Refine
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (2)
- Article (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Keywords
- Language Variation (3) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
Publisher
The article aims to examine grammatical features and pragmatic concerns of communicating in the Sciences. In the research of certain languages, it became common to explaingrammatical features such as the usage of passive voice and nominal structures by communication requirements such as objectivity and precision. With the assumption that communication in Science is designed to help gain and spread new insight, the authors tried to integrateseveral approaches to pragmatic and grammatical features of communication. By discussing therelationship between the grammar of certain languages and of the corresponding commonlanguage, the article also places the subject of communication in the Sciences in the discipline oflanguage Variation.
Language resources are often compiled for the purpose of variational analysis, such as studying differences between genres, registers, and disciplines, regional and diachronic variation, influence of gender, cultural context, etc. Often the sheer number of potentially interesting contrastive pairs can get overwhelming due to the combinatorial explosion of possible combinations. In this paper, we present an approach that combines well understood techniques for visualization heatmaps and word clouds with intuitive paradigms for exploration drill down and side by side comparison to facilitate the analysis of language variation in such highly combinatorial situations. Heatmaps assist in analyzing the overall pattern of variation in a corpus, and word clouds allow for inspecting variation at the level of words.
Newspapers became extremely popular in Germany during the 18th and 19th century, and thus increasingly influential for modern German. However, due to the lack of digitized historical newspaper corpora for German, this influence could not be analyzed systematically. In this paper, we introduce the Mannheim Corpus of Digital Newspapers and Magazines, which in its current release comprises 21 newspapers and magazines from the 18th and 19th century. With over 4.1 Mio tokens in about 650 volumes it currently constitutes the largest historical corpus dedicated to newspapers in German. We briefly discuss the prospect of the corpus for analyzing the evolution of news as a genre in its own right and the influence of contextual parameters such as region and register on the language of news. We then focus on one historically influential aspect of newspapers – their role in disseminating foreign words in German. Our preliminary quantitative results indeed indicate that newspapers use foreign words significantly more frequently than other genres, in particular belles lettres.