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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.
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.
Based on specific linguistic landmarks in the speech signal, this study investigates pitch level and pitch span differences in English, German, Bulgarian and Polish. The analysis is based on 22 speakers per language (11 males and 11 females). Linear mixed models were computed that include various linguistic measures of pitch level and span, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. Pitch level appeared to have significantly higher values for the female speakers in the Slavic than the Germanic group. The male speakers showed slightly different results, with only the Polish speakers displaying significantly higher mean values for pitch level than the German males. Overall, the results show that the Slavic speakers tend to have a wider pitch span than the German speakers. But for the linguistic measure, namely for span between the initial peaks and the non-prominent valleys, we only find the difference between Polish and German speakers. We found a flatter intonation contour in German than in Polish, Bulgarian and English male and female speakers and differences in the frequency of the landmarks between languages. Concerning “speaker liveliness” we found that the speakers from the Slavic group are significantly livelier than the speakers from the Germanic group.
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.
The classification of verbs in Levin's (1993) English Verb Classes and Alternations: A preliminary Investigation, on the basis of both intuitive semantic grouping and their participation in valence alternations, is often used by the NLP community as evidence of the semantic similarity of verbs (Jing & McKeown 1998; Lapata & Brew 1999; Kohl et al. 1998). In this paper, we compare the Levin classification with the work of the FrameNet project (Fillmore & Baker 2001), where words (not just verbs) are grouped according to the conceptual structures (frames) that underlie them and their combinatorial patterns are inductively derived from corpus evidence. This means that verbs grouped together in FrameNet (FN) might be semantically similar but have different (or no) alternations, and that verbs which share the same alternation might be represented in two different semantic frames.
This paper presents the concept of the "participant perspective" as an approach to the study of spoken language. It discusses three aspects of this concept and shows that they can offer helpful tools in spoken language research. Employing the participant perspective provides us with an alternative to many of the approaches currently in use in the study of spoken language in that it favours small-scale, qualitative research that aims to uncover categories relevant for the participants. Its results can usefully complement large-scale studies of phenomena on all linguistic dimensions of talk.
The goal of the MULI (MUltiLingual Information structure) project is to empirically analyse information structure in German and English newspaper texts. In contrast to other projects in which information structure is annotated and investigated (e.g. in the Prague Dependency Treebank, which mirrors the basic information about the topic-focus articulation of the sentence), we do not annotate theory-biased categories like topic-focus or theme-rheme. Trying to be as theory-independent as possible, we annotate those features which are relevant to information structure and on the basis of which typical patterns, co-occurrences or correlations can be determined. We distinguish between three annotation levels: syntax, discourse and prosody. The data is based on the TIGER Corpus for German and the Penn Treebank for English, since the existing information on part-of-speech and syntactic structure can be re-used for our purposes. The actual annotation of an English example sequence illustrates our choice of categories on each level. Their combination offers the possibility to investigate how information structure is realised and can be interpreted.
CoMParS is a resource under construction in the context of the long-term project German Grammar in European Comparison (GDE) at the IDS Mannheim. The principal goal of GDE is to create a novel contrastive grammar of German against the background of other European languages. Alongside German, which is the central focus, the core languages for comparison are English, French, Hungarian and Polish, representing different typological classes. Unlike traditional contrastive grammars available for German, which usually cover language pairs and are based on formal grammatical categories, the new GDE grammar is developed in the spirit of functionalist typology. This implies that, instead of formal criteria, cognitively motivated functional domains in terms of Givón (1984) are used as tertia comparationis. The purpose of CoMParS is to document the empirical basis of the theoretical assumptions of GDE-V and to illustrate the otherwise rather abstract content of grammar books by as many as possible naturally occurring and adequately presented multilingual examples, including information on their use in specific contexts and registers. These examples come from existing parallel corpora, and our presentation will focus on the legal aspects and consequences of this choice of language data.