Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (83) (remove)
Language
- German (56)
- English (20)
- Russian (4)
- Portuguese (2)
- Polish (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (83)
Keywords
- Semantik (83) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (27)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (19)
- Postprint (8)
- Ahead of Print (2)
- Hybrides Open Access (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (33)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (16)
Publisher
- Institut für Deutsche Sprache (8)
- de Gruyter (6)
- Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) (5)
- Akademie-Verlag (3)
- Benjamins (3)
- Erich Schmidt (3)
- Akademie Verlag (2)
- Lajos-Kossuth-Universität (2)
- Ministerstvo prosveščenija RSFSR; Omskij gosudarstvenny pedagogičeskij institut imeni A. M. Gor´kogo (2)
- Nodus (2)
Meaning in interaction
(2024)
This editorial to the Special Issue on “Meaning in Interaction” introduces to the approach of Interactional Semantics, which has been developed over the last years within the framework of Interactional Linguistics. It discusses how “meaning” is understood and approached in this framework and lays out that Interactional Semantics is interested in how participants clarify and negotiate the meanings of the expressions that they are using in social interaction. Commonalities and differences of this approach with other approaches to meaning are flagged, and the intellectual origins and precursors of Interactional Semantics are introduced. The contributions to the Special Issue are located in the larger field of research.
Unter Neologismen finden sich bedeutungsgleiche Ausdrücke (im weitesten Sinne Synonyme), die unter bestimmten Bedingungen sprachliche Unsicherheiten hervorrufen. Das liegt u. a. an ihrer semantisch-konzeptuellen Ähnlichkeit, an nicht abgeschlossenen Lexikalisierungsprozessen, aber es treten auch Zweifel auf, weil es Unterschiede zwischen der Allgemein- und der Fachsprache gibt. Für einige Neologismen ist es auch charakteristisch, dass mehrere morphologische Varianten gleichzeitig in den Wortschatz eintreten, sodass nicht immer klar ist, wann welche präferiert werden. Dass all diese Ausdrücke lexikalischem Wettbewerb und situationsgebundenen Gebrauchsbedingungen ausgesetzt sind und dass sie zu Zweifel führen können, wird in Onlineforen sichtbar. Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie solche Paare/Gruppen korpusgestützt semantisch analysiert und wie sie in deskriptiven Wörterbüchern angemessen beschrieben werden können, um sowohl Gemeinsamkeiten als auch Unterschiede für Nachschlagende sichtbar zu machen. Dazu werden konkrete Beispiele und ein gegenüberstellendes Wörterbuchdarstellungsformat für neologistische Synonyme vorgeschlagen.
In social interaction, different kinds of word-meaning can become problematic for participants. This study analyzes two meta-semantic practices, definitions and specifications, which are used in response to clarification requests in German implemented by the format Was heißt X (‘What does X mean?’). In the data studied, definitions are used to convey generalizable lexical meanings of mostly technical terms. These terms are either unknown to requesters, or, in pedagogical contexts, requesters ask in order to check the addressee’s knowledge. Specifications, in contrast, clarify aspects of local speaker meanings of ordinary expressions (e.g., reference, participants in an event, standards applied to scalar expressions). Both definitions and specifications are recipient-designed with respect to the (presumed) knowledge of the addressee and tailored to the topical and practical relevancies of the current interaction. Both practices attest to the flexibility and situatedness of speakers’ semantic understandings and to the systematicity of using meta-semantic practices differentially for different kinds of semantic problems. Data are come from mundane and institutional interaction in German from the public corpus FOLK.
Klassische Namen der Offline-Welt sind bei weitem umfangreicher erforscht als die eher kurzlebigen und auch noch sehr jungen Namen der digitalen Welt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden virtuelle Namen als eigene Namenklasse postuliert und unter Verweis auf bestehende Namentypologien verortet. Anschließend werden drei unterschiedliche Typen frei wählbarer virtueller Namen in Videospielen am Beispiel des populären Browserspiels ‚Forge of Empires‘ graphematisch und semantisch analysiert: Gilden-, Städte- und Benutzernamen. Hierfür werden drei Korpora mit je 100 Namen des jeweiligen Typs auf unterschiedliche Muster zunächst hinsichtlich Sprachwahl, Zeichenverwendung und graphematischen Besonderheiten untersucht. Anschließend erfolgt eine Untersuchung der den Namen zugrundeliegenden Benennungsmotive durch induktiv-explorative Kategorienbildung. Zwischen den untersuchten Namentypen kristallisiert sich in der Analyse ein funktionaler Unterschied heraus: Gildennamen priorisieren eine kommunikativ-phatische Funktion, wohingegen Benutzernamen primär Individualität ausdrücken. Städtenamen nehmen dabei eine Zwischenposition ein. Insgesamt fügen sich die verschiedenen Teilergebnisse in das Bild der bisherigen spärlichen Studien zur Namenwahl in Videospielen ein und rufen zugleich zur weiteren Erforschung auf.
Basic grammatical categories may carry social meanings irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs—a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages—are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension of social perception. In an archival analysis of actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and older people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not with communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and an integral part of social perception.
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience a variety of symptoms sometimes including atypicalities in language use. The study explored diferences in semantic network organisation of adults with ASD without intellectual impairment. We assessed clusters and switches in verbal fuency tasks (‘animals’, ‘human feature’, ‘verbs’, ‘r-words’) via curve ftting in combination with corpus-driven analysis of semantic relatedness and evaluated socio-emotional and motor action related content. Compared to participants without ASD (n=39), participants with ASD (n=32) tended to produce smaller clusters, longer switches, and fewer words in semantic conditions (no p values survived Bonferroni-correction), whereas relatedness and content were similar. In ASD, semantic networks underlying cluster formation appeared comparably small without afecting strength of associations or content.
Sometimes in interaction, a speaker articulates an overt interpretation of prior talk. Such moments have been studied as involving the repair of a problem with the other’s talk or as formulating an understanding of the matter at hand. Stepping back from the established notions of formulations and repair, we examine the variety of actions speakers do with the practice of offering an interpretation, and the order within this domain. Results show half a dozen usage types of interpretations in mundane interaction. These form a largely continuous territory of action, with recognizably distinct usage types as well as cases falling between these (proto)typical uses. We locate order in the domain of interpretations using the method of semantic maps and show that, contrary to earlier assumptions in the literature, interpretations that formulate an understanding of the matter at hand are actually quite pervasive in ordinary talk. These findings contribute to research on action formation and advance our understanding of understanding in interaction. Data are video- and audio-recordings of mundane social interaction in the German language from a variety of settings.
In semantic fieldwork, it is common to use a language other than the language under investigation for presenting linguistic materials to the language consultants, e.g. discourse contexts in acceptability judgment tasks. Previous works commenting on the use of a ‘meta-language’ or ‘language of wider communication’ in this sense (AnderBois and Henderson 2015; Matthewson 2004) have argued that this practice is not methodologically inferior to the exclusive use of the object language for elicitation, but that the fieldworker needs to be alert to potential influences of the meta-language or, indeed, the object language, on the elicited judgments. Thus, the choice of a language for presenting discourse contexts is an integral component of fieldwork methodology. This paper provides a research report with a focus on this component. It describes a multilingual fieldwork setting offering several potential meta-languages, which the fieldworker and the consultants master to varying degrees. The choice of the languages in this setting is discussed with regard to methodological, social and practical considerations and related to selected, more general methodological questions regarding semantic fieldwork practice.
In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as wenn ‘if’ and nur wenn ‘only if’ are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with wenn/nur wenn ‘if/only if’ and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., P/not-P), and subsequently completed the final sentence about Q (with or without negation). In Experiment 2, participants rated the truth or falsity of the consequent Q after reading a conditional sentence with wenn or nur wenn and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., If P, Q. P/not-P. // Therefore, Q?). Both experiments showed that neither wenn nor nur wenn were interpreted as biconditional CCs. Modus Ponens (If P, Q. P. // Therefore, Q) was validated for wenn, whereas it was not validated in the case of nur wenn. While Denial of the Antecedent (If P, Q. not-P. // Therefore, not-Q.) was validated in the case of nur wenn, it was not validated for wenn. The same method was used to test wenn vs. unter der Bedingung, dass ‘on condition that’ in Experiment 3, and wenn vs. vorausgesetzt, dass ‘provided that’ in Experiment 4. Experiment 5, using Affirmation of the Consequent (If P, Q. Q. // Therefore, P.) to test wenn vs. nur wenn replicated the results of Experiment 2. Taken together, the results show that in German, unter der Bedingung, dass is the most likely candidate of biconditional CCs whereas all others are not biconditional. The findings, in particular of nur wenn not being semantically biconditional, are discussed based on available formal analyses of conditionals.