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An ongoing academic and research program, the “Vocabula Grammatica” lexicon, implemented by the Centre for the Greek Language (Thessaloniki, Greece), aims at lemmatizing all the philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and metrical terms in the written texts of scholars (philologists and scholiasts) who curated the ancient Greek literature from the beginning of the Hellenistic period (4th/3rd c. BC) until the end of the Byzantine era (15th c. AD). In particular, it aspires to fill serious gaps (a) in the study of ancient Greek scholarship and (b) in the lexicography of the ancient Greek language and literature. By providing specific examples, we will highlight the typical and methodological features of the forthcoming dictionary.
As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
Whether verbs have to be marked as punctual vs. durative has been a controversial issue from the very beginnings of research on aktionsarten in the last century right on up to modern theories of aspectual classes and aspect composition. Debates about the linguistic necessity of this distinction have often been accompanied by the question of what it means for a verb to be temporally punctual. In this paper I will, firstly, sketch the history of research on the punctual-durative distinction and present several linguistic arguments in its favor. Secondly, I will show how this distinction is captured in an eventstructure- based approach to lexical semantics. Thirdly, I will discuss the extent to which a precise definition of the notions used in lexical
representations helps avoid circular argumentation in lexical semantics. Finally, I will demonstrate how this can be done for the notion of ‘punctuality’ by clarifying the logical type of this predicate and relating it to central cognitive time concepts.
Drawing upon the transformative power of questions, the paper investigates questioning sequences from authentic coaching data to examine the systematic use of a particular succession of formulation and question and its impact on inviting self-reflection processes in the client and eliciting change. The object of investigation in this paper are therefore questioning sequences in which a coach asks a question immediately after a rephrasing or relocating action, prompting the client to respond in an explicit or implicit way. The coach hereby shifts the focus to a hypothetical scenario, prompting the client to change her perspective on the matter and reflect on her own statements, ideas and attitudes from an outside perspective. The paper aims to contribute to closing the research gap of the change potential of reflection-stimulating action techniques used by coaches, by investigating one of many ways of how questions can be powerful tools to invite a change of perspective for the client. The study focuses on one coaching process consisting of three sessions between a female coach and a female client, utilizing a single case study approach. The data collection was part of the interdisciplinary project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching”, comprising 14 authentic coaching processes. The analysis follows Peräkylä’s Transformative Sequences model, examining the first position including the formulation and the subsequent question, the client’s response, and the coach’s reaction to the response. On a practical level, the main purpose of this paper is not to contribute to the many ways practical literature recommends coaches how to do their work and how to ask questions, but rather to show in what ways the elicitation of self-reflection processes in clients has been achieved by other coaches in authentic coaching sessions.
“My Curiosity was Satisfied, but not in a Good Way”: Predicting User Ratings for Online Recipes
(2014)
In this paper, we develop an approach to automatically predict user ratings for recipes at Epicurious.com, based on the recipes’ reviews. We investigate two distributional methods for feature selection, Information Gain and Bi-Normal Separation; we also compare distributionally selected features to linguistically motivated features and two types of frameworks: a one-layer system where we aggregate all reviews and predict the rating vs. a two-layer system where ratings of individual reviews are predicted and then aggregated. We obtain our best results by using the two-layer architecture, in combination with 5 000 features selected by Information Gain. This setup reaches an overall accuracy of 65.60%, given an upper bound of 82.57%.
Verbs may be attributed to higher agency than other grammatical categories. In Study 1, we confirmed this hypothesis with archival datasets comprising verbs (N = 950) and adjectives (N = 2115). We then investigated whether verbs (vs. adjectives) increase message effectiveness. In three experiments presenting potential NGOs (Studies 2 and 3) or corporate campaigns (Study 4) in verb or adjective form, we demonstrate the hypothesized relationship. Across studies, (overall N = 721) grammatical agency consistently increased message effectiveness. Semantic agency varied across contexts by either increasing (Study 2), not affecting (Study 3), or decreasing (Study 4) the effectiveness of the message. Overall, experiments provide insights in to the meta-semantic effects of verbs – demonstrating how grammar may influence communication outcomes.
The proposed contribution will shed light on current and future challenges on legal and ethical questions in research data infrastructures. The authors of the proposal will present the work of NFDI’s section on Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects (hereinafter: ELSA), whose aim is to facilitate cross-disciplinary cooperation between the NFDI consortia in the relevant areas of management and re-use of research data.
Having found their way onto the computer screens, comics soon branched into webcomics. These kept a lot of the characteristics of print comic books, but gradually adapted new unexplored modes of representation. Three relatively new ‘enhancements’ to the medium of comics are presented in this article: webcomics enhanced through the use of the infinite canvas, as proposed by Scott McCloud, those enhanced with videos and/or sound, and lastly those enhanced with interactive and ludic elements. All of the mentioned push the medium of comics into new waters, and by doing so they add new layers of meaning and modify their structure based on the make-up of the implemented features. Infinite canvas manages to lift some limitations of print comics without changing the overall feel too drastically, while animated and voiced webcomics, as well as interactive or game comics, have a much higher inclination to transgress into domains of other media and transform themselves in order to accommodate and integrate these novel foreign features.
“Die Sprach-Checker” (Eng. “Language Checkers”) are young citizen scientists from Mannheim’s highly diverse district Neckarstadt-West. Together with linguists, they investigate a tremendous treasure: their own multilingualism. They are exploring and (re)discovering their own languages and the other languages used in their environment while documenting and reflecting on their everyday experiences in and with different linguistic practices. Our aim is to raise awareness of their strengths and to promote appreciation for their language biographies, thus fostering a sense of identification with one’s own linguistic surroundings. Such a joint research endeavour offers empirical opportunities to address (linguistic) issues of societal relevance by collecting authentic data from the multicultural district and involving its residents and local stakeholders. In this paper, we will provide insights regarding the project’s background, conception, and outcomes. We address everyone who is planning or conducting a citizen science project with young people, especially children and adolescents, or who works at the interface between science and society.
The internationally renowned conference of the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) has taken place every two years for the past 39 years. Last year’s conference, held July 12th–16th, 2022, marked EURALEX’s 20th edition, and more than 200 international participants gathered at Mannheim Palace to discuss current developments, learn about new projects, and present their own work — either in lexicography or in one of the many applied or neighboring disciplines such as corpus and computational linguistics.
This study deals with interpretation practices that speakers employ in order to (re)formulate what another person has said or implied. Analyzing interpretations in a public televised mediation that resembles a public debate, I show which kinds of interpretation practices that speakers adopt and how they differ depending the participants' roles. Systematically comparing all interpretations of the mediator vs. the opposing participants’, I argue that interpretations can be described as general practices with specific interactional effects, but that they are designed and exploited in different ways (i.e., for clarification and discourse-organization vs. self- and other-positioning and constructing arguments). I point out that speakers use meta-pragmatic accounts that support the interactional effects of their interpretations.
The availability of electronic corpora of historical stages of languages has been wel- comed as possibly attenuating the inherent problem of diachronic linguistics, i.e. that we only have access to what has chanced to come down to us - the problem which was memorably named by Labov (1992) as one of “Bad Data”. However, such corpora can only give us access to an increased amount ot historical material and this can essentially still only be a partial and possibly distorted picture of the actual language at a particular period of history. Corpora can be improved by taking a more representative sample of extant texts if these are available (as they are in significant number for periods after the invention of printing). But, as examples from the recently compiled GerManC corpus of seventeenth and eighteenth century German show, the evidence from such corpora can still fail to yield definitive answers to our questions about earlier stages of a language. The data still require expert interpretation, and it is important to be realistic about what can legitimately be expected from an electronic historical corpus.
Aims and objectives:
Language debates in Latvia often focus on the role of Latvian as official and main societal language. Yet, Latvian society is highly multilingual, and families with home languages other than Latvian have to choose between different educational trajectories for their children. In this context, this paper discusses the results of two studies which addressed the question of why families with Russian as a home language choose (pre)schools with languages other than Russian as medium of instruction (MOI). The first study analyses family narratives which provide insight into attitudes and practices which lead to the decision to send children to Latvian-MOI institutions. The second study investigates language attitudes and practices by families in the international community of Riga German School.
Methodology:
The paper discusses data gathered during two studies: for the first, semi-structed interviews were conducted with Russian-speaking families who choose Latvian-medium schools for their children. For the second study, a survey was carried out in the community of an international school in Riga, sided by ethnographic observations and interviews with teachers and the school leadership.
Data and analysis:
Interviews and ethnographic observations were subjected to a discourse analysis with a focus on critical events and structures of life trajectory narratives. Survey data were processed following simple statistical analysis and qualitative content analysis.
Findings/conclusions:
Our data reveal that families highly embrace multilingualism and see the development of individual plurilingualism as important for integration into Latvian society as well as for educational and professional opportunities in the multilingual societies of Latvia and Europe. At the same time, multilingualism and multiculturalism, including Russian, are seen as a value in itself. In addition, our studies reflect the bidirectionality of family language policies in interplay with practices in educational institutions: family decisions influence children’s language acquisition at school, but the school also has an impact on the families’ language practices at home. In sum, we argue that educational policies should therefore pay justice to the wishes of families in Latvia to incorporate different language aspects into individual educational trajectories.
Originality:
Language policy is a frequent topic of investigation in the Baltic states. However, there has been a lack in research on family language policy and school choices. In this vein, our paper adds to the understanding of educational choices and language policy processes among Russian-speaking families and the international community in Latvia.
‘Can’ and ‘must’-type modal verbs in the direct sanctioning of misconduct across European languages
(2023)
Deontic meanings of obligation and permissibility have mostly been studied in relation to modal verbs, even though researchers are aware that such meanings can be conveyed in other ways (consider, for example, the contributions to Nuyts/van der Auwera (eds.) 2016). This presentation reports on an ongoing project that examines deontic meaning but takes as its starting point not a type of linguistic structure but a particular kind of social moment that presumably attracts deontic talk: The management of potentially ‚unacceptable‘ or untoward actions (taking the last bread roll at breakfast, making a disallowed move during a board game, etc.). Data come from a multi-language parallel video corpus of everyday social interaction in English, German, Italian, and Polish. Here, we focus on moments in which one person sanctions another’s behavior as unacceptable. Using interactional-linguistic methods (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018), we examine similarities and differences across these four languages in the use of modal verbs as part of such sanctioning attempts. First results suggest that modal verbs are not as common in the sanctioning of misconduct as one might expect. Across the four languages, only between 10%–20% of relevant sequences involve a modal verb. Most of the time, in this context, speakers achieve deontic meaning in other ways (e.g., infinitives such as German nicht so schmatzen, ‚no smacking‘). This raises the question what exactly modal verbs, on those relatively rare occasions when they are used, contribute to the accomplishment of deontic meaning. The reported study pursues this question in two ways: 1) By considering similarities across languages in the ways that modal verbs interact with other (verbal) means in the sanctioning of misconduct.; 2) By considering differences across languages in the use of modal verbs. Here, we find that the relevant modal verbs are used similarly in some activity contexts (enforcing rules during board games), but less so in other activity contexts (mundane situations with no codified rules). In sum, the presented study adds to cross-linguistically grounded knowledge about deontic meaning and its relationships to linguistics structures.
Αυοιγμα / Opening
(2011)
We compare the use of überhaupt and sowieso in Dutch and German. We use the world-wide web as the main resource and pursue a zigzag strategy, trying to find usages going back and forth between dictionaries, intuitions and real data obtained through web search. To our surprise, the results more or less confirm the decision of Dutch dictionaries to consider überhaupt and sowieso synonymous. In German, we find no synonymy, but only a great overlap of usage conditions in declarative sentences.
Despite the importance of the agent role for language grammar and processing, its definition and features are still controversially discussed in the literature on semantic roles. Moreover, diagnostic tests to dissociate agentive from non-agentive roles are typically applied with qualitative introspection data. We investigated whether quantitative acceptability ratings obtained with a well-established agentivity test, the DO-cleft, provide evidence for the feature-based prototype account of (Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic protoroles and argument selction. Language 67(3). 547-619) postulating that agentivity increases with the number of agentive features that a role subsumes. We used four different intransitive verb classes in German and collected acceptability judgements from non-expert native speakers of German. Our results show that sentence acceptability increases linearly with the number of agentive features and, hence, agentivity. Moreover, our findings confirm that sentience belongs to the group of proto-agent features. In summary, this suggests that a multidimensional account including a specific mechanism for role prototypicality (feature accumulation) successfully captures gradient acceptability clines. Quantitative acceptability estimates are a meaningful addition to linguistic theorizing.
The IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB) software currently uses a simple tabular data model with proven limitations. We outline and justify the need for a new data model to underlie the next major version of CWB. This data model, dubbed Ziggurat, defines a series of types of data layer to represent different structures and relations within an annotated corpus; each such layer may contain variables of different types. Ziggurat will allow us to gradually extend and enhance CWB’s existing CQP-syntax for corpus queries, and also make possible more radical departures relative not only to the current version of CWB but also to other contemporary corpus-analysis software.
This study investigates the interrelations between bilingual development (German/Russian), immigration and integration in the host society. Participants are Russian-Germans, that is, ethnic Germans who have repatriated to Germany from the former Soviet Union. They were part of a longitudinal study dedicated to the integration of multi-generation Russian-German families in Germany. The paper focuses on eight Russian-Germans who moved to Germany between the ages of five and eight and are now young adults. The analysis is based on interviews conducted in the twentieth year of their life in Germany in German and Russian, A semi-structured questionnaire was used to elicit information on the main stages of integration, the use of the languages, the attitudes towards German and Russian, and an assessment of the current situation. The obtained data were used to make an initial assessment of the oral language competencies of the participants and as sources of information about the objective facts and subjective attitudes that determined linguistic and social integration.
This paper presents an annotation scheme for English modal verbs together with sense-annotated data from the news domain. We describe our annotation scheme and discuss problematic cases for modality annotation based on the inter-annotator agreement during the annotation. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic sense tagging, showing that our annotations do provide a valuable training resource for NLP systems.
In this paper we outline our corpus-driven approach to detecting, describing and presenting multi- word expressions (MWEs). Our goal is to treat MWEs in a way that gives credit to their flexible nature and their role in language use. The bases of our research are a very large corpus and a Statistical method of collocation analysis. The rich empirical data is interpreted linguistically in a structured way which captures the interrelations, patterns and types of variances of MWEs. Several levels of abstraction build on each other: surface patterns, lexical realizations (LRs), MWEs and MWE patterns. Generalizations are made in a controlled way and in adherence to corpus evidence. The results are published online in a hypertext format.
Wortgeschichte digital (‘digital word history’) is a new historical dictionary of New High German, the most recent period of German reaching from approximately 1600 AD up to the present. By contrast to many historical dictionaries, Wortgeschichte digital has a narrated text – a “word history” – at the core of its entries. The motivation for choosing this format rather than traditional microstructures is
briefly outlined. Special emphasis it put on the way these word histories interact with other components of the dictionary, notably with the quotation section. As Wortgeschichte digital is an online only project, visualizations play an important role for the design of the dictionary. Two examples are presented: first, the “quotation navigator” which is relevant for the microstructure of the entries, and, second, a timeline (“Zeitstrahl”) which is part of the macrostructure as it gives access to the lemma inventory from a diachronic point of view.
The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years.
The article discusses the possibilities and challenges of combining conversation analysis and ethnography in the study of everyday family life. We argue that such a combination requires the decision whether to prioritise interaction data or ethno-graphic (in particular, interview) data in the analysis. We present a conversation analytic case study of how household work is commonly brought up in the interactions of one couple and bring this to bear on a re-analysis of a possible conflict situation originally described in the ethnographic analysis by Klein, Izquierdo, and Bradbury (2007), published in this journal. While the findings of the two analyses converge, they inform us about different dimensions of couple interaction. The ethnographic analysis is focused on participants’ experiences, and the conversation analysis is focused on participants’ practices. We conclude that the methodological decision to prioritise interaction or interview data has consequences for the kind of questions we can ask.
This paper deals with the distribution of word length in short native mythological and historical Eskimo narrative texts. To my knowledge, no Eskimo‐Aleut data have been the object of quantitative linguistic investigation so far. Due to the strong linguistic and Stylistic homogeneity of the examined texts it was assumed that these texts can be subsumed under a single law of word length distribution, if word length distribution of a text is considered as a function of certain of its properties, such as author, language, and genre. So far, word length distribution in texts of a wide variety of languages and genres has been demonstrated to follow distributions of the compound Poisson family of discrete probability distributions. In view of the morphological idiosyncrasies of the Eskimo language in general, which are responsible for an unusually high mean word length of about 4.5 to 5.2 syllables per word in the texts, it is interesting to see whether Eskimo texts show a significantly different behaviour with respect to word length. The results demonstrate that the Eskimo data employed in this study can be fitted well by the Hyperpoisson distribution. Two further discrete probability distributions will be deduced from certain morphology‐based assumptions about Eskimo. It turns out that most of the Eskimo data can be fitted by these two distributions. The question to what extent these results point to a more grammar‐oriented theory of word length is also discussed.
Sound units play a pivotal role in cognitive models of auditory comprehension. The general consensus is that during perception listeners break down speech into auditory words and subsequently phones. Indeed, cognitive speech recognition is typically taken to be computationally intractable without phones. Here we present a computational model trained on 20 hours of conversational speech that recognizes word meanings within the range of human performance (model 25%, native speakers 20–44%), without making use of phone or word form representations. Our model also generates successfully predictions about the speed and accuracy of human auditory comprehension. At the heart of the model is a ‘wide’ yet sparse two-layer artificial neural network with some hundred thousand input units representing summaries of changes in acoustic frequency bands, and proxies for lexical meanings as output units. We believe that our model holds promise for resolving longstanding theoretical problems surrounding the notion of the phone in linguistic theory.
We describe a simple procedure for the automatic creation of word-level alignments between printed documents and their respective full-text versions. The procedure is unsupervised, uses standard, off-the-shelf components only, and reaches an F-score of 85.01 in the basic setup and up to 86.63 when using pre- and post-processing. Potential areas of application are manual database curation (incl. document triage) and biomedical expression OCR.
Optimality theory (henceforth OT) models natural language competence in terms of interactions of universal constraints, notably markedness and faithfulness constraints. This article illustrates some of the major advances in the understanding of word-formation phenomena originating from this theory, including the prosodic organization of morphologically complex words, neutralization patterns in derivational affixes, allomorphy, and infixation.
This paper will address the challenge of creating a knowledge graph from a corpus of historical encyclopedias with a special focus on word sense alignment (WSA) and disambiguation (WSD). More precisely, we examine WSA and WSD approaches based on article similarity to link messy historical data, utilizing Wikipedia as aground-truth component – as the lack of a critical overlap in content paired with the amount of variation between and within the encyclopedias does not allow for choosing a ”baseline” encyclopedia to align the others to. Additionally, we are comparing the disambiguation performance of conservative methods like the Lesk algorithm to more recent approaches, i.e. using language models to disambiguate senses.
This article explores the relation between word order and response latency, focusing on responses to question-word questions. Qualitative (multimodal) and quantitative analyses of naturally occurring conversations in French—where question-words can occur in initial, medial, or final position within the question—show that variation in word order affects the timing of responses. It is argued that this is so because word order provides a differential basis for action ascription, creating different temporal opportunities for projecting the recipient’s next relevant action. The frequent occurrence of early responses to questions with an initial question-word, in particular, stresses the importance of the recognition point of an action under way for response timing and shows respondents’ pervasive orientation to sequential progressivity. Findings highlight how lexico-syntactic trajectories of emergent turns, prior talk and actions, material and bodily features of interaction, and participants’ shared expectations conspire in shaping the time-courses of action ascription and action projection.
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.
Word Families in Diachrony. An epoch-spanning structure for the word families of older German
(2022)
The ‘Word Families in Diachrony’ project (WoDia), for which a funding application to the DFG is in preparation, aims to provide a database driven online research environment that will enable processes of change in the entire historical vocabulary of German to be investigated by focusing on the changes in word families and the individual means of word formation. WoDia will embed the vocabularies of Old High German (OHG), Middle High German (MHG), Old Saxon (OS), and Middle Low German (MLG) in a database, resulting in a word-family structure for High and Low German from the beginnings up to the 15th century (for High German) and up to the 17th century (for Low German). The basis of the vocabulary is provided by reference dictionaries of the four historical varieties, whereas the word families’ historical structure is based on the word-family dictionary of OHG by Jochen Splett (1992). Each lemma in the database will be assigned, where appropriate, to a word family. The individual word-formation elements and the word-formation hierarchy will be mapped in a structural formula. The etymologically corresponding lemmas and word families of the different periods/varieties of older German will be linked so that an analysis across the varieties will also be possible. The annotations of word families in the database (e. g., relating to word structure) will be supplemented by linking their lemmas to the online dictionaries and to the reference corpora of Old German (OS and OHG), MHG, and MLG.
Many European languages have undergone considerable changes in orthography over the last 150 years. This hampers the application of modern computer-based analysers to older text, and hence computer-based annotation and studies of text collections spanning a long period. As a step towards a functional analyser for Norwegian texts (Nynorsk standard) from the 19th century, funding was granted in 2020 for creating a full form generator for all inflected forms of headwords found in Ivar Aasen’s dictionary published in 1873 (Aasen 1873) and his grammar from 1864 (Aasen 1864). Creating this word bank led to new insight in Aasen (1873), its structure, internal organisation, and ambition level as well as its link to Aasen (1864). As a test, the full form list generated from this new word bank was used to analyse the word inventory of texts by Aa. O. Vinje, written in the period 1850–1870. The Vinje texts were also analysed using a full form list of modern standard Norwegian, to study the differences in applicability and see how Vinje’s language relates to the written standard of modern Norwegian.
eThis paper first attempts a state-of-the art overview of what is known about women in the history of lexicography up to the early twentieth century. It then focusses more closely on the German and German-English lexicographical traditions to 1900, examining them from three different perspectives (following Russell’s 2018 study of women in English lexicography): women as users and dedicatees of dictionaries; women as contributors to and compilers of lexicographical works; and (in a very preliminary way) women and female sexuality as represented in German/English bilingual dictionaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Russell (2018) was able to identify some 24 dictionaries invoking women as patrons, dedicatees or potential users before 1700, and some 150 works in English lexicography by women between 1500 and 1900, besides the contribution of hundreds of women as supporters and helpers, not least as unpaid readers and sub-editors for the Oxford English Dictionary. Equivalent research in other languages is lacking, but this paper presents some of the known examples of women as lexicographers. The evidence tends to support Russell’s finding for English, that women were more likely to find a place in lexicography outside the mainstream: sometimes in a more private sphere (like Hester Piozzi); often in bilingual lexicography (such as Margrethe Thiele, working on a Danish-French dictionary), including missionary and or colonizing activity (such as Cinie Louw in Africa, Daisy Bates in Australia); and in dialect description (Coronedi Berti in Italy, Luisa Lacal and María Moliner in Spain). Within the German-speaking context, women who participated in lexicographical work themselves are hard to identify before the late nineteenth century, though those few women who did have access to education were often engaged in language learning, including translation activity, and they were likely users of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Christian Ludwig’s (1706) English-German dictionary – the first of its kind – was dedicated to the Electoral Princess Sophia of Hanover. Elizabeth Weir may have been the first named female compiler of a German dictionary, with her bilingual New German Dictionary (1888). Rather better known are the cases of Agathe Lasch and Luise Pusch, who, as pioneering women in the field of German linguistics, ultimately led major lexicographical projects documenting German regional varieties in the first half of the twentieth century (Middle Low German and Hamburgish in the case of Lasch; the Hessisch Nassau dialect dictionary in the case of Berthold). In the light of existing research on gender and sexuality in the history of English lexicography (e. g. Iamartino 2010; Turton 2019), I conclude with a preliminary exploration how woman and sexuality have been represented in dictionaries of German and English, taking the words Hure and woman in bilingual German-English dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as my case studies.
Scientific interest in von Kempelen's 'speaking machine' stems mainly from a general interest in the history of science. This study, however, is devoted to the question of what relevance the 'speaking machine' has today. Apart for discussing why it fascinates researchers and non-researchers alike we describe the potential of replicas as an instrument for demonstration and for researching speech generation.
In this chapter, I will focus on the phenomenon of drop out, i.e., withdrawal from the turn due to overlapping talk, in order to reflect on the link between “unfinished” turns and participation framework. With the help of a sequential and multimodal analysis inspired by the conversation analytical approach, I will show that dropping out from a turn is strongly linked to the availability displayed by potential recipients of a turn-at-talk. Although conversation analysis has described in detail the systematics of overlapping talk, especially of its onset (Jefferson 1973, 1983, 1986) and its resolution (Scheg-loff 2000; Jefferson 2004), the phenomenon of withdrawal from a turn due to simultaneous talk has not been investigated in detail. While it seems to bedifficult to describe this interactional practice by referring exclusively to syntactic features (incompleteness of the turn), I suggest looking at turn withdrawal from a multimodal perspective (e.g. Goodwin 1980, 1981; Mondada2007a; Schmitt 2005), taking into account visible resources like gaze or gesture. The problem of continuing or stopping a turn-in-progress in overlapping talk can be closely linked to the participation framework (Goodwin and Goodwin 2004), as speakers do visibly take into account their recipient’s availability and coordinate their turn construction with the dynamic changes of the participation framework and the interactional space.
From June 26th to July 2nd 2023 the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA) took place in Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia – after a long pause due to the Covid-pandemic and for the first time in the southern hemisphere. About 350 participants from about 50 different countries attended the conference. This year’s ICCA came up with 36 panels and about 300 papers that were presented. Four plenary speakers have been invited and 24 pre-conference workshops took place. On Wednesday evening Ilana Mushin, in her role as conference chair, officially opened ICCA. The President of the International Society of Conversation Analysis (ISCA), Tanya Stivers, also welcomed all participants. To get acquainted with the indigenous culture of Queensland, the opening ceremony was enriched with a highly impressive dance performance by First Nations people. After the official inauguration the international community met at the Welcome Reception to look forward together to the days ahead with many opportunities for exchange and networking.
As it will become clear throughout this report, the research topics revolved around not only classic CA concepts, but also importantly concerned embodiment, which continued the line of past conferences (Dix 2019). Another aspect that has been highlighted was conflict and social norms. Due to personal capacities, we can only present a selection of presentations within the scope of this conference report. The selection was influenced by the personal interest of the authors and should not be understood as rating in any sense.
Recently, a claim was made, on the basis of the German Google Books 1-gram corpus (Michel et al., Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science 2010; 331: 176–82), that there was a linear relationship between six non-technical non-Nazi words and three ‘explicitly Nazi words’ in times of World War II (Caruana-Galizia. 2015. Politics and the German language: Testing Orwell’s hypothesis using the Google N-Gram corpus. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities [Online]. http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/fqv011 (accessed 15 April 2015)). Here, I try to show that apparent relationships like this are the result of misspecified models that do not take into account the temporal aspect of time-series data. The main point of this article is to demonstrate why such analyses run the risk of incorrect statistical inference, where potential effects are both meaningless and can potentially lead to wrong conclusions.
Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: I will focus on one crucial step in von Glasersfeld’s argumentation, viz. his view that every individual constructs his own private meanings (understood as conceptual structures or elements thereof) for linguistic expressions, so that linguistic interaction and even communication in general is based on a notion of compatibility between different speakers’ private conceptual schemes. The central question here is: “Just what does it mean that different private conceptual schemes (private meanings) are compatible, or what constitutes a viable criterion to this end?” As von Glasersfeld himself stresses twice (§28, §37), the criteria to be looked for can only be “public,” residing in properties of verbal and non-verbal actions of the interacting individuals, properties that can be sensed and processed by the participating system.
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on treebank annotation schemes and their impact on PCFG parsing results. We provide a thorough comparison of two German treebanks: the TIGER treebank and the TüBa-D/Z. We use simple statistics on sentence length and vocabulary size, and more refined methods such as perplexity and its correlation with PCFG parsing results, as well as a Principal Components Analysis. Finally we present a qualitative evaluation of a set of 100 sentences from the TüBa- D/Z, manually annotated in the TIGER as well as in the TüBa-D/Z annotation scheme, and show that even the existence of a parallel subcorpus does not support a straightforward and easy comparison of both annotation schemes.
Our paper discusses family language policies among multilingual families in Latvia with Russian as home language. The presentation is based on three case studies, i.e. interviews conducted with Russophones who have chosen to send their children to Latvian-medium pre-schools and schools. The main aim is to understand practices and regards among such families “from below,” i.e. which family-internal and family-external factors influenced the choice of Latvian-medium education and what impact this choice has on linguistic practices.
The paper shows that there have been critical events which both encouraged and discouraged the choice of Latvian-medium education. The wish to integrate into mainstream society has been met by obstacles both from ethnic Russians and Latvians. Yet, the three families consider their choices to be the right ones for the future development of their children in a multiethnic Latvia in which Latvian serves as the unifying language of society.