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Von Januar bis Juli 2023 gestalten Grundschulkinder aus dem Mannheimer Vielfaltsquartier Neckarstadt-West zusammen mit der Kinderbuchautorin und Illustratorin Anke Faust in Kooperation mit dem Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) ein Buch. Sie erzählen darin von den Abenteuern, die ihre Figuren in der Neckarstadt-West erleben, und welche Sprachschätze sie dabei finden können. Kooperationspartner des IDS für dieses Projekt sind unter anderem der Campus Neckarstadt-West, die Alte Feuerwache Mannheim gGmbH und der Verein Neckarstadt Kids e.V.
"Badeölgrüne Buchten", "kükengelbes Haar" und "tomatenrote Tomaten" - Vergleiche mit Farbadjektiven
(2014)
Im Zentrum dieses Beitrags steht die Analyse kreativer Wortbildungsprodukte in Songtexten. Der Fokus liegt somit bewusst auf solchen Wortbildungen, die nicht den Weg ins Lexikon finden, sondern gerade aufgrund ihres okkasionellen Charakters einen erhöhten Grad an Expressivität aufweisen, der dann gezielt für die spezifische kreative Qualität von Songtexten genutzt wird.
Solche okkasionellen komplexen Wörter, die sich in theoretischer Hinsicht innerhalb der Domäne der ‚Extravagant Morphology‘ verorten lassen, werden über das Kriterium der Wortlänge aus dem Songkorpus herausgefiltert und im Anschluss hinsichtlich ihrer formalen sowie semantisch-pragmatischen Besonderheiten analysiert. Im Vordergrund steht dabei die Frage, wodurch die Kreativität der insgesamt 183 Bildungen des Untersuchungskorpus getriggert wird. Die Analyse zeigt, dass expressive Effekte in Songtexten offenbar sowohl durch die Verwendung markierter Wortbildungsmuster als auch durch den Rückgriff auf ‚auffällige‘ Lexik erzeugt werden. Zum einen ist der Anteil markierter Wortbildungsmuster wie der Phrasenkomposition und anderer phrasaler Wortbildungen gegenüber klassischen Textsorten wie Zeitungstexten deutlich erhöht. Zum anderen wird durch die Verwendung einer umgangssprachlichen, vulgären, brutalen oder poetischen Lexik, aber auch mit unmarkierten Wortbildungsmustern wie der prototypischen Determinativkomposition, Aufmerksamkeit erregt. Insgesamt erweist sich das Songkorpus dabei als wahre Fundgrube für kreative Wortbildungsprodukte.
Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt auf der Basis authentischer Alltagsinteraktionen das Formen- und Funktionsspektrum der äußerungsmodalisierenden Kommen-tarphrase ohne Scheiß im gesprochenen Deutsch. Die Konstruktion wird von Inter-agierenden insbesondere als Ressource zur Steigerung des Geltungsanspruchs einer Bezugsäußerung genutzt, wodurch diese als wahr und/oder ernstgemeint modali-siert wird. Damit leistet ohne Scheiß einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Bearbeitung des Erwartungsmanagements durch den/die SprecherIn sowie zur Herstellung von In-tersubjektivität. Die Konstruktion ist syntaktisch variabel und kann somit Äußerun-gen sowohl prospektiv als auch retraktiv modalisieren. Zudem wird mit der Wahl des Lexem Scheiß ein nähesprachliches Register aktiviert, was in Verbindung mit weiteren (prosodischen und/oder lexikalischen) Elementen zu affektiver Aufladung führen kann. Eine abschließende Darstellung häufiger lexikalischer Kookkurrenz-partner und deren funktionaler Bedeutung sowie ein Abgleich zu intrakonstruktio-nalen Varianten wie ohne Witz/ohne Spaß zeigt die Produktivität der Konstruktion im alltäglichen Sprachgebrauch auf.
"Sprachschrott" [Leserforum]
(1988)
"Systemrelevant" - eine sprachwissenschaftliche Betrachtung des Begriffs aus aktuellem Anlass
(2020)
"Wie Schule Sprache macht"
(2019)
Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld (1742-1792) beschrieb in seiner "Theorie der Gartenkunst" die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur und spiegelte die gesellschaftlichen Zustände. Dabei stellte er eine Verbindung zwischen der Kunstform des Landschaftsgartens und der Verbesserung der Menschheit her. In diesem Band wird exemplarisch vorgeführt, mit welchem lexematischen Material er die Kombination aus differenzierter Beschreibung und beabsichtigter ästhetischer Erziehung in moralischer Absicht innerhalb des vom Sprachsystem lexikalisch vorgegebenen Rahmens umsetzte und welche sprachlichen Strategien aus diesen Intentionen resultierten.
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.
In recent years, formal semantic research on the meaning of tense and aspect has benefited from a number of studies investigating languages with graded tense systems. This paper contributes a first sketch of the temporal marking system of Awing (Grassfields Bantu), focusing on two varieties of remote past and remote future. We argue that the data support a "symmetric" analysis of past and future tense in Awing. In our specific proposal, Awing temporal remoteness markers are uniformly analyzed as quantificational tense operators, and both the past and the future paradigm include a form that prevents contextual restriction of this temporal quantifier.
This conference booklet provides information about 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10) that took place in Mannheim, Germany, from 18 to 21 July 2023. It contains
– a description of the conference aims,
– details on the conference venue,
– information on committees,
– the conference program,
– the abstracts of the keynotes, oral and poster presentations, and
– an author index.
Am Beispiel der polyfunktionalen Mehrworteinheit <was weiß ich> wird das Zusammenspiel von pragmatischer und phonetischer Ausdifferenzierung in Pragmatikalisierungsprozessen untersucht. Hierzu werden spontan-sprachliche Belege aus dem Korpus „Deutsch heute“ analysiert. Die beobachtete phonetische Variationsbreite deutet auf eine komplexe Beziehung zu den jeweiligen pragmatischen Funktionen hin.
Sogenannte „Pragmatikalisierte Mehrworteinheiten“ sind im Deutschen hochfrequent und unterliegen bisweilen tiefgreifenden phonetischen Reduktionsprozessen. Diese können Realisierungsvarianten hervorbringen, die in der Rückschau auf mehr als eine lexematische Ursprungsform zurückführbar sind. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht mit [ˈzɐmɐ] einen besonders prägnanten Fall dieser Art anhand eines Perzeptionsexperimentes.
This manual introduces a conversation analytically informed coding scheme for episodes involving the direct social sanctioning of problem behavior in informal social interaction which was developed in the project Norms, Rules, and Morality across Languages (NoRM-aL) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language. It outlines the background for its development, delimits the phenomena to which the coding scheme can be applied and provides instructions for its use.
The scheme asks for basic information about the recording and the participants involved in the episode, before taking stock of different features of the sanctioning episode as a whole. This is followed by sets of specific coding questions about the sanctioning move itself (such as its timing and composition) and the reaction it engenders. The coding enables researchers to get a bird’s eye view on recurrent features of such episodes in larger quantities of data and allows for comparisons across different languages and informal 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.
This report presents a corpus of articulations recorded with Schlieren photography, a recording technique to visualize aeroflow dynamics for two purposes. First, as a means to investigate aerodynamic processes during speech production without any obstruction of the lips and the nose. Second, to provide material for lecturers of phonetics to illustrates these aerodynamic processes. Speech production was recorded with 10 kHz frame rate for statistical video analyses. Downsampled videos (500 Hz) were uplodad to a youtube channel for illustrative purposes. Preliminary analyses demonstrate potential in applying Schlieren photography in research.
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.
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.
One of the fundamental questions about human language is whether all languages are equally complex. Here, we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. We present a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections consisting of ~ 3.5 billion words or ~ 9.0 billion characters and covering 2069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of what we call average prediction complexity. We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. In addition, we show that speaker population size predicts entropy. We argue that both results constitute evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective.
Classical null hypothesis significance tests are not appropriate in corpus linguistics, because the randomness assumption underlying these testing procedures is not fulfilled. Nevertheless, there are numerous scenarios where it would be beneficial to have some kind of test in order to judge the relevance of a result (e.g. a difference between two corpora) by answering the question whether the attribute of interest is pronounced enough to warrant the conclusion that it is substantial and not due to chance. In this paper, I outline such a test.
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.
A syntax-based scheme for the annotation and segmentation of German spoken language interactions
(2018)
Unlike corpora of written language where segmentation can mainly be derived from orthographic punctuation marks, the basis for segmenting spoken language corpora is not predetermined by the primary data, but rather has to be established by the corpus compilers. This impedes consistent querying and visualization of such data. Several ways of segmenting have been proposed,
some of which are based on syntax. In this study, we developed and evaluated annotation and segmentation guidelines in reference to the topological field model for German. We can show that these guidelines are used consistently across annotators. We also investigated the influence of various interactional settings with a rather simple measure, the word-count per segment and unit-type. We observed that the word count and the distribution of each unit type differ in varying interactional settings and that our developed segmentation and annotation guidelines are used consistently across annotators. In conclusion, our syntax-based segmentations reflect interactional properties that are intrinsic to the social interactions that participants are involved in. This can be used for further analysis of social interaction and opens the possibility for automatic segmentation of transcripts.
Travel guides and travel reports constitute an important source for the generation and spread of popular geopolitical epistemes and assumptions. With regard to colonial attitudes and their possible perpetuation, it is therefore of great interest what kind of information such texts convey regarding (post)colonial places, and how they contextualize it. The paper compares descriptions of Qingdao (Tsingtau), a German colonized territory between 1897 and 1914, in travel guides and related material from colonial and postcolonial times and in different European languages. It investigates what differences can be found between these descriptions in relation to time, language, and medium (print or online) of publication. Of particular interest is the question whether, and in what ways, colonial perspectives are perpetuated in present-day (especially German) travel literature.
The Lehnwortportal Deutsch (2012 seqq.) serves as an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, synthesizing an increasing number of lexicographical dictionaries and providing basic cross-resource search options. The paper discusses the far-reaching revision of the system’s conceptual, lexicographical and technological underpinnings currently under way, focussing on their relevance for multilingual loanword lexicography.
In this paper we present an experimental semantic search function, based on word embeddings, for an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWPD). The LWPD synthesizes an increasing number of lexicographical resources and provides basic cross-resource search options. Onomasiological access to the lexical units of the portal is a highly desirable feature for many research questions, such as the likelihood of borrowing lexical units with a given meaning (Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009; Zeller, 2015). The search technology is based on multilingual pre-trained word embeddings, and individual word senses in the portal are associated with word vectors. Users may select one or more among a very large number of search terms, and the database returns lexical items with word sense vectors similar to these terms. We give a preliminary assessment of the feasibility, usability and efficacy of our approach, in particular in comparison to search options based on semantic domains or fields.
Qualifizierungsmaßnahmen wie „Perspektive für Flüchtlinge Plus“ (PerFPlus) können als wichtige Bestandteile der neuen Willkommenskultur in Deutschland betrachtet werden. Deutschland als Einwanderungsland kann mit Hilfe solcher Initiativen gezielt für Arbeitsbereiche und Berufsgruppen werben, in denen es an Nachwuchs mangelt. Den Neuzugewanderten bieten sie die eine Chance sich in der hiesigen Arbeitswelt zu orientieren und Berufsfelder zu erkunden, die ihnen bislang noch nicht oder nur in anderer Form bekannt waren. Auf der anderen Seite bergen solche Maßnahmen aber auch ihr Risiko: Wenn sie ihr Ziel verfehlen und Frustrationen auf beiden Seiten erzeugen, sind lange Warteschleifen, Arbeitslosigkeit und möglicherweise politische Polarisierung und Radikalisierung die Folge. Insofern ist eine schnelle Intervention hinsichtlich der Verbesserung solcher Maßnahmen essentiell. Der vorliegende Bericht soll die konzeptionell-arbeitenden Teams bei der Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA) sowie bei Bildungsanbietern die mit der BA kooperieren bei ihren wichtigen Aufgaben unterstützen. Alle Partner bleiben im Bericht anonym.
Deutschland sieht sich in den nächsten Jahren vor enormen Herausforderungen gegen-übergestellt. Mit der Fluchtmigration von knapp 1,5 Mio. Menschen alleine zwischen 2014 und 2017 stehen nahezu in jedem gesellschaftlichen Bereich und hier insbesonde-re in den Sektoren Bildung und Arbeit große Integrationsaufgaben an. Steven Vertovec, der Leiter des Max-Planck-Instituts zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften bezeichnet die Fluchtmigration von 2015 auch deshalb als die „zweite Wende“ (Vertovec 2015) für Deutschland, die das Land nachhaltig verändern wird. Nach seiner Einschätzung werden die gesellschaftlichen Transformationen dermaßen tiefgrei-fend sein, dass die Formulierung „seit der Flüchtlingskrise“ eine ebenso geläufige Rede-wendung sein wird wie die Formulierung „seit der Wende“.
Berufliche Qualifizierungsmaßnahmen wie „GASTRO“ im Rhein-Neckar-Raum sind in diesem Kontext sehr wichtige Anstrengungen im Hinblick auf die strukturelle Integrati-on der Fluchtmigranten. Im gesamtgesellschaftlichen Kontext sind sie unverzichtbare Bestandteile der neuen Willkommenskultur, die seit den 2010ern versucht wird, in Deutschland zu etablieren. Als Einwanderungsland kann Deutschland mit Hilfe solcher Initiativen gezielt für Arbeitsbereiche und Berufsgruppen werben, in denen es an Nach-wuchs mangelt. Den Neuzugewanderten bieten sie die Chance sich in der hiesigen Ar-beitswelt zu orientieren und möglicherweise Berufsfelder zu erkunden, die ihnen bis-lang noch nicht oder nur in anderer Form bekannt waren.
This paper addresses long-term archival for large corpora. Three aspects specific to language resources are focused, namely (1) the removal of resources for legal reasons, (2) versioning of (unchanged) objects in constantly growing resources, especially where objects can be part of multiple releases but also part of different collections, and (3) the conversion of data to new formats for digital preservation. It is motivated why language resources may have to be changed, and why formats may need to be converted. As a solution, the use of an intermediate proxy object called a signpost is suggested. The approach will be exemplified with respect to the corpora of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, namely the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and the Archive for Spoken German (AGD).
Besides English, Afrikaans is considered “the [Germanic] language which deviates grammatically the farthest from the others” (Harbert 2007: 17). But how exactly do we measure “grammatical deviation”, and how deviant is Afrikaans really if we compare it not just to other standard languages but also to non-standard varieties? The present contribution aims to address those questions combining functional-typological and dialectometric perspectives. We first select data for 28 Germanic varieties showing vastly different speaker numbers, grades of standardisation and amounts of language contact. Based on 48 (micro)typological variables from syntax, morphology and phonology, we perform cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling and present ways of visualizing and interpreting the results. Inter alia, the analyses show a major divide between Continental West Germanic and North Germanic (as might be expected) and they also identify a number of outliers, including English and pidgin and creole languages such as Russenorsk or Rabaul Creole German. Afrikaans appears to cluster with the other West Germanic languages rather than the outliers. Within West Germanic, however, it does indeed emerge as rather deviant and, according to our metric, it is, for example, typologically closer to other high-contact varieties such as Yiddish than it is to Dutch.
In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/ cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005. 1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing.