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A central question in psycholinguistics is how the human brain processes language in real time. To answer this question, the differences between auditory and visual processing have to be considered. The present dissertation examines the extent to which event-related potentials (ERPs) in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) interact with different modes of presentation during sentence comprehension. Besides the two classical modalities, auditory and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), the monitoring of readers’ eye movements was chosen as a new mode of presentation. Here, the temporal paradox between neuronal ERP effects and behavioral effects in the eye movement record were of particular interest. Specifically, by concurrently measuring ERPs and eye movements in natural reading, the dissertation aimed to shed light on the counterintuitive fact that difficulties in sentence comprehension arise earlier in eye movement measures than in the corresponding neuronal ERP effects. In contrast to RSVP and the auditory modality, reading offers a parafoveal preview of upcoming words (Rayner 1998), which enables the brain to process information of words before these are fixated for the first time (in foveal vision). When the word Gegenteil in example (1) below is fixated and processed, the brain concurrently processes some information of the upcoming parafoveal words von and weiß. (1) Schwarz ist das Gegenteil von weiß. (2) Schwarz […] blau. (3) Schwarz […] nett. The parafoveal preview mostly provides orthographic (word form) information, while semantic information is not conveyed (Inhoff & Starr 2004; White 2008). Whereas word form and lexical meaning are processed simultaneously with RSVP and auditory presentation, the parafoveal preview in natural reading allows for a temporal decoupling such that word forms are processed before meaning. This is one reason for the faster information uptake in reading. The present dissertation is the first to systematically investigate the influence of the parafoveal preview in sentence processing. Participants read sentences such as in (1)-(3), in which two adjectives were either antonyms (1), semantically related non-antonyms (2), or semantically unrelated non-antonyms (3). ERPs were computed for the last fixation before the target word (the sentence-final word in 1-3), which was assumed to capture parafoveal processing, and for the first fixation on the target, that should reflect foveal processing. The results were compared to two experiments using identical stimuli with auditory and RSVP presentation, and the parafoveal preview clearly led to different ERP results. While the RSVP and auditory presentations replicated the finding of a P300 to the second antonym in (1) (Kutas & Iragui 1998; Roehm et al. 2007), there was no P300 in response to antonyms at any fixation position in natural reading. However, the dissociation of parafoveal and foveal processing in reading also made it possible to disentangle different processes underlying the N400. There was a reduced parafoveal N400 for (1,2) compared with (3), which could be attributed to the preactivation of the word forms of the expected antonyms and of semantically related non-antonyms. In foveal vision, all non-antonyms (2,3) showed an enhanced N400 compared with (1) because they were unexpected and implausible in the sentence context. This dissociation between the preactivation of a word-form and the contextual fit of a word’s meaning is impossible with the other two modes of presentation, because orthographic and semantic information become available almost at the same time and are thus processed simultaneously. Furthermore, the parafoveal N400 effect was not accompanied by changes in the duration of the corresponding fixation, whereas the foveal N400 was. Similarly, with the concurrent measurement of ERPs and eye movements, the temporal paradox described above remained, as effects in the eye movement record preceded the neuronal ERP effects. Further support for these central findings came from two additional experiments that investigated different stimuli with concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures. Altogether, the experiments revealed that the previous findings on the language-related N400 can be replicated with natural reading, but they can also be differentiated qualitatively by virtue of the characteristics of natural reading. Although the behavioral and neuronal effects mirrored one another, not every neuronal effect necessarily translates into a behavioral output. Finally, even concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures cannot resolve the temporal paradox.
Incompatibility (or co-hyponymy) is the most general type of semantic relation between lexical items, the meaning of which entails exclusion. Such items fall under a superordinate term or concept and denote sets which have no members in common (e.g. animal: dog-cat-mouse-lion-sheep; example from Cruse 2004). Traditionally, these have been of interest to lexical semanticists for the description of the structure of the lexicon. However, incompatibility is not just a relation that signifies a difference of meaning. This paper is a critical corpus-assisted re-evaluation of the phenomenon of incompatibility which argues that the relation in question sometimes also functions as a discourse marker. Incompatibles indicate recurrent intertextual patterns. This holds particularly true for socially or politically controversial lexical items such as Flexibilität (flexibility), Mobilität (mobility) or Globalisierung (globalisation). Corpus investigations of such words have revealed that among other semantically related terms, incompatibles have a crucial discourse focussing function. For the German lexical item Globalisierung, I will show how its lexical usage can be studied through a corpus-driven analysis of corresponding incompatibles. Incompatible terms are not contingent co-words but often occur in close contextual proximity and participate in regular syntagmatic structures (e.g. Globalisierung und Rationalisierung; Globalisierung und Modernisierung; Neoliberalismus, Globalisierung und Kapitalismus). Hence, these are easily extracted by conducting a computational collocation analysis. Such significant collocates provide a good insight into the discursive and thematic contexts of the search word. Following Teubert (2004), I will demonstrate how the meaning of such lexical items is constituted in discourse and how the examination of these particular collocates reveals their sense-constructing function and their pragmatic-discursive force. I will provide a brief discussion of the methodology used for such analyses, and I will explain why the complex semantic-pragmatic and thematic-communicative patterns implied in sets of incompatibles should be given a stronger emphasis in lexicography.
Contextual lexical relations, such as sense relations, have traditionally played an essential role in disambiguating word senses in lexicography, as they offer insights into the meaning and use of a word. However, the description of paradigmatic relations in particular is often restricted to a few types such as synonymy and antonymy. The limited description of various types of relations and the method of presenting these relations in existing German dictionaries are often problematic.
Elexiko, the first German hypertext dictionary compiled exclusively on the basis of an electronic corpus, offers a new way of presenting sense relations, using a variety of approaches to extract the necessary data. In this paper, I will show how elexiko presents a differentiated system of paradigmatic relations including synonymy, various subtypes of incompatibility (such as antonymy, complementarity, converseness, reversiveness, etc.), and vertical structures (such as hyponymy and meronymy). Primary attention, however, will focus on the question of how data for a paradigmatic description is retrieved from the corpus. Whereas a corpus-driven approach is mainly used for various semantic information and a corpus-based method plays an important part in obtaining data for the grammatical description in elexiko, it will be argued that both the corpus-driven and the corpus-based approach can be complementary methods in gaining insights into sense relations. I will demonstrate which results can be obtained by each approach, and advantages and disadvantages of both procedures will be explored in more detail.
As sense relations are context-dependent, it will also be demonstrated how a sense-bound presentation can be realised in an electronic reference work including a system of cross-referencing that illustrates lexical structures and the interrelatedness of words within the lexicon. Finally, I will show how accompanying examples from the corpus and additional lexicographic information help the user to understand contextual restrictions, so that s/he is able to use dictionary information more effectively.
Synonymie und Antonymie
(2015)
Synonymie (zum Beispiel ‚essen‘ und ‚speisen‘) und Antonymie (zum Beispiel ‚heiß‘ und ‚kalt‘), also Ähnlichkeit und Gegensätzlichkeit der Bedeutung, sind Phänomene, die im Zentrum sprachwissenschaftlicher Forschung stehen. Der zweite Band der Reihe ‚Literaturhinweise zur Linguistik‘ bietet eine konzise Einführung in das Thema Synonymie und Antonymie und eine strukturierte Auswahlbibliografie mit aktueller Fachliteratur und bewährten Nachschlagewerken. Er berücksichtigt verschiedene Richtungen der modernen Sprachwissenschaft wie etwa die Kognitionswissenschaft, die Korpus- und Computerlinguistik und Deutsch als Fremdsprache.
Dieser Beitrag zeigt, wie allgemeinsprachige Wörterbücher mit Angaben zur Sinn- und Sachverwandtschaft umgehen sollten, damit sie als geeignetes Hilfsmittel bei der Wortschatzarbeit sowohl im muttersprachlichen als auch im fremdsprachlichen Unterricht eingesetzt werden können. Anhand einiger Beispiele aus dem elexiko-Wörterbuch sollen Möglichkeiten aufgezeigt werden, wie kombinierte lexikalisch-semantische Informationen einen Beitrag zur gezielten Wortschatzerweiterung leisten könnten. Für eine effektive Verankerung sprachlichen und außersprachlichen Wissens sollten Erkenntnisse über das Mentale Lexikon in die Darstellung und Beschreibung von Sprache im Wörterbuch eingebunden werden. Konkrete Vorschläge illustrieren, wie Nachschlagewerke möglicherweise gestaltet werden sollten, um besser als Lehrwerke und Quellen für die Wortschatzarbeit geeignet zu sein. Dafür ist es erforderlich, dass die Dokumentation sprachlicher Zusammenhänge auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen, die angemessene Visualisierung kontextueller Phänomene und explizite Erläuterungen eine entscheidende Rolle spielen
Sprechaktverben stehen, wie auch andere Einheiten des Lexikons, in unterschiedlichen Arten von Gegensatzbeziehungen zueinander. Das Spektrum der Gegensatzrelationen umfasst eine Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Phänomene wie Komplementarität, Kontrarität, direktionale Opposition, Sub- kontrarität, Konversivität, Reversivität und Dualität (vgl. Cruse 1986, Lang 1995, Cruse et al. 2002), die alle negationsinvolvierend, aber ftir den Wortschatzausschnitt der Sprechaktverben nicht alle gleichermaßen relevant sind. Gegensatzrelationen von Wörtern sind meist bei Adjektiven, seltener auch bei Adverbien, Nomen und Verben untersucht worden. Im Unterschied zu den klassischen Beispielen antonymischer Verben wie z. B. lieben-hassen, kommen-gehen und kaufen-verkaufen lassen sich Sprechaktverben nur schwer in das Spektrum der Gegensatzrelationen ein- ordnen. Im Folgenden werden die Kriterien, die zur Bestimmung unterschiedlicher Typen von Gegensatzrelationen angeführt worden sind, diskutiert und auf den Wortschatzbereich der Sprechaktverben angewendet.