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This paper focuses on language change based on shifting social norms, in particular with regard to the debate on language and gender. It is a recurring argument in this debate that language develops "naturally" and that "severe interventions" - such as gender-inclusive language is often claimed to be - in the allegedly "organic" language system are inappropriate and even "dangerous". Such interventions are, however, not unprecedented. Socially motivated processes of language change are neither unusual nor new. We focus in our contribution on one important political-social space in Germany, the German Bundestag. Taking other struggles about language and gender in the plenaries of the Bundestag as a starting point, our article illustrates that language and gender has been a recurring issue in the German Bundestag since the 1980s. We demonstrate how this is reflected in linguistic practices of the Bundestag, by the use of a) designations for gays and lesbians; b) pair forms such as Bürgerinnen und Bürger (female and male citizens); and c) female forms of addresses and personal nouns ('Präsidentin' in addition to 'Präsident'). Lastly, we will discuss implications of these earlier language battles for the currently very heated debate about gender-inclusive language, especially regarding new forms with gender symbols like the asterisk or the colon (Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen; male*female teachers) which are intended to encompass all gender identities.
Contrastive analysis of climate-related neologisms registered in GermanN and French Wikipedia
(2023)
Neologisms represent new social norms, tendencies, controversies and attitudes. They denote new or changed concepts which are constantly being negotiated between different members of the discourse community (Wodak 2022 and Catalano/Waugh (eds.) 2020). Neologisms help to identify new communicative patterns and narratives which illustrate different strings of discourse in everyday life. In recent years, many neologisms relating to the subject of the environment and climate have been emerging around the world mainly due to dominant discussions on climate change and the movement “Fridays for Future”. In German, for example, neologisms such as Klimakleber, klimaresilient and globaler Streik and in French neologisms such as éco-anxiété, justice climatique and écocitoyen could be observed. These neologisms occur in many domains of life, for example in politics, media and also in advertising, which means that “l’importance croissante des enjeux environnementaux dans les discours politiques, médiatiques et publicitaires” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22) can be identified. However, it is not only the occurrence of environment- or climate-related topics that is increasing, but also the rising polarisation of the public debate. The polarisation within public discourse is based on the fact that there are opposing positions which are represented by new or recently relevant terms such as activistes du climat (or Klimaaktivisten) and climatosceptiques (or Klimaskeptiker) (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22). Due to different identifications with one or the other side, one can also speak of an “affrontement idéologique” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 23). 1 The explosive nature and the high complexity of the debate on climate and the environmental issues mean that many words are naturally unfamiliar to people. This is especially true with regard to neologisms. In addition, it is often not only the new word itself but also the signified concept that is initially unknown. When people then look up words, they often do so on the Internet. Wikipedia as a “free encyclopedia” (Wikipedia 2023) is particularly well suited as an object of study with regard to neologisms, since factual knowledge is given special attention there. Furthermore, this reference guide is perceived as a regular source of agreed and common knowledge on all sorts of subjects. Hence, the descriptions found here represent social agreement on controversial terms and discussions to some degree. In this paper, German and French neologisms from the subject area of climate and environment will be examined primarily in Wikipedia, but also in the neighbouring resource Wiktionary,2 which is “a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary” (Wiktionary 2023). Since Wikipedia and Wiktionary are available in French and in German, 21010. International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC) both are equally suitable for the contrastive analysis. Thus, Wikipedia articles which are accessible in both languages (e.g. Klimanotstand and État d›urgence climatique) or Wikipedia articles about similar events and phenomena (e.g. Letzte Generation and Dernière Rénovation) will be compared. For example, we will have a closer look at other new terms specifying different thematic aspects of the discourse of climate and environment. We will mainly refer to those lexical items which can be found in the respective articles in both languages. Special emphasis will be on overlaps and differences, thematic foci, speaker’s positions and evaluative terms.
This conversation analytic study compares the use of negation particles in spoken German and Persian, namely nein/nee and na. While these particles have a range of functions in both languages (Ghaderi 2022; Imo 2017), their use in response to news remains understudied. We focus on nein/nee and na in two sequential contexts: (i) after prior disconfirmations (Extract (a)) and (ii) in response to either solicited or unsolicited informings (see Extracts (b) and (c), respectively). In both contexts, nein/nee and na mark unexpectedness and open up an opportunity space for more, but they do so in different ways and with different outcomes. Nein/nee- and na-turns after disconfirming, often minimal responses to first-position confirmable turns mark the prior as unexpected (or even contrasting with the nein/nee/na-speaker’s expectations) and thus as expandable/accountable (cf. Ford 2001; Gubina/Betz 2021). Nein/nee/na-turns after informings (e.g., announcements that display a story teller’s negative emotional stance) differ not only in sequential position but also in prosodic realization. They can be either falling or rising, but all are characterized by marked prosody, i.e., lengthening, very low onset, smiling or breathy voice, or high overall pitch. Through position and turn design features, such nein/nee- and na-turns not only mark a prior turn as counter to (normative) expectations, but may also display the speaker’s affective stance and affiliate with the affective stance of the prior interactant. By comparing the use of nein/nee and na in German and Persian in the two functions illustrated in Extracts (a) and (b/c), we will show (i) how nein/nee- and na-turns shape interactional trajectories after responsive actions and (ii) what role the particles play in managing news and stance-taking as well as epistemic and affective positioning. Apart from revealing similarities in the use of German and Persian negation particles, the results of our crosslinguistic comparison will demonstrate that even if different languages have similar practices for specific actions, the use of these practices is language- and culture-specific. This means that even similar practices in different languages have their own “collateral effects” (Sidnell/Enfield 2012), linguistic and prosodic characteristic features, and, at least sometimes, consequences for social actions accomplished in the specific language (e.g., Dingemanse/Blythe/Dirksmeyer 2014; Evans/Levinson 2009; Floyd/Rossi/Enfield (eds.) 2020; Fox et al. 2009). Our study uses the method of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2013) and draws on more than 80 hours of audio and video recordings of spontaneous interactions (co-present, via video link, and on the telephone) in everyday and institutional contexts.
Ways out of the dictionary: hyperlinks to other sources in German and African online dictionaries
(2023)
This study examines a number of German and African online dictionaries to see how they make use of the possibility of linking to external sources (e.g. other dictionaries, encyclopaedias, or even corpus data). The article investigates which hyperlinks occur at which places in the word articles and how these are presented to the dictionary users. This is done against the background of metalexicographic considerations on the planning of outer features and the mediostructure in online dictionaries as well as different categorizations of hyperlinks in online reference works. The results show that retro-digitized dictionaries make virtually no use of hyperlinks to external sources. Genuine online dictionaries, on the other hand, do, but often in a form that needs improvement, since, for example, explanations of dictionary-external links are not always found in the user guide and their design is different even within a dictionary.
This paper introduces the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube-Sprache (‘The Nottingham German YouTube Language Corpus’ - or NottDeuYTSch corpus). The corpus comprises over 33 million words, taken from roughly 3 million YouTube comments published between 2008 and 2018, written by a young, German-speaking demographic. The NottDeuYTSch corpus provides an authentic and representative linguistic snapshot of young German speakers and offers significant opportunities for in-depth research in several linguistic fields, such as lexis, morphology, syntax, orthography, multilingualism, and conversational and discursive analysis.
In many European languages, propositional arguments (PAs) can be realized as different types of structures. Cross-linguistically, complex structures with PAs show a systematic correlation between the strength of the semantic bond and the syntactic union (cf. Givón 2001; Wurmbrand/Lohninger 2023). Also, different languages show similarities with respect to the (lexical) licensing of different PAs (cf. Noonan 1985; Givón 2001; Cristofaro 2003 on different predicate types). However, on a more fine-grained level, a variation across languages can be observed both with respect to the syntactic-semantic properties of PAs as well as to their licensing and usage. This presentation takes a multi-contrastive view of different types of PAs as syntactic subjects and objects by looking at five European languages: EN, DE, IT, PL and HU. Our goal is to identify the parameters of variation in the clausal domain with PAs and by this to contribute to a better understanding of the individual language systems on the one hand and the nature of the linguistic variation in the clausal domain on the other hand. Phenomena and Methodology: We investigate the following types of PAs: direct object (DO) clauses (1), prepositional object (PO) clauses (2), subject clauses (3), and nominalizations (4, 5). Additionally, we discuss clause union phenomena (6, 7). The analyzed parameters include among others finiteness, linear position of the PA, (non) presence of a correlative element, (non) presence of a complementizer, lexical-semantic class of the embedding verb. The phenomena are analyzed based on corpus data (using mono- and multilingual corpora), experimental data (acceptability judgement surveys) or introspective data.
This paper discusses contemporary societal roles of German in the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania). Speaker and learner statistics and a summary of sociolinguistic research (Linguistic Landscapes, language learning motivation, language policies, international roles of languages) suggest that German has by far fewer speakers and functions than the national languages, English, and Russian, and it is not a dominant language in the contemporary Baltics anymore. However, German is ahead of ‘any other language’ in terms of users and societal roles as a frequent language in education, of economic relations, as a historical lingua franca, and a language of traditional and new minorities. Highly diverse groups of users and language policy actors form a ‘coalition of interested parties’ which creates niches which guarantee German a frequent use. In the light of the abundance of its functions, the paper suggests the concept ‘additional language of society’ for a variety such as German in the Baltics – since there seems to be no adequate alternative labelling which would do justice to all societal roles. The paper argues that this concept may also be used for languages in similar societal situations and, not least, be useful in language marketing and the promotion of multilingualism.
We introduce DeReKoGram, a novel frequency dataset containing lemma and part-of-speech (POS) information for 1-, 2-, and 3-grams from the German Reference Corpus. The dataset contains information based on a corpus of 43.2 billion tokens and is divided into 16 parts based on 16 corpus folds. We describe how the dataset was created and structured. By evaluating the distribution over the 16 folds, we show that it is possible to work with a subset of the folds in many use cases (e.g., to save computational resources). In a case study, we investigate the growth of vocabulary (as well as the number of hapax legomena) as an increasing number of folds are included in the analysis. We cross-combine this with the various cleaning stages of the dataset. We also give some guidance in the form of Python, R, and Stata markdown scripts on how to work with the resource.
Telephone-based remote interpreting has come into widespread use in multilingual encounters, all the more so in times of refugee crises and the large influx of asylum-seekers into Europe. Nevertheless, the linguistic practices in this mode of communication have not yet been examined comprehensively. This article therefore investigates selected aspects of turn-taking and clarification sequences during semi-authentic telephone-interpreted counselling sessions for refugees (Arabic–German). A quantitative analysis reveals that limited audibility makes it more difficult for interpreters to claim their turn successfully; in most cases, however, turn-taking occurs smoothly. The trouble sources that trigger queries are mainly content-related and interpreters vary greatly in the ways they deal with such difficulties. Contrary to what one might expect, the study shows that coordination fails only rarely during telephone-based remote interpreting.
This article details the process of creating the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube-Sprache ('The Nottingham German YouTube Language Corpus' - or NottDeuYTSch corpus) and outlines potential research opportunities. The corpus was compiled to analyse the online language produced by young German-speakers and offers significant opportunity for in-depth research across several linguistic fields including lexis, morphology, syntax, orthography, and conversational and discursive analysis. The NottDeuYTSch corpus contains over 33 million words taken from approximately 3 million YouTube comments from videos published between 2008 to 2018 targeted at a young, German-speaking demographic and represent an authentic language snapshot of young German speakers. The corpus was proportionally sampled based on video category and year from a database of 112 popular German-speaking YouTube channels in the DACH region for optimal representativeness and balance and contains a considerable amount of associated metadata for each comment that enable further longitudinal cross-sectional analyses. The NottDeuYTSch corpus is available for analysis as part of the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo).