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This paper seeks to apply the principles of the famous 3-Circle-Model devised for the description of the ecolinguistic position of English world-wide to the position of German around the world.
On the one hand, the 3-Circle-Model for English with its "Inner", "Outer" and "Extended/Expanding" Circles was invented by Kachru in the 1980s and has since then been adopted, refined and criticised by numerous authors. The situation of German world-wide, on the other hand, has only been scarcely discussed in the past 20 years. While the global extension of German is obviously by far weaker than that of English, there are also a number of noteworthy similarities in terms of historical spread and the current position of these two languages.
This paper therefore discusses the analogies of global English and German by establishing three circles for German: the Inner Circle for the core German-speaking area, i.e. Germany, Austria and Switzerland; the Outer Circle including a number of German minority areas (mostly in Europe), and finally the Extended Circle which may be denoted as "Crumbling" rather than "Expanding". The latter comprises traditional German diaspora communities in different parts of the world which either result from migration, but also reflect the previous functions of German as a language of culture and as a lingua franca in regions like Eastern Europe. The paper argues that there are some striking structural similarities, but also shows the limits of this comparison.
This study presents the results of a large-scale comparison of various measures of pitch range and pitch variation in two Slavic (Bulgarian and Polish) and two Germanic (German and British English) languages. The productions of twenty-two speakers per language (eleven male and eleven female) in two different tasks (read passages and number sets) are compared. Significant differences between the language groups are found: German and English speakers use lower pitch maxima, narrower pitch span, and generally less variable pitch than Bulgarian and Polish speakers. These findings support the hypothesis that inguistic communities tend to be characterized by particular pitch profiles.
This study investigates cross-language differences in pitch range and variation in four languages from two language groups: English and German (Germanic) and Bulgarian and Polish (Slavic). The analysis is based on large multi-speaker corpora (48 speakers for Polish, 60 for each of the other three languages). Linear mixed models were computed that include various distributional measures of pitch level, span and variation, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. A classification experiment based on the relevant parameter measures (span, kurtosis and skewness values for pitch distributions for each speaker) succeeded in separating the language groups.
Komplexe Argumentstrukturen. Kontrastive Untersuchungen zum Deutschen, Rumänischen und Englischen
(2014)
Neben dem kanonischen Ausdruck der Argumentstruktur von Verben als Intransitiv- oder Transitivkonstruktion mit Nominal- oder Präpositionalphrasen können Argumente in vielfältiger Weise auch in komplexer, nicht-kanonischer Form realisiert werden. Solche Argumentstrukturen zeigen insbesondere im Sprachvergleich interessante Variationen, wie der vorliegende Band anhand von Studien zum Deutschen, Rumänischen und Englischen zeigt. Er versammelt kontrastive Arbeiten zur Alternation von sententialen und nominalen Subjekten, zu den Typen und Restriktionen von Resultativkonstruktionen, zu den Bedingungen des Auftretens innerer Objekte, zu Eigenschaften infiniter Formen und ihren Verwendungsbeschränkungen als Argumentausdrücke sowie zu den spezifischen Bedingungen der Ditransitiv-Alternation. Die aus verschiedenen theoretischen Perspektiven geschriebenen Arbeiten reflektieren dabei das Spannungsfeld zwischen lexikalischen Forderungen, konstruktionalen Idiosynkrasien und sprachübergreifenden oder sprachspezifischen strukturellen Restriktionen.
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.