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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.
Genau tritt im aktuellen Sprachgebrauch nicht nur in seiner klassischen Bedeutung als Adjektiv oder Adverb auf, sondern wird auch als Fokus- bzw. Gradpartikel sowie Gesprächspartikel verwendet. Bisherige Beschreibungen haben sich nur in geringem Maße und unter Verwendung heterogener Begriffe mit seinem interaktionalen Gebrauch auseinandergesetzt. In diesem Beitrag werden mit Hilfe eines sequenziellen und multimodalen Ansatzes verschiedene interaktionale Verwendungen von genau in Videoaufnahmen deutscher Alltagsgespräche untersucht. Ausgehend von seiner Funktion als Gradpartikel wird genau sowohl als redebeitragsinterne Bestätigungspartikel in Wortfindungsprozessen als auch als responsive Bestätigungspartikel eingesetzt. Da genau häufig das Ende eines Verstehensprozesses bzw. einer Wissensverhandlung markiert, könnte allgemeiner die Bezeichnung des Intersubjektivitätsmarkers in Erwägung gezogen werden. Aus dem responsiven, bestätigenden Gebrauch heraus entsteht eine stärker sequenzschließende und sequenzstrukturierende Funktion von genau, woraus sich auch der zunehmende Gebrauch dieses Lexems als rein diskursstrukturierende Partikel innerhalb eines Redezugs erklären könnte.
Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.
This paper analyses the XVIII century German translations of 'Les aventures de Télémaque' (1699) by François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon. In that century, Fénelon's masterpiece was translated into German mainly by four authors (August Bohse, Benjamin Neukirch, Josef Anton Ehrenreich, Ludwig Ernst Faramond), who adapted the text according not only to the historical period, but also to their own purpose, creating completely different works. They transformed the original text in different text genres, from a utopian novel with political and pedagogical aims to a text in verse form for didactic purposes, or to an epic poem with pedagogical functions. To investigate the differences between the translations the paper will focus especially on the macrostructural and the paratextual elements in order to make preliminary hypothesis on 1) the text genre, 2) the functions of the text and 3) the expected audience. Examples and final conclusions will end the article.
We propose a new type of subword embedding designed to provide more information about unknown compounds, a major source for OOV words in German. We present an extrinsic evaluation where we use the compound embeddings as input to a neural dependency parser and compare the results to the ones obtained with other types of embeddings. Our evaluation shows that adding compound embeddings yields a significant improvement of 2% LAS over using word embeddings when no POS information is available. When adding POS embeddings to the input, however, the effect levels out. This suggests that it is not the missing information about the semantics of the unknown words that causes problems for parsing German, but the lack of morphological information for unknown words. To augment our evaluation, we also test the new embeddings in a language modelling task that requires both syntactic and semantic information.
To improve grammatical function labelling for German, we augment the labelling component of a neural dependency parser with a decision history. We present different ways to encode the history, using different LSTM architectures, and show that our models yield significant improvements, resulting in a LAS for German that is close to the best result from the SPMRL 2014 shared task (without the reranker).