Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (159) (remove)
Keywords
- Deutsch (101)
- Rezension (36)
- Wörterbuch (21)
- Korpus <Linguistik> (11)
- Konversationsanalyse (10)
- Gesprochene Sprache (8)
- Verb (8)
- Interaktion (7)
- Sprachgeschichte (7)
- Sprachkontakt (7)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (48)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (41)
- Postprint (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (74)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (16)
- Peer-review (2)
Publisher
- de Gruyter (159) (remove)
What is the subject of German linguistics? This seemingly simple question has no obvious answer. In the ZGL’s first issue, the editors required contributions to cover the whole of the German language and to be theoretically sound but application-orientated, whereas the current ZGL-homepage defines the German language of present and history in all its differentiations as its subject matter.
Looking through the fifty volumes of ZGL, three relationships can be identified as presumably enlightening the role of language, in particular the German language: language and mind; language and language use; language and culture. Though of a different systematic type, language and data should be added as an increasingly important pairing for conceptualizing language. On this basis, I also discuss the position of linguistic studies of the German language, mirrored in the ZGL-volumes, between social, cultural and natural sciences, as well as the corresponding epistemic approaches – like explaining vs. understanding.
A constructicon, i.e., a structured inventory of constructions, essentially aims at documenting functions of lexical and grammatical constructions. Among other parameters, so-called constructional collo-profiles, as introduced by Herbst (2018, 2020), are conclusive for determining constructional meanings. They provide information on how relevant individual words are for construction slots, they hint at usage preferences of constructions and serve as a helpful indicator for semantic peculiarities of constructions. However, even though collo-profiles constitute an indispensable component of constructicon entries, they pose major challengers for constructicographers: For a constructicographic enterprise it is not feasible to conduct collostructional analyses for hundreds or even thousands of constructions. In this article, we introduce a procedure based on the large language model BERT that allows to predict collo-profiles without having to extensively annotate instances of constructions in a given corpus. Specifically, by discussing the constructions X macht Y ADJP (‘x makes Y ADJ’, e.g. he drives him crazy) and N1 PREP N1 (e.g., bumper to bumper, constructions over constructions), we show how the developed automated system generates collo-profiles based on a limited number of annotated instances. Finally, we place collo-profiles alongside other dimensions of constructional meanings included in the German Constructicon.
Novel formats of construction-based description hold great potential for phenomena that fall through the cracks in traditional kinds of linguistic reference works. On the example of German verb argument structure constructions with a prepositional object, we demonstrate that a construction-based description of such phenomena is superior to existing lexicographic and grammaticographic treatments, but that it also poses a number of new problems. The most fundamental of these relates to the fact that construction-based analyses can be proposed on different levels of abstraction. We illustrate pertinent problems relating to the precise identification of constructional form and meaning and suggest a multi-layered descriptive format for web-based electronic reference constructica that can accommodate these challenges. Semantically, the proposed solution integrates both lumping and splitting perspectives on constructional grain size and permits users to flexibly zoom in and out on individual elements in the resource. Formally, it can capture variation in the number and marking of realised arguments as found in e.g. passives and transitivity alternations. Aspects of the theoretical controversy between Construction Grammar and Valency Theory are addressed where relevant, but our focus is on questions of description and the practical implementation of construction-based analyses in a suitable type of linguistic reference work.
Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.
Standardly, verb-first (V1) conditionals are considered to be mere variants of wenn-conditionals; accordingly, left-peripheral V1-clauses are analyzed as embedded into the prefields of declarative apodosis clauses, just like their V-end counterparts. We challenge this view, proposing instead that dependent V1-clauses are syntactically unembedded/unintegrated, and, consequently, that postposed declarative apodosis clauses are either V2-declaratives with prefield ellipsis or V1-declaratives. We argue our case by presenting evidence that (i) wenn-clauses differ considerably from V1-clauses in semantic distribution, (ii) unlike wenn-clauses, V1-clauses do not meet the criteria for syntactic embedding, (iii) the alternatives entailed by (ii) for the structural analysis of a postposed apodosis both have empirical support. As for a syntactic analysis of V1-structures suited to these findings, we argue that a CP adjunction analysis is currently the best option available. We also point out connections between the semantic restrictions on V1-conditionals and the semantics of V1-interrogatives that are suggestive of a common semantic core, which raises hope that our background vision (ultimately, all dependent V-to-C clauses are semantically licensed substitutes for genuine subordinates) may also be true for V1-clauses.
Dictionary usage research views dictionaries primarily as tools for solving linguistic problems. A large proportion of dictionary use now takes place online and can thus be easily monitored using tracking technologies. Using the data gathered through tracking usage data, we hope to optimize user experiences of dictionaries and other linguistic resources. Usage statistics are also used for external evaluation of linguistic resources. In this paper, we pursue the following three questions from a quantitative perspective: (1) What new insights can we gain from collecting and analysing usage data? (2) What limitations of the data and/or the collection process do we need to be aware of? (3) How can these insights and limitations inform the development and evaluation of linguistic resources?