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The article discusses the possibilities and challenges of combining conversation analysis and ethnography in the study of everyday family life. We argue that such a combination requires the decision whether to prioritise interaction data or ethno-graphic (in particular, interview) data in the analysis. We present a conversation analytic case study of how household work is commonly brought up in the interactions of one couple and bring this to bear on a re-analysis of a possible conflict situation originally described in the ethnographic analysis by Klein, Izquierdo, and Bradbury (2007), published in this journal. While the findings of the two analyses converge, they inform us about different dimensions of couple interaction. The ethnographic analysis is focused on participants’ experiences, and the conversation analysis is focused on participants’ practices. We conclude that the methodological decision to prioritise interaction or interview data has consequences for the kind of questions we can ask.
When a noise verb is used to indicate verbal communication, factors from both the source domain of the verb (perception) and the target domain (communication) play a role in determining the argument structure of the sentence. While the target domain supplies a syntactic structure, the source domain’s semantics constrain the degree to which that syntactic structure can be exploited. This can be determined by comparing noise verbs in this use with manner-of-communication verbs, which are superficially similar, but native to communication. Data for these two classes of verbs were drawn from the British National Corpus. The data were annotated with frame-semantic markup, as described in the Berkeley FrameNet Project. We compared the presence, type of syntactic realization, and position of the semantically annotated arguments for both classes of verbs. We found that noise and manner verbs show statistically significant differences in these three areas. For instance, noise verbs are more focused on the form of the message than manner verbs: noise verbs appear more frequently with a quoted message. In addition, there are differences other than the complementation patterns: certain noise verbs are biased with respect to speakers’ genders, message types, and even orthography in quoted messages
Lexicographic meaning descriptions of German lexical items which are formally and semantically similar and therefore easily confused (so-called paronyms) often do not reflect their current usage of lexical items. They can even contradict one’s personal intuition or disagree with lexical usage as observed in public discourse. The reasons are manifold. Language data used for compiling dictionaries is either outdated, or lexicographic practice is rather conventional and does not take advantage of corpus-assisted approaches to semantic analysis. Despite of various modern electronic or online reference works speakers face uncertainties when dealing with easily confusable words. These are for example sensibel/sensitiv (sensitive) or kindisch/kindlich (childish/childlike). Existing dictionaries often do not provide satisfactory answers as to how to use these sets correctly. Numerous questions addressed in online forums show where uncertainties with paronyms are and why users demand further assistance concerning proper contextual usage (cf. Storjohann 2015). There are different reasons why users misuse certain items or mix up words which are similar in form and meaning. As data from written and more spontaneous language resources suggest, some confusions arise due to ongoing semantic change in the current use of some paronyms. This paper identifies shortcomings of contemporary German Dictionaries and discusses innovative ways of empirical lexicographic work that might pave the way for a new data-driven, descriptive reference work of confusable German terms. Currently, such a guide is being developed at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim implementing corpora and diverse corpus-analytical methods. Its objective is to compile a dictionary with contrastive entries which is a useful reference tool in situation of language doubt. At the same time, it aims at sensitizing users of context dependency and language change.
As the nature of negative polarity items (NPIs) and their licensing contexts is still under much debate, a broad empirical basis is an important cornerstone to support further insights in this area of research. The work discussed in this paper is intended as a contribution to realizing this objective. The authors briefly introduce the phenomenon of NPIs and outline major theories about their licensing and also various licensing contexts before discussing our major topics: Firstly, a corpus-based retrieval method for NPI candidates is described that ranks the candidates according to their distributional dependence on the licensing contexts. Our method extracts single-word candidates and is extended to also capture multi-word candidates. The basic idea for automatically collecting NPI candidates from a large corpus is that an NPI behaves like a kind of collocate to its licensing contexts. Manual inspection and interpretation of the candidate lists identify the actual NPIs. Secondly, an online repository for NPIs and other items that show distributional idiosyncrasies is presented, which offers an empirical database for further (theoretical) research on these items in a sustainable way.