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Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.
Germany's (single) national official language is German. The dominance of German in schools, politics, the legal system, administration and the entire written public domain is so great that for a long time the lack of a coherent language policy was not seen as a problem. State restraint in this area is due, on the one hand, to historical reasons; on the other hand, it has been promoted by the federal system in Germany, which grants the federal states far-reaching responsibilities in the fields of education and culture. More recently, multilingualism among the population has increased and has resulted in a growing interest in understanding the language situation in Germany and (in particular) taking a closer look at the different minority languages. In 2017, for the first time in about 80 years, there is a question on the language of the population in the German micro census. The Institute for the German Language has also carried out various representative surveys; in the winter of 2017/201, a large representative survey with questions on the language repertoire and language attitudes is in the field.
In this paper we examine the composition and interactional deployment of suspended assessments in ordinary German conversation. We define suspended assessments as lexicosyntactically incomplete assessing TCUs that share a distinct cluster of prosodic-phonetic features which auditorily makes them come off as 'left hanging' rather than cut-off (e.g., Schegloff/Jefferson/Sacks 1977; Jasperson 2002) or trailing-off (e.g., Local/Kelly 1986; Walker 2012). Using CA/IL methodology (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018) and drawing on a large body of video-recorded face-to-face conversations, we highlight the verbal, vocal and bodily-visual resources participants use to render such unfinished assessing TCUs recognizably incomplete and identify six recurrent usage types. Overall, the suspension of assessing TCUs appears to either serve as a practice for circumventing the production of assessments that are interactionally inapposite, or as a practice for coping with local contingencies that render the very doing of an assessment problematic for the speaker. Data are in German with English translations.
Die Rolle der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation erweist sich in den Interviews aus dem Israelkorpus m. E. als besonders wichtig. Es wird von der Tatsache ausgegangen, dass es sich bei den Informanten um Personen mit besonders delikaten biographischen Hintergründen handele. Die Interviewerinnen müssen demzufolge mit der starken emotionalen Belastung rechnen, der die Interviewten während der Rekonstruktion ihrer Lebensgeschichte ausgesetzt sind. Ein sehr direkter Frage-Antwort-Stil könnte wegen dieser emotionalen Belastung als unangenehm empfunden werden. Der Einsatz von Verfahren antizipatorischer Verstehensdokumentation weist stattdessen m. E. eindeutig darauf hin, wie sich die Interviewerinnen offensichtlich um Empathie bemühen und im Sinne einer intersubjektiven Inreraktionskonstitution mit den Interviewten kooperieren. Ziel dieses Beitrages ist es zu zeigen, wie solche Verfahren der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation durch den systematischen Einsatz der Konnektoren und, also, dann realisiert werden können.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, wie Konnektoren als sprachliche Mittel zur Aktualisierung von zwei Arten konversationeller Aktivitäten eingesetzt werden können, nämlich von intersubjektiven bzw. gesprächsorganisatorischen Verfahren. Auf intersubjektive Verfahren greift ein Sprecher zurück, um in Kooperation mit seinem Gesprächspartner einen gemeinsamen Wissenshintergrund (common ground) zu schaffen. Durch gesprächsorganisatorische Verfahren greift der Sprecher in die gesprächsthematische Struktur des Interaktionsgeschehens ein. In diesem Beitrag wird die Aktualisierung dieser beiden konversationellen Verfahren am Beispiel der kommunikativen Gattung autobiographisches Interview betrachtet. Diese Gattung ist für eine solche Analyse m. E. besonders geeignet, denn sie zeichnet sich durch eine relativ scharfe Trennung der Gesprächsrollen aus, die das Nachvollziehen des Interaktionsgeschehens erleichtert. An einem autobiographischen Interview sind zwei Subjekte beteiligt: der Interviewte, der als Wissensträger gilt, und der Interviewer, der durch seine Rolle als Gesprächsleiter die Wissensvermittlung begünstigen soll. Der Interviewer ist also mit einer zweifachen Aufgabe konfrontiert, denn er muss die anfängliche Wissensasymmetrie ausgleichen und ist zugleich für die Gesprächsorganisation zuständig. Im Folgenden soll am Beispiel des Konjunktors und veranschaulicht werden, wie der Gebrauch von Konnektoren zur Bewältigung dieser beiden kommunikativen Aufgaben beitragen kann.
Im Streit um Migration soll der Gebrauch von Disclaimern in erster Linie ein positives Bild des Produzenten liefern oder wenigstens Ansprüche auf die Berechtigung seiner kritischen Stellungnahme erheben, ohne dass der Produzent als Rassist abgestempelt wird. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die Ergebnisse einer Fallstudie über den Gebrauch eines solchen Disclaimers in Deutschland und in Italien zusammengefasst, nämlich von „Ich bin kein Rassist, aber“ und seiner italienischen Entsprechung „Non sono razzista, ma“. Es wird gezeigt, (i) wie diese Disclaimer zum Ausdruck ausländerkritischer Stellungnahmen verwendet werden und (ii) wie ihre Verwendung in der Öffentlichkeit wahrgenommen wird.
In this chapter, we will investigate smartphone-based showing sequences in everyday social encounters, that is, moments in which a personal mobile device is used for presenting (audio-)visual content to co-present participants. Despite a growing interest in object-centred sequences and mundane technology use, detailed accounts of the sequential, multimodal, and material dimensions of showing sequences are lacking. Based on video data of social interactions in different languages and on the framework of multimodal interaction analysis, this chapter will explore the link between mobile device use and social practices. We will analyse how smartphone showers and their recipients coordinate the manipulation of a technological object with multiple courses of action, and reflect upon the fundamental complexity of this by-now routine joint activity.
The ubiquity of smartphones has been recognised within conversation analysis as having an impact on conversational structures and on the participants’ interactional involvement. However, most of the previous studies have relied exclusively on video recordings of overall encounters and have not systematically considered what is taking place on the device. Due to the personal nature of smartphones and their small displays, onscreen activities are of limited visibility and are thus potentially opaque for both the co-present participants (“participant opacity”) and the researchers (“analytical opacity”). While opacity can be an inherent feature of smartphones in general, analytical opacity might not be desirable for research purposes. This chapter discusses how a recording set-up consisting of static cameras, wearable cameras and dynamic screen captures allowed us to address the analytical opacity of mobile devices. Excerpts from multi-source video data of everyday encounters will illustrate how the combination of multiple perspectives can increase the visibility of interactional phenomena, reveal new analytical objects and improve analytical granularity. More specifically, these examples will emphasise the analytical advantages and challenges of a combined recording set-up with regard to smartphone use as multiactivity, the role of the affordances of the mobile device, and the prototypicality and “naturalness” of the recorded practices.
Introduction
(2023)
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, we present an overview of freely available web applications providing online access to spoken language corpora. We explore and discuss various solutions with which the corpus providers and corpus platform developers address the needs of researchers who are working with spoken language. The paper aims to contribute to the long-overdue exchange and discussion of methods and best practices in the design of online access to spoken language corpora.
Einführung
(2022)
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.
Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über Korpora internetbasierter Kommunikation, die als digitale Ressourcen frei zur Verfügung stehen und für eigene linguistische Forschungsarbeiten genutzt werden können. In Abschnitt 1 erläutern wir korpuslinguistische Basiskonzepte, die für die Arbeit mit Korpora internetbasierter Kommunikation benötigt werden, und präzisieren die Sprachgebrauchsdomäne Internetbasierte Kommunikation, die den Gegenstand des hier beschriebenen Ressourcentyps bildet. Abschnitt 2 gibt einen Überblick zu existierenden Korpusressourcen für das Deutsche und stellt ausgewählte Korpora zu weiteren europäischen Sprachen vor. In Abschnitt 3 geben wir abschließend einen kurzen Einblick in aktuelle Forschungsfelder, die sich im Bereich der Korpuslinguistik und Sprachtechnologie in Bezug auf den Aufbau und die Aufbereitung von Korpora internetbasierter Kommunikation stellen.
Coronaparty, Jo-jo-Lockdown und Mask-have – Wortschatzerweiterung während des Corona-Stillstands
(2021)
Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (“exactly”). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the “confirmable”) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B’s confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the “anchor”). Through claiming temporal priority, eben speakers treat a just-formulated position as self-evident and mark independence. Further evidence for the three-part structure “anchor-confirmable-eben” that eben sets in motion retrospectively comes from instances where eben speakers supply a missing/opaque anchor via a postpositioned display of independent access. Data are in German with English translation.
OKAY originates from English, but it is increasingly used across languages. This chapter presents data from 13 languages, illustrating the spectrum of possible uses of OKAY in responding and claiming understanding in contexts of informings. Drawing on a wide range of interaction types from both informal and institutional contexts, including those crucially involving embodied practices, we show how OKAY can be used to (i) claim sufficient understanding, (ii) mark understanding of the prior informing as preliminary or not complete, and (iii) index discrepancy of expectation.
As immigration and mobility increases, so do interactions between people from different linguistic backgrounds. Yet while linguistic diversity offers many benefits, it also comes with a number of challenges. In seven empirical articles and one commentary, this Special Issue addresses some of the most significant language challenges facing researchers in the 21st century: the power language has to form and perpetuate stereotypes, the contribution language makes to intersectional identities, and the role of language in shaping intergroup relations. By presenting work that aims to shed light on some of these issues, the goal of this Special Issue is to (a) highlight language as integral to social processes and (b) inspire researchers to address the challenges we face. To keep pace with the world’s constantly evolving linguistic landscape, it is essential that we make progress toward harnessing language’s power in ways that benefit 21st century globalized societies.
KonsortSWD ist das NFDI Konsortium für die Sozial-, Verhaltens-, Bildungs- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Für die äußerst vielfältigen Datentypen und Forschungsmethoden bauen die Beteiligten im Rahmen der NFDI eine bereits bestehende Forschungsdateninfrastruktur aus und ergänzen neue integrierende Dienste. Basis sind die heute 41 vom Rat für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsdaten akkreditierten Forschungsdatenzentren (FDZ). FDZ sind Spezialsammlungen zu jeweils spezifischen Forschungsdaten, z.B. aus der qualitativen Sozialforschung, und können so Forschende auf Basis einer ausführlichen Expertise zu diesen Daten beraten. Neben der Unterstützung der FDZ baut KonsortSWD auch neue Dienste in den Bereichen Datenproduktion, Datenzugang und Technische Lösungen auf.
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.
This paper investigates the use of linking adverbs in adversative constructions in German and Italian. In Italian those constructions are very frequently formulated with adverbs such as invece, while wordings without a lexical connective are more typical of German. Corpus data show that the syntactic und semantic conditions favouring the use of adversative adverbs are by and large the same in both languages. Lexical connectives can increase explicitness when the intended adversative interpretation is not obvious on other grounds. The higher frequency of adversative adverbs in Italian is shown to be a consequence of the more restrictive rules of the placement of prosodic accent.
Close repetitions of lexical material can create an impression of clumsiness in the style of Italian prose, while they seem to be accepted with more ease in German. The present study shows that this traditional claim needs some further differentiation. The negative effects on style take place in Italian when informationally prominent words are repeated, while informational background material may - and in certain cases even must - be repeated for clarity. The comparative study investigates lexical, syntactic and prosodic resources for indicating adversative (contrast) relations in argumentative texts from the field of humanities, written in Italian and German. It shows that, for encoding this kind of relation, Italian depends very much on lexical resources, including repetitions of words, while German makes more use of syntactic and prosodic parallelism. As a consequence, German can often dispense with adversative connectives and allows to employ word repetitions for different purposes.
Das 18. Jahrhundert war wissenschaftlich von großen Umbrüchen geprägt, auch im Bereich der Anatomie und Physiologie des Menschen. Die hierauserwachsende lebhafte Diskussion erstreckte sich auch auf das noch sehr junge Gebiet der (mechanischen) Sprachsynthese und ihrer Grundlagen. Das Sprachsynthesekonzept Wolfgang von Kempelens (1734–1804) ist hierbei ein besonders eindrückliches Beispiel dafür, dass eine grundlegende wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis womöglich durch technologische Limitationen nicht notwendigerweise auch praktisch umgesetzt werden kann. Grundsätzlich waren Kempelens Erkenntnisse zur Anatomie und Physiologie des Menschen und damit auch zur Spracherzeugung weitestgehend zutreffend. Die praktische Umsetzung hingegen wirkt aus heutiger Sicht recht kurios. Kempelens Vokaltrakt-Konzept soll exemplarisch dem nur wenig früher entstandenen Prototypen zur Sprachsynthese Christian Gottlieb Kratzensteins (1723–1795) gegenübergestellt werden. Dessen „Erkenntnisse“ müssen heute vielfach als falsch bezeichnet werden; sein Modell zur Vokalsynthese weist einerseits auffällige Parallelen zu demjenigen KEMPELENS auf, geht hinsichtlich der Physiologie jedoch von vielfach irrigen Annahmen aus.
There are a number of recent replicas of Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine. Although all of them are explicitly based on Kempelen's own description nearly none of them are identical in construction and sound. In this paper we want to illustrate some of these differences and their reasons for five replicas built by ourselves.
Wolfgang von Kempelen's book "The Mechanism of Human Speech" from 1791 is a famous milestone in the history of speech communication research. It has an enormous relevance for the phonetic sciences and it marks an important turning point for the development of the (mechanical) speech synthesis. So far no English version of this work was available, which excludes many interested researchers. Access to the original versions in German and French is restricted for various reasons. For example the blackletter script of the German version is troublesome for most of today's readers. We report here on a new edition of Kempelen's book which unites a better readable German version and its English translation. It will now also be in a searchable electronic format and has been enriched with many commentaries, which aid in the understanding of details of the late 18th century that are little known or unknown to many researchers today.
The paper gives an analysis of productively occurring dative constructions in German, attempting to unify what are known traditionally as Double Object and Experiencer Datives. The datives in question - cipients as we call them - are argued to be licensed under two conditions: One, predicates licensing cipients project a theme and a location argument internally; two, interpretation of the predication as a whole involves reference to two dissociated temporal intervals, or more generally, indexical truth intervals. It is argued that the location argument is needed because it provides the variable that is bound by the cipient argument - the variable in question ranges over superlocations of the location argument referent. Reference to two truth intervals is forced because interpreting the cipient structure involves evaluation of two propositional meanings that would contradict each other in a single context. The first propositional meaning is embedded in the predicate; it encodes that something is at a certain location (in quality space). The second propositional meaning is projected as a presupposition that corresponds just to the negation of the first one. The cipient, functioning as the logical subject of the construction, accommodates this second presuppositional meaning; this makes the construction as a whole interpretable. The analysis applies uniformly to what appear to be the two major contexts licensing cipients: ‘eventive’ and ‘foo-comparative’ predications, thereby accounting for some striking parallels between them.
We argue that properties with a nominal origin get transferred regularly in certain Gentian particle verb constructions to properties that are propositional insofar as they characterize the temporal structure of eventualities, understood to be described by propositional (= truth-assessable) representations of state changes. Accordingly, the oft-noted perfectivizing function of certain verbal particles like ein- in einfahren ('pull in', cf. Kühnhold 1972) is the effect of redressing a conflict at the syntax-semantics interface: On the one hand, constructions like in [die Grube]acc einfahren ('pull into the mine’) exhibit transitive syntax (Gehrke 2008), requiring that the syntactic arguments be mapped onto well-distinguished or DIFFERENT referents in the semantics (Kemmer 1993). On the other hand, in/ein codes a spatio-temporal inclusion relation between its relata, contradicting the requirement imposed by the transitive syntax. Following Brandt (2019), we submit that the interface executes a manoeuvre that delays the interpretation of part of the contradiction-inducing DIFFERENCE feature. It is not locally interpreted (semantically represented) in toto but in part passed on to the next syntactic-semantic computational cycle. Here, the passed-on meaning is interpreted in the locally customary terms, in the case at hand, as a temporal index where the post-state of the depicted eventuality does not hold.
Eine korpuslinguistische Untersuchung mit umfassender Analyse der häufiger vorkommenenden Adverbbildungsmuster des Deutschen legt nahe, dass die Sättigung des internen Argumentplatzes eines ursprünglich relationalen Ausdrucks eine wichtige Rolle bei der Adverbproduktion spielt (Brandt 2020). Eine genauere Betrachtung der Unterschiede zwischen -ermaßen- vs. -erweise-Adverbien deutet auf eine grammatische Unterscheidung zwischen Satzadverbien und Adverbien der Art und Weise: Im Fall von -ermaßen erfolgt die Sättigung über Token-Reflexivität, während der interne Slot von -erweise- Bildungen über häufigere und möglicherweise expansive Mechanismen geschlossen wird. Darüber hinaus fördert die pleonastische Qualität von Bildungen auf der Basis gerundivaler Partizipien die Produktivität von -erweise Adverbien.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in the perceptual quality of a text-to-speech system. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of a symbolic representation which was either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic representation is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, post-lexical segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to derive an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.
Automatic recognition of speech, thought, and writing representation in German narrative texts
(2013)
This article presents the main results of a project, which explored ways to recognize and classify a narrative feature—speech, thought, and writing representation (ST&WR)—automatically, using surface information and methods of computational linguistics. The task was to detect and distinguish four types—direct, free indirect, indirect, and reported ST&WR—in a corpus of manually annotated German narrative texts. Rule-based as well as machine-learning methods were tested and compared. The results were best for recognizing direct ST&WR (best F1 score: 0.87), followed by indirect (0.71), reported (0.58), and finally free indirect ST&WR (0.40). The rule-based approach worked best for ST&WR types with clear patterns, like indirect and marked direct ST&WR, and often gave the most accurate results. Machine learning was most successful for types without clear indicators, like free indirect ST&WR, and proved more stable. When looking at the percentage of ST&WR in a text, the results of machine-learning methods always correlated best with the results of manual annotation. Creating a union or intersection of the results of the two approaches did not lead to striking improvements. A stricter definition of ST&WR, which excluded borderline cases, made the task harder and led to worse results for both approaches.
Diese Fallstudie untersucht die quantitative Verteilung von direkten und nicht-direkten Formen von Redewiedergabe im Vergleich zwischen zwei Literaturtypen: Hochliteratur - definiert als Werke, die auf der Auswahlliste von Literaturpreisen standen - und Heftromanen - massenproduzierten Erzählwerken, die zumeist über den Zeitschriftenhandel vertrieben werden. Die Studie geht von manuell annotierten Daten aus und überprüft daran die Verlässlichkeit automatischer Annotationswerkzeuge, die im Anschluss eingesetzt werden, um eine Untersuchung von insgesamt 250 Volltexten durchzuführen. Es kann nachgewiesen werden, dass sich die Literaturtypen sowie auch unterschiedliche Genres von Heftromanen hinsichtlich der verwendeten Wiedergabeformen unterscheiden.
Feminine forms of job titles raise great interest in many countries. However, it is still unknown how they shape stereotypical impressions on warmth and competence dimensions among female and male listeners. In an experiment with fictitious job titles men perceived women described with feminine job titles as significantly less warm and marginally less competent than women with masculine job titles, which led to lower willingness to employ them. No such effects were observed among women.
This study examines what kind of cues and constraints for discourse interpretation can be derived from the logical and generic document structure of complex texts by the example of scientific journal articles. We performed statistical analysis on a corpus of scientific articles annotated on different annotations layers within the framework of XML-based multi-layer annotation. We introduce different discourse segment types that constrain the textual domains in which to identify rhetorical relation spans, and we show how a canonical sequence of text type structure categories is derived from the corpus annotations. Finally, we demonstrate how and which text type structure categories assigned to complex discourse segments of the type “block” statistically constrain the occurrence of rhetorical relation types.
As part of our project "German at Work: The Linguistic and Communicative Integration of Refugees" at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (Mannheim, Germany), we are conducting several ethnographic field studies to investigate the integration process of refugees into various professional fields. The guiding questions are which linguistic and communicative problems arise in workplace interactions between refugees and their colleagues and with which communicative practices the participants ensure mutual understanding. In the present article, we further focus on the question whether and how the professional trainers use the work interactions as opportunities for language mediation and which practices they use.
This paper discusses the semi-formal language of mathematics and presents the Naproche CNL, a controlled natural language for mathematical authoring. Proof Representation Structures, an adaptation of Discourse Representation Structures, are used to represent the semantics of texts written in the Naproche CNL. We discuss how the Naproche CNL can be used in formal mathematics, and present our prototypical Naproche system, a computer program for parsing texts in the Naproche CNL and checking the proofs in them for logical correctness.
This paper investigates synchronic variation in the lexical and grammatical environments of the German lexical verb verdienen ‘earn’, ‘deserve’. In its lexical uses, verdienen co-occurs with an object noun phrase whose head is either concrete (e.g. Geld ‘money’) or, more commonly, abstract (e.g. Beachtung ‘attention’). When it is used more grammatically with deontic modal meaning, verdienen is followed by a passive or active infinitive. This paper uses collostructional analyses to contrast lexical and grammatical uses in terms of the most strongly attracted lexical items, which are grouped into semantic classes. The results reflect different degrees of host-class expansion (cf. Himmelmann 2004), whereby the collexemes of verdienen expand from concrete to abstract and their morpho-syntactic contexts from nominal to infinitival complement and subsequently from passive to active. Synchronic distribution can thus serve as a window on diachronic development (Kuteva 2001), in this case the rise of a deontic modality marker.
Der Beitrag thematisiert die Märchenformel es war einmal unter konstruktionsgrammatischem Gesichtspunkt. Im Mittelpunkt der Überlegungen stehen zwei Fragen: a) Wie kann man es war einmal im Kontext seines Gebrauchs in Märchen beschreiben? b) Wie Lässt sich diese Märchenformel im Kontext anderer, mit ihr formal und/oder semantisch verwandter Konstruktionen mit es erfassen? Um die erste Frage zu beantworten, wird auf Merkmale der Textsorte ‚Märchen' sowie auf den Begriff des Erzählens zurückgegriffen. Damit im Zusammenhang wird in Anlehnung an die Terminologie in Feilke (1996) von textuell-pragmatischer Prägung gesprochen. Zur Klärung der zweiten Frage sollen vor dem Hintergrund syntaktischer Prägung abstraktere Konstruktionen mit es (Rhematisierungskonstruktionen, Präsentativkonstruktionen und das es impersonate) herangezogen und in Beziehung zu es war einmal gesetzt werden. Die Überlegungen von a) über b) führen zu der Annahme einer auf Ähnlichkeiten basierenden Konstruktionsfamilie mit es als Thetizitätsmarker.
This paper deals with different types of verbal complementation of the German verb verdienen. It focuses on constructions that have been undergoing a grammaticalization process and thus express deontic modality, as in Sie verdient geliebt zu werden (ʽShe deserves to be lovedʼ) and Sie verdient zu leben (ʽShe deserves to liveʼ) (Diewald, Dekalo & Czicza 2021). These constructions are connected to parallel complementation types with passive and active infinitives containing a correlate es, as in Sie verdient es, geliebt zu werden and Sie verdient es, zu leben, as well as finite clauses with the subordinator dass with and without correlative es, as in Sie verdient, dass sie geliebt wird and Sie verdient es, dass sie geliebt wird. This paper attempts to show a close comparative investigation of these six types of constructions based on their relevant semantic and syntactic properties in terms of clause linkage (Lehmann 1988). We analyze the relevant data retrieved from the DWDS corpus of the 20th century and present an expanded grammaticalization path for verdienen-constructions. The finite complementation with dass is regarded as an example of a separate structural option called “elaboration”. Concerning the use of correlative es, it is shown that it does not have any substantial effect on the grammaticalization of modal verdienen-constructions.
Historische Werkzeugnisse. Reflexive Medienpraktiken in Kriegsgefangenenakten des Zweiten Weltkriegs
(2023)
Im US-Kriegsgefangenenlager Fort Hunt wurden während des Zweiten Weltkriegs deutsche Soldaten verhört und abgehört, was in Protokollen dokumentiert wurde. Die praxeologische Herausforderung besteht darin, Praktiken anhand dieses Materials adäquat zu analysieren. Dass wir Spuren in Archivdaten verstehen, ist in ihrer Semiotizität begründet. Dass sie die sie hervorbringenden Situationen überdauern, verdanken wir ihrer Medialität. In einer semiopraxeologischen Analyse, die diese beiden Grundkonstanten zeichenvermittelter Kommunikation in Beziehung zueinander setzt, wird erörtert, wie Praktiken sich aus ihren Spuren erschließen. Es wird gezeigt, wie sich an Dokumenten indexikalische und reflexive Verweise auf die heterogenen, praktischen Verwendungszusammenhänge über die Zeit manifestieren. Entsprechend sind Archivdokumente als historische Werkzeugnisse aufzufassen, die einerseits Vergangenes belegen und die andererseits praktisch gehandhabt werden, was wiederum neue Praxisindizes erzeugt und als Spuren am Material hinterlässt. Die Analyse zeigt, inwiefern Wissen nicht trotz, sondern aufgrund seiner semiotischen und materialen Manifestationen in (Archiv-)Dokumenten vorläufig ist und sich als Gegenstand weiterer Praktiken immer wieder verändern kann.
Mobiles Livevideostreaming ist eine Medienpraktik, bei der sich die Beteiligten in einer spezifischen Ausrichtung zueinander befinden und in der Streamer*innen und Zuschauer*innen unterschiedliche semiotische Ressourcen zur Verfügung stehen. Anhand der multimodalen Sequenzanalyse einer prägnanten Episode eines Ortswechsels im Rahmen der Berichterstattung eines Journalisten von einem politischen Ereignis auf der Livevideostreaming-Plattform Periscope wird die Frage bearbeitet, wie Beteiligung und involvement in Livevideostreams hergestellt sowie organisiert werden und dargelegt, inwiefern mobiles Livevideostreaming soziale Parainteraktion transzendiert. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Hosts der Medienpraktik ‚Livevideostreaming' interaktionsdominierend agieren und die Zuschauer*innen durch asymmetrische Partizipationskoordination per footing shifts situativ in das Geschehen involvieren.
How do people communicate in mobile settings of interaction? How does mobility affect the way we speak? How does mobility exert influence on the manner in which talk itself is consequential for how we move in space? Recently, questions of this sort have attracted increasing attention in the human and social sciences. This Special Issue contributes to the emerging body of studies on mobility and talk by inspecting an ordinary and ubiquitous phenomenon in which communication among mobile participants is paramount: participation in traffic. This editorial presents previous work on mobility in natural settings, as carried out by interactionally oriented researchers. It also shows how the investigation into traffic participation adds new perspectives to research on language and communication.
Parmi les nombreuses contributions de Charles Goodwin à l’étude des interactions sociales, ses travaux sur les gestes de pointage (1986, 2003, 2007) et la vision professionnelle (1994) constituent un apport majeur. Forts de l’enseignement goodwinien, nous examinons le recours aux gestes de pointage lors des instructions de navigation observables dans des leçons de conduite. Nous décrivons quatre exécutions indexicales différentes des gestes de pointage employés pour indiquer un parcours à suivre : les gestes trajectoire, les gestes géométriques, schématiques et contrastifs. Les gestes trajectoire tracent une ligne dans l’espace, révélant ainsi une composante déictique et une composante iconique. Les gestes géométriques instaurent une relation vectorielle avec la configuration routière visible, alors que les gestes schématiques reposent sur une représentation sémiotique stylisée de l’environnement. Ni complètement géométriques, ni schématiques, les gestes contrastifs se basent sur une représentation oppositionnelle de l’espace ambiant. La mobilité des interactants, leur asymétrie épistémique, l’activité didactique, et la séquentialité de l’interaction contribuent à donner leur sens à ces gestes de pointage.
In this contribution we present some work of the R&D European project “LIRICS” and of the ISO/TC 37/SC 4 committee related to the topic of interoperability and re-use of language resources. We introduce some basic mechanisms of the standardization work in ISO and describe in more details the general approach on how to cope with the annotation of language data within ISO.
We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.