine größere Herausforderung als die Phonetik der Einzellaute. Das System der Töne, Tonbewegungen und Äußerungsakzente sowie ihre Beiträge zur Äußerungsbedeutung werden am Beispiel von Aussage- und Fragesätzen dargestellt. Den Abschluss bilden konkrete Übungsvorschläge zur Intonation im DaF- Unterricht.
Im Stadtbild europäischer Großstädte sehen Besucher heute neben der Mehrheitskultur viele andere kulturelle Färbungen. Als Folge politischer Entwicklungen sowie freiwilliger und erzwungener Migrationsbewegungen waren die europäischen Gesellschaften noch nie völlig homogene nationale Einheiten. In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten sind durch wirtschaftliche und politische Unterschiede zwischen verschiedenen Regionen in Europa und weltweit jedoch neue Migrationswellen ausgelöst worden, die in vielen Staaten zu massiven Veränderungen in der ethnischen Zusammensetzung der Bevölkerung geführt haben. Obwohl sich dadurch in den Zielländern der Migration neue Minderheitengruppen gebildet haben und die multiethnische Zusammensetzung der europäischen Gesellschaften Realität ist, ist bei vielen Menschen in Europa nach wie vor die Auffassung stark verbreitet, dass – im Sinne der Ideologie von „ein Volk, ein Staat, eine Sprache“ – diese neuen Minderheiten als suspekt oder sogar als gefährlich anzusehen sind.
Drawing on naturalistic video and audio recordings of international meetings, and within the framework of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and interactional linguistics, this chapter studies how multilingual resources are mobilized in social interactions among professionals, how available linguistic and embodied resources are identified and used by the participants, which solutions are locally elaborated by them when they are confronted with various languages spoken but not shared among them, and which definition of multilingualism they adopt for all practical purposes. Focusing on the multilingual solutions emically elaborated in international professional meetings, we show that the participants orient to a double principle: on the one hand, they orient to the progressivity of the interaction, adopting all the possible resources that enable them to go on within the current activity; on the other hand, they orient to the intersubjectivity of the interaction, treating, preventing and repairing possible troubles and problems of understanding. Specific multilingual solutions can be adopted to keep this difficult balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity; they vary according to the settings, the competences at hand, the linguistic and embodied resources locally defined by the participants as publicly available, the multilingual resources treated as totally or partially shared, as transparent or opaque, and as needing repair or not. The paper begins by sketching the analytical framework, including the methodology and the data collected; it then presents some general findings, before offering an analysis of various ways in which participants keep the balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity in different multilingual interactional contexts.
Die Satznegation, bisher ungeachtet zweier seriöser Monographien in den Grammatiken eher stiefmütterlich behandelt, weist gegenüber anderen Arten der Negation, ebenso gegenüber vielen existimatorischen Angaben gewisse syntaktische und semantische Besonderheiten auf, die in die grammatische Beschreibung eingehen müssen. Es wird für die dependentielle Verbgrammatik ein neues Darstellungsverfahren entwickelt, das diesen Besonderheiten gerecht zu werden versucht.
Dans le cadre de l’ethnométhodologie et de l’analyse conversationnelle, cet article s’intéresse à la production de la parole radiophonique en contexte, telle qu’elle est accomplie en temps réel et de manière située, incarnée et soutenue technologiquement dans le studio. Il vise ainsi à replacer la parole radiophonique dans son écologie matérielle et à l’aborder dans ses processus de production plutôt que comme un produit fini. L’analyse se focalise sur les instants qui précèdent immédiatement la prise de parole des animateurs, sur le moment où ils procèdent aux derniers échanges coordonnant leur parole à l’antenne et où ils mobilisent une série de ressources technologiques juste avant le passage au direct : ils précisent ou confirment les dernières prises de décision concernant ce qu’ils vont dire et la manière de le dire, prennent en main leur casque, le mettent, arrangent le micro, effectuent les derniers réglages de régie. Ce moment révèle les arrangements technologiques – dans la mobilisation de plusieurs artefacts - et interactionnels – dans la mise en œuvre de procédés de coordination et d’ajustement mutuel - complexes qui rendent possible la parole en direct.
Opinion holder extraction is one of the most important tasks in sentiment analysis. We will briefly outline the importance of predicates for this task and categorize them according to part of speech and according to which semantic role they select for the opinion holder. For many languages there do not exist semantic resources from which such predicates can be easily extracted. Therefore, we present alternative corpus-based methods to gain such predicates automatically, including the usage of prototypical opinion holders, i.e. common nouns, denoting for example experts or analysts, which describe particular groups of people whose profession or occupation is to form and express opinions towards specific items.
We examine predicative adjectives as an unsupervised criterion to extract subjective adjectives. We do not only compare this criterion with a weakly supervised extraction method but also with gradable adjectives, i.e. another highly subjective subset of adjectives that can be extracted in an unsupervised fashion. In order to prove the robustness of this extraction method, we will evaluate the extraction with the help of two different state-of-the-art sentiment lexicons (as a gold standard).
Der Beitrag ist eine fallbasierte und konzeptionell ausgerichtete Auseinandersetzung mit dem konversationsanalytischen Konzept „recipient design“. Dieses wird zunächst in seinem monomodal-verbalen Entstehungszusammenhang erläutert und anschließend aus Perspektive der multimodalen Interaktionsanalyse reflektiert. In einem methodologischen Exkurs werden die Verfahren der „visuellen Erstanalyse“ und der „rekurrenten Mehrebenen-Analyse“ vorgestellt und im analytischen Teil umgesetzt. So wird zunächst das visuell wahrnehmbare Verhalten, dann die Äußerungs- und Interaktionsstruktur und abschließend die Prosodie eines lehrerseitigen recipient design analysiert. In einem fallanalytischen Resümee präsentieren wir im Detail das Zusammenspiel der bei der Produktion dieses multimodalen recipient design beteiligten Ausdrucksressourcen. Abschließend diskutieren wir eine Reihe offener Punkte, die bei einer multimodalen Konzeption von recipient design zu beachten sind. Dabei wird deutlich, dass recipient design theoretisch neu gerahmt und systematisch in Bezug auf online-analytische und verstehensdokumentarische Überlegungen reflektiert werden muss.
The authors compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The finding shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.
Sprachentwicklung – Sprachkultur – Sprachkritik: Erwägungen zum heutigen und künftigen Deutsch
(2013)
Following an explanation of the problems to evaluate the general state of a language and to predict its future development, the main popular worries concerning the present German language are briefly presented and discussed. Three speculative scenarios of states of German at the end of the century are sketched and compared:
A. The preservation of the main structural features and domains of the German language,
B. The change of German into an Anglo-German creole,
C. The exchange of German by an 'international' English with the exception of a few relics of old German dialects.
Scenario A, the 'positive' one of the three possible developments, is argued for in more detail, and ways and means to support such a development of the German language within the context of the other European languages are suggested and discussed.
Interested in formally modelling similarity between narratives, we investigate judgements of similarity between narratives in a small corpus of film reviews and book–film comparisons. A main finding is that judgements tend to concern multiple levels of story representation at once. As these texts are pragmatically related to reception contexts, we find many references to reception quality and optimality. We conclude that current formal models of narrative can not capture the task of naturalistic narrative comparisons given in the analysed reviews, but that the development of models containing a more reception-oriented point of view will be necessary.
In the rapidly changing circumstances of our increasingly digital world, reading is also becoming an increasingly digital experience: electronic books (e-books) are now outselling print books in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, many readers still view e-books as less readable than print books. The present study thus used combined EEG and eyetracking measures in order to test whether reading from digital media requires higher cognitive effort than reading conventional books. Young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them while their eye movements and EEG were recorded. The results of a debriefing questionnaire replicated previous findings in that participants overwhelmingly chose the paper page over the two electronic devices as their preferred reading medium. Online measures, by contrast, showed shorter mean fixation durations and lower EEG theta band voltage density – known to covary with memory encoding and retrieval – for the older adults when reading from a tablet computer in comparison to the other two devices. Young adults showed comparable fixation durations and theta activity for all three devices. Comprehension accuracy did not differ across the three media for either group. We argue that these results can be explained in terms of the better text discriminability (higher contrast) produced by the backlit display of the tablet computer. Contrast sensitivity decreases with age and degraded contrast conditions lead to longer reading times, thus supporting the conclusion that older readers may benefit particularly from the enhanced contrast of the tablet. Our findings thus indicate that people’s subjective evaluation of digital reading media must be dissociated from the cognitive and neural effort expended in online information processing while reading from such devices.
Der Aufsatz gibt einen Überblick über die Arten von Nebensätzen im Deutschen. Er beschreibt ihre syntaktischen Funktionen und Strukturen anhand des Felderschemas. Auf drei Gesichtspunkte wird detaillierter eingegangen: nebensatzspezifische Funktionen von (i) Pronomina und (ii) Vergleichspartikeln sowie (iii) die Rolle von Nebensätzen bei der Satzspaltung. Der Aufsatz kann im Universitätsunterricht und als Grundlage für Untersuchungen in vergleichender Syntax genutzt werden.
Der Aufsatz gibt einen Überblick über die Arten von Nebensätzen im Deutschen. Er beschreibt ihre syntaktischen Funktionen und Strukturen anhand des Felderschemas. Auf drei Gesichtspunkte wird detaillierter eingegangen: nebensatzspezifische Funktionen von (i) Pronomina und (ii) Vergleichspartikeln sowie (iii) die Rolle von Nebensätzen bei der Satzspaltung. Der Aufsatz kann im Universitätsunterricht und als Grundlage für Untersuchungen in vergleichender Syntax genutzt werden.
Vom 26. bis 28. September 2012 hat an der Universität Santiago de Compostela (USC) in Kooperation mit dem Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) die internationale Fachtagung der germanistischen Linguistik Argumentstrukturen zwischen Valenz und Konstruktionen: Empirie – Theorie – Anwendung (ArValKon) stattgefunden. Sie wurde von Prof. Dr. Meike Meliss (USC) und Prof. Dr. Stefan Engelberg (IDS) organisiert und von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in Verbindung mit dem drittmittelgeförderten Forschungsprojekt DICONALE (Xunta de Galicia) und der Forschungsgruppe Humboldt finanziert. Die Tagung reihte sich in die Tradition der Kooperationen zwischen IDS und USC ein, die vom ehemaligen Direktor des IDS, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Engel, initiiert wurde. Diesem hat die Universität Santiago de Compostela 2002 die Ehrendoktorwürde verliehen. Der Tagung ArValKon sind zudem zwei weitere internationale Tagungen vorausgegangen, die am Institut für Deutsche Philologie der Universität Santiago de Compostela in bilateraler Kooperation mit dem IDS stattgefunden haben und valenzgrammatische Fragestellungen bzw. Fragen der Wortbildung zum Gegenstand hatten.
We explore the feasibility of contextual healthiness classification of food items. We present a detailed analysis of the linguistic phenomena that need to be taken into consideration for this task based on a specially annotated corpus extracted from web forum entries. For automatic classification, we compare a supervised classifier and rule-based classification. Beyond linguistically motivated features that include sentiment information we also consider the prior healthiness of food items.
We investigate the task of detecting reliable statements about food-health relationships from natural language texts. For that purpose, we created a specially annotated web corpus from forum entries discussing the healthiness of certain food items. We examine a set of task-specific features (mostly) based on linguistic insights that are instrumental in finding utterances that are commonly perceived as reliable. These features are incorporated in a supervised classifier and compared against standard features that are widely used for various tasks in natural language processing, such as bag of words, part-of speech and syntactic parse information.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
The perception of prosodic prominence is influenced by different sources like different acoustic cues, linguistic expectations and context. We use a generalized additive model and a random forest to model the perceived prominence on a corpus of spoken German. Both models are able to explain over 80% of the variance. While the random forests give us some insights on the relative importance of the cues, the general additive model gives us insights on the interaction between different cues to prominence.
In recent times presentations have drawn the attention of scientific interest as a new form of communication. In visualization of abstract structures or relationships in scholarly presentations using diagrams, different medial layers of meaning are conjoined in a very special way. The present paper examines firstly the multimodal structure of presentations and the mechanisms of establishing cross-modality coherence. Then the results of a reception experiment are discussed that gives rise to the assumption that multimodality can in fact improve the understanding of scholarly presentations. In the final part of the paper the production of an abstract visualization in a scholarly presentation is exemplified with regard to the solution of disambiguation and linearization problems. We claim that abstract visualizations in presentations are used to produce narratives by the speaker, and without such narratives this kind of visualization cannot be understood properly.
Since the eighties of the last century, the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German Language) explored in various ways the attitudes of the German population towards the national language in Germany. After limited studies without statistical relevance, two representative surveys were conducted in 1997/98 and 2008/09. The questions asked concerned attitudes toward recent developments of the language, the regional variance of German, especially the East- and West-German variants, and towards foreign languages inside and outside of the country. The major statistical results are presented and discussed.
A frequently replicated finding is that higher frequency words tend to be shorter and contain more strongly reduced vowels. However, little is known about potential differences in the articulatory gestures for high vs. low frequency words. The present study made use of electromagnetic articulography to investigate the production of two German vowels, [i] and [a], embedded in high and low frequency words. We found that word frequency differently affected the production of [i] and [a] at the temporal as well as the gestural level. Higher frequency of use predicted greater acoustic durations for long vowels; reduced durations for short vowels; articulatory trajectories with greater tongue height for [i] and more pronounced downward articulatory trajectories for [a]. These results show that the phonological contrast between short and long vowels is learned better with experience, and challenge both the Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and current theories of German phonology.