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In spite of the obvious importance that is accorded to the notion grammatical construction in any approach that sees itself as a construction grammar (CxG), there is as yet no generally accepted definition of the term across different variants of the framework. In particular, there are different assumptions about which additional requirements a given structure has to meet in order to be recognized as a construction besides being a ‘form-meaning pair’. Since the choice of a particular definition will determine the range of both relevant phenomena and concrete observations to be considered in empirical research within the framework, the issue is not just a mere terminological quibble but has important methodological repercussions especially for quantitative research in areas such as corpus linguistics. The present study illustrates some problems in identifying and delimiting such patterns in naturally occurring text and presents arguments for a usage-based interpretation of the term grammatical construction.
In the context of the HyTex project, our goal is to convert a corpus into a hypertext, basing conversion strategies on annotations which explicitly mark up the text-grammatical structures and relations between text segments. Domain-specific knowledge is represented in the form of a knowledge net, using topic maps. We use XML as an interchange format. In this paper, we focus on a declarative rule language designed to express conversion strategies in terms of text-grammatical structures and hypertext results. The strategies can be formulated in a concise formal syntax which is independend of the markup, and which can be transformed automatically into executable program code.
Generierung von Linkangeboten zur Rekonstruktion terminologiebedingter Wissensvoraussetzungen
(2002)
Dieser Beitrag skizziert Strategien zur (semi-)automatischen Annotation von definitorischen Textsegmenten und Termverwendungsinstanzen auf der Grundlage grammatisch annotierter Korpora. Ziel unserer Überlegungen ist es, bei der selektiven Rezeption von Fachtexten in einer Hypertextumgebung die je spezifischen Wissensvoraussetzungen, die der Verwendung von Fachtermini unterliegen und die für das Textverständnis eine entscheidende Rolle spielen, über automatisch generierte Linkangebote rekonstruierbar zu machen.
In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes from systematic variation in the design of imperative turns, relative to the fittedness of the imperatively mandated action to the addressee’s ongoing trajectory of actions, what we call the “dine of commitment”. We present four points on this dine: Responsive imperatives perform an operation on the deontic dimension of what the addressee has announced or already begun to do (in particular its permissibility); local-project imperatives formulate a new action advancing a course of action in which the addressee is already actively engaged; global-project-imperatives target a next task for which the addressee is available on the grounds of their participation in the overall event, and in the absence of any competing work; and competitive imperatives draw on a presently otherwise engaged addressee on the grounds of their social commitment to the relevant course of actions. These four turn shapes are increasingly complex, reflecting the interactional work required to bridge the increasing distance between what the addressee is currently doing, and what the imperative mandates. We present data from German and Polish informal and institutional settings.
The lexicography of German
(2020)
This chapter discusses the main dictionaries of the German language as it is spoken and written in Germany, and also German as it is spoken and written in Austria, Switzerland, the eastern fringes of Belgium, and South Tyrol. It also briefly describes Pennsylvania German. Corpora and other language resources used in German dictionary-making are also presented. Finally, there is a discussion of some current issues in German lexicography, as well as future prospects.
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
We present a method to identify and document a phenomenon on which there is very little empirical data: German phrasal compounds occurring in the form of as a single token (without punctuation between their components). Relying on linguistic criteria, our approach implies to have an operational notion of compounds which can be systematically applied as well as (web) corpora which are large and diverse enough to contain rarely seen phenomena. The method is based on word segmentation and morphological analysis, it takes advantage of a data-driven learning process. Our results show that coarse-grained identification of phrasal compounds is best performed with empirical data, whereas fine-grained detection could be improved with a combination of rule-based and frequency-based word lists. Along with the characteristics of web texts, the orthographic realizations seem to be linked to the degree of expressivity.
In this paper, I argue against the analyses of the there-construction by Moro (1997) and Hoekstra & Mulder (1990) and for an analysis in the frame of Williams (1994), Hazout (2004) from two angles. First of all, Moro and Hoekstra & Mulder do not correctly predict the behaviour of the there-construction under wh-movement; second, from a semantic point of view, the predicate in the small clause structure is the postverbal DP and not there. Alternatively, I follow the proposal by Williams (1994) in which there is the subject of predication and I will point out a direction to analyse the problematic wh-movement data within this framework.
Precise multimodal studies require precise synchronisation between audio and video signals. However, raw audio and audio from video recordings can be out of sync for several reasons. In order to re-synchronise them, a dynamic programming (DP) approach is presented here. Traditionally, DP is performed on the rectangular distance matrix comparing each value in signal A with each value in signal B. Previous work limited the search space using for example the Sakoe Chiba Band (Sakoe and Chiba, 1978). However, the overall space of the distance matrix remains identical. Here, a tunnel matrix and its according DP-algorithm are presented. The matrix contains merely the computed distance of two signals to a pre-specified bandwidth and the computational cost is equally reduced. An example implementation demonstrates the functionality on artificial data and on data from real audio and video recordings.
This article deals with three interrelated phenoma in the information structure of German sentences: the focusing of negative markers, of finite verb forms and of the particles ja, doch, wohl and schon. Focusing of the finite verb is the most important marker of verum focus, as described by Höhle (1988). Focusing of particles can be an alternative means for similar purposes, while focusing of negation seems to be the contradictory opposite of verum focus. It is shown that negation- independently of its information structural status - can be interpreted on three distinct levels of sentence meaning: as an indicator of the non-facticity of a state of affairs, the non-truth of a proposition, or the non-desirability of a speech act. Focusing of the negative marker puts contrastive emphasis on the negative value assigned to sentence meaning on one of these levels. Ve rum focus can be interpreted on the same three levels: as a marker of contrastive emphasis on a positive value of facticity, truth or desirability. The particles ja, doch, wohl and schon refer to sufficient epistemic or interactional conditions for the assignment of a positive or negative value. By focusing such a particle, the speaker indicates that (s)he believes the assigned value to be well justified and insists on establishing it as common ground for further interaction.
Thomas Müntzer zählt zu den Persönlichkeiten der deutschen Geschichte, die bislang völlig kontrovers beurteilt wurden. Das demonstriert schon die Auflistung der Bezeichnungen, mit denen Müntzer in der Literatur charakterisiert wurde und wird: Reformator, Theologe, Priester, Prediger, Prophet, Mystiker, Spiritualist, Apokalyptiker, (Sozial-)Revolutionär, Rebell, Bauernführer, Terrorist. In der DDR wurde er als Kämpfer für eine bessere, gerechte, von Ausbeutung freie Gesellschaft verehrt. Er galt als Vertreter eines christlichen Sozialismus. Sein Porträt war seit 1971 auf der 5-Mark- Banknote zu finden. Die religiösen Aspekte seines Wirkens wurden allerdings stark vernachlässigt. Die frühere Bundesrepublik sah in Müntzer eher einen religiösen Sonderling und nahm ihn nur am Rande zur Kenntnis.
Seine theologischen Auffassungen äußerte Müntzer in wenigen, meist recht kurzen, aber äußerst eindringlich formulierten Texten, deren Druck oft mit Problemen verbunden war. Bei den Zeitgenossen wirkte er vor allem über seine Predigten, die allerdings nicht publiziert wurden. Erhalten blieb dagegen ein nicht unbeträchtlicher Teil seines Briefwechsels, der für die Entwicklung seiner Ideen aufschlussreich ist. Im Prager Manifest, einem ungedruckt gebliebenen frühen Text, formulierte Müntzer erstmals in groben Zügen seine zentralen reformatorischen Vorstellungen.
HMMs are the dominating technique used in speech recognition today since they perform well in overall phone recognition. In this paper, we show the comparison of HMM methods and machine learning techniques, such as neural networks, decision trees and ensemble classifiers with boosting and bagging in the task of articulatory-acoustic feature classification. The experimental results show that HMM methods work well for the classification of such features as vocalic. However, decision tree and bagging outperform HMMs for the fricative classification task since the data skewness is much higher than for the feature vocalic classification task. This demonstrates that HMMs do not perform as well as decision trees and bagging in highly skewed data settings.
MRI data of German vowels and consonants was acquired for 9 speakers. In this paper tongue contours for the vowels were analyzed using the three-mode factor analysis technique PARAFAC. After some difficulties, probably related to what constitutes an adequate speaker sample for this three-mode technique to work, a stable two-factor solution was extracted that explained about 90% of the variance. Factor 1 roughly captured the dimension low back to high front; Factor 2 that from mid front to high back. These factors are compared with earlier models based on PARAFAC. These analyses were based on midsagittal contours; the paper concludes by illustrating from coronal and axial sections how non-midline information could be incorporated into this approach.
Analyses of jaw movement(obtained by Electromagnetic Articulography) and acoustics show that loud speech is an intricate phenomenon. Besides involving higher intensity and subglottal pressure it affects jaw movements as well as fundamental frequency and especially first formants. It is argued that all these effects serve the purpose of enhancing perceptual salience.
The vowel quality in some diphthongs of Swabian (an upper german dialect) was determined by measurement of first and second formant values. A minimal contrast could be shown between two different diphthong qualities […], where for Standard German only one is assumed, viz. /ai/. The two diphthong qualities differ only slightly in onset and offset vowel quality, so a better understanding of their relationship was expected from an examination of their dynamic aspects. Our preliminary results suggest that there is indeed a difference in the temporal structure of the two diphthongs.
The paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation and analysis of multimodality. Each of the tools has specific strengths so that a variety of different tools, working on the same data, can be desirable for project work. However this usually requires tedious conversion between formats. We propose a common exchange format for multimodal annotation, based on the annotation graph (AG) formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools. In the current version of this format the common denominator information can be reliably exchanged between the tools, and additional information can be stored in a standardized way.
The English language has taken advantage of the Digital Revolution to establish itself as the global language; however, only 28.6 %of Internet users speak English as their native language. Machine Trans-lation (MT) is a powerful technology that can bridge this gap. In devel-opment since the mid-20th century, MT has become available to every Internet user in the last decade, due to free online MT services. This paper aims to discuss the implications that these tools may have for the privacy of their users and how they are addressed by EU data protec-tion law. It examines the data-flows in respect of the initial processing (both from the perspective of the user and the MT service provider) and potential further processing that may be undertaken by the MT service provider.
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be derived from this more general semantic contribution. In addition we discuss some cross linguistic consequences of our analysis.
A polarity-sensitive item (PSI), as traditionally defined, is an expression that is restricted to either an affirmative or negative context. PSIs like ‘lift a finger’ and ‘all the time in the world’ sub-serve discourse routines like understatement and emphasis. Lexical–semantic classes are increasingly invoked in descriptions of the properties of PSIs. Here, we use English corpus data and the tools of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982, 1985) to explore Israel’s (2011) observation that the semantic role of a PSI determines how the expression fits into a contextually constructed scalar model. We focus on a class of exceptions implied by Israel’s model: cases in which a given PSI displays two countervailing patterns of polarity sensitivity, with attendant differences in scalar entailments. We offer a set of case studies of polaritysensitive expressions – including verbs of attraction and aversion like ‘can live without’, monetary units like ‘a red cent’, comparative adjectives and time-span adverbials – that demonstrate that the interpretation of a given PSI in a given polar context is based on multiple factors. These factors include the speaker’s perspective on and affective stance towards the described event, available inferences about causality and, perhaps most critically, particulars of the predication, including the verb or adjective’s frame membership, the presence or absence of an ability modal like can, the grammatical construction used and the range of contingencies evoked by the utterance.
When a noise verb is used to indicate verbal communication, factors from both the source domain of the verb (perception) and the target domain (communication) play a role in determining the argument structure of the sentence. While the target domain supplies a syntactic structure, the source domain’s semantics constrain the degree to which that syntactic structure can be exploited. This can be determined by comparing noise verbs in this use with manner-of-communication verbs, which are superficially similar, but native to communication. Data for these two classes of verbs were drawn from the British National Corpus. The data were annotated with frame-semantic markup, as described in the Berkeley FrameNet Project. We compared the presence, type of syntactic realization, and position of the semantically annotated arguments for both classes of verbs. We found that noise and manner verbs show statistically significant differences in these three areas. For instance, noise verbs are more focused on the form of the message than manner verbs: noise verbs appear more frequently with a quoted message. In addition, there are differences other than the complementation patterns: certain noise verbs are biased with respect to speakers’ genders, message types, and even orthography in quoted messages
We provide a unified account of semantic effects observable in attested examples of the German applicative (‘be-’) construction, e.g. Rollstuhlfahrer Poul Sehachsen aus Kopenhagen will den 1997 erschienenen Wegweiser Handiguide Europa fortführen und zusammen mit Movado Berlin berollen (‘Wheelchair user Poul Schacksen from Copenhagen wants to continue the guide ‘Handiguide Europe’, which came out in 1997, and roll Berlin together with Movado.’). We argue that these effects do not come from lexico-semantic operations on ‘input’ verbs, but are instead the products of a reconciliation procedure in which the meaning of the verb is integrated into the event-structure schema denoted by the applicative construction. We analyze the applicative pattern as an argument-structure construction, in terms of Goldberg (1995). We contrast this approach with that of Brinkmann (1997), in which properties associated with the applicative pattern (e.g. omissibility of the theme argument, holistic interpretation of the goal argument, and planar construal of the location argument) are attributed to general semantico-pragmatic principles. We undermine the generality of the principles as stated, and assert that these properties are instead construction-particular. We further argue that the constructional account provides an elegant model of the valence-creation and valence-augmentation functions of the prefix. We describe the constructional semantics as prototype-based: diverse implications of fee-predications, including iteration, transfer, affectedness, intensity and saturation, derive via regular patterns of semantic extension from the topological concept of coverage.
Wer über die aktuelle Entwicklung des Deutschen, über Sprachpflege und Sprach-politik in Deutschland spricht, muss unausweichlich auch über Englisch reden. Darin unterscheidet sich mein Bericht nicht von denen aus mehreren anderen europäischen Ländern. Meine Kapitel heißen Anglizismen, Domänenverslust, Sprachpolitik.
Contemporary studies on the characteristics of natural language benefit enormously from the increasing amount of linguistic corpora. Aside from text and speech corpora, corpora of computer-mediated communication (CMC) Position themselves between orality and literacy, and beyond that provide in- sight into the impact of "new", mainly intemet-based media on language beha- viour. In this paper, we present an empirical attempt to work with annotated CMC corpora for the explanation of linguistic phenomena. In concrete terms, we implement machine leaming algorithms to produce decision trees that reveal rules and tendencies about the use of genitive markers in German.
Discourse parsing of complex text types such as scientific research articles requires the analysis of an input document on linguistic and structural levels that go beyond traditionally employed lexical discourse markers. This chapter describes a text-technological approach to discourse parsing. Discourse parsing with the aim of providing a discourse structure is seen as the addition of a new annotation layer for input documents marked up on several linguistic annotation levels. The discourse parser generates discourse structures according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory. An overview of the knowledge sources and components for parsing scientific joumal articles is given. The parser’s core consists of cascaded applications of the GAP, a Generic Annotation Parser. Details of the chart parsing algorithm are provided, as well as a short evaluation in terms of comparisons with reference annotations from our corpus and with recently developed Systems with a similar task.
This chapter addresses the requirements and linguistic foundations of automatic relational discourse analysis of complex text types such as scientific journal articles. It is argued that besides lexical and grammatical discourse markers, which have traditionally been employed in discourse parsing, cues derived from the logical and generical document structure and the thematic structure of a text must be taken into account. An approach to modelling such types of linguistic information in terms of XML-based multi-layer annotations and to a text-technological representation of additional knowledge sources is presented. By means of quantitative and qualitative corpus analyses, cues and constraints for automatic discourse analysis can be derived. Furthermore, the proposed representations are used as the input sources for discourse parsing. A short overview of the projected parsing architecture is given.
Linguistic variation and linguistic virtuosity of young “Ghetto”-migrants in Mannheim, Germany
(2011)
In this paper, we provide an insight into the life world and social experiences of young Turkish migrants who are categorised by German society as “social problem cases”. Based on natural conversational data, we describe the communicative repertoire of one migrant adolescent and that of his friends. Our aims are (a) to isolate those linguistic features that convey the impression of “foreignness”, and stand out among other German speakers’ features, and (b) to analyse the variability in our informants’ discursive practices - i.e. code- or style-switching, as it is commonly referred to in the literature - in order to show how variation serves as a communicative resource. Our findings show that these adolescents’ remarkable linguistic proficiency and communicative competence contrast markedly to their low educational and professional status.
Les séquences argumentatives dans les discussions conflictuelles entre mères et filles adolescentes
(1994)
In Anlehnung an die Theorie der Individuation wird vermutet, dass das Gesprächsverhalten von Müttern und jugendlichen Töchtern in konfliktären Interaktionen durch Kontrolltendenzen auf Seiten der Mütter und Abgrenzungstendenzen auf Seiten der Töchter determiniert wird. Das Aufeinandertreffen konträrer partnerbezogener Intentionen sollte sich in bestimmten Regelmäßigkeiten bei der Abfolge von gesprächsorganisatorischen und argumentativen Äußerungen niederschlagen. Als Datenbasis dienten 60 Konfliktgespräche zwischen 30 Müttern und ihren jugendlichen Töchtern im Alter von 12 bis 24 Jahren. Jede Dyade diskutierte zwei aktuelle Konflikte. Die transkribierten Gespräche wurden nach einem Argumentations-Kategorien-System in Einheiten zerlegt und klassifiziert. Gesprächsorganisatorische Kategorien waren Initiativen sowie positive und negative Reaktionen auf Initiativen. Argumente wurden in ihrer Bezugnahme auf ein Ziel oder ein anderes Argument nach ihrer stärkenden, modifizierenden, schwächenden, zustimmenden oder ablehnenden Funktion unterschieden. Die Auswertungen erfolgten über lag-sequentielle Analysen. Als statistisch signifikante Muster resultierten das Repetionsphänomen (Initiativen werden vor allem von Müttern häufig wiederholt), die Argumentkonfrontation (Gegenargumente werden überzufällig häufig mit Gegenargumenten gekontert) und ein positiver sowie ein negativer Reaktionszyklus (sowohl positive als auch negative Reaktionen ziehen Partnerreaktionen der gleichen Qualität nach sich). Die Ergebnisse stehen in Einklang mit den entwicklungspsychologischen Annahmen über die partnerbezogenen Intentionen von Müttern und jugendlichen Töchtern.
Complex common names such as Indian elephant or green tea denote a certain type of entity, viz. kinds. Moreover, those kinds are always subkinds of the kind denoted by their head noun. Establishing such subkinds is essentially the task of classifying modifiers that are a defining trait of endocentrically structured complex common names. Examining complex common names of different lexico-syntactic types(NN compounds, N+N syntagmas, NP/PP syntagmas, A+N syntagmas) and from different languages (particularly English, German and French) it can be shown that complex common names are subject to language- independent formal and semantic constraints. In particular, complex common names qualify as name-like expressions in that they tend to be deficient in terms of formal complexity and semantic compositionality.
In this chapter, emotions are not regarded primarily as internal-psychological phenomena, but as socially proscribed and formed entities, which are constituted in accordance with social rules of emotionality and which are manifested, interpreted, and processed together communicatively in the interaction for definite purposes by the persons involved. In the elaboration of such an interactive conception of emotionality, the following aspects are treated: the value of emotionality in linguistic theories; emotions as a specific form of experiencing; the rules of emotionality; communication of emotions as transmission of evaluations; practices of manifestation, interpretation and processing of emotions in the communication process; fundamental interrelations between emotions and communication behavior; and methodology of the analysis of emotions and emotionality in specific conversation types. Finally, the developed theoretical apparatus in the analysis of two short conversation sections is elucidated.
Integrated Linguistic Annotation Models and Their Application in the Domain of Antecedent Detection
(2011)
Seamless integration of various, often heterogeneous linguistic resources in terms of their output formats and a combined analysis of the respective annotation layers are crucial tasks for linguistic research. After a decade of concentration on the development of formats to structure single annotations for specific linguistic issues, in the last years a variety of specifications to store multiple annotations over the same primary data has been developed. The paper focuses on the integration of the knowledge resource logical document structure information into a text document to enhance the task of automatic anaphora resolution both for the task of candidate detection and antecedent selection. The paper investigates data structures necessary for knowledge integration and retrieval.
Different Views on Markup
(2010)
In this chapter, two different ways of grouping information represented in document markup are examined: annotation levels, referring to conceptual levels of description, and annotation layers, referring to the technical realisation of markup using e.g. document grammars. In many current XML annotation projects, multiple levels are integrated into one layer, often leading to the problem of having to deal with overlapping hierarchies. As a solution, we propose a framework for XML-based multiple, independent XML annotation layers for one text, based on an abstract representation of XML documents with logical predicates. Two realisations of the abstract representation are presented, a Prolog fact base format together with an application architecture, and a specification for XML native databases. We conclude with a discussion of projects that have currently adopted this framework.
An approach to the unification of XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents with identical textual content and concurrent markup in the framework of XML-based multi-layer annotation is introduced. A Prolog program allows the possible relationships between element instances on two annotation layers that share PCDATA to be explored and also the computing of a target node hierarchy for a well-formed, merged XML document. Special attention is paid to identity conflicts between element instances, for which a default solution that takes into account metarelations that hold between element types on the different annotation layers is provided. In addition, rules can be specified by a user to prescribe how identity conflicts should be solved for certain element types.
This article introduces the topic of ‘‘Multilingual language resources and interoperability’’. We start with a taxonomy and parameters for classifying language resources. Later we provide examples and issues of interoperatability, and resource architectures to solve such issues. Finally we discuss aspects of linguistic formalisms and interoperability.
Researchers in many disciplines, sometimes working in close cooperation, have been concerned with modeling textual data in order to account for texts as the prime information unit of written communication. The list of disciplines includes computer science and linguistics as well as more specialized disciplines like computational linguistics and text technology. What many of these efforts have in common is the aim to model textual data by means of abstract data types or data structures that support at least the semi-automatic processing of texts in any area of written communication.
We report on finished work in a project that is concerned with providing methods, tools, best practice guidelines, and solutions for sustainable linguistic resources. The article discusses several general aspects of sustainability and introduces an approach to normalizing corpus data and metadata records. Moreover, the architecture of the sustainability platform implemented by the authors is described.