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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.
Language shift after migration has been reported to occur within three generations. While this pattern holds in many cases there is also some counter evidence. In this paper, family documents from a German immigration community in Canada are investigated to trace individual decisions of language choice that contributed to an extended process of shift taking four generations and more than a century.
We present evidence for the analysis of the vowels in English <say> and <so> as biphonemic diphthongs /ɛi/ and /əu/, based on neutralization patterns, regular alternations, and foot structure. /ɛi/ and /əu/ are hence structurally on a par with the so called “true diphthongs” /ɑi/, /ɐu/, /ɔi/, but also share prosodic organization with the monophthongs /i/ and /u/. The phonological evidence is supported by dynamic measurements based on the American English TIMIT database.
Calculations of F2-slopes proved to be especially suited to distinguish the relevant groups in accordance with their phonologically motivated prosodic organizations.
The sentiment polarity of a phrase does not only depend on the polarities of its words, but also on how these are affected by their context. Negation words (e.g. not, no, never) can change the polarity of a phrase. Similarly, verbs and other content words can also act as polarity shifters (e.g. fail, deny, alleviate). While individually more sparse, they are far more numerous. Among verbs alone, there are more than 1200 shifters. However, sentiment analysis systems barely consider polarity shifters other than negation words. A major reason for this is the scarcity of lexicons and corpora that provide information on them. We introduce a lexicon of verbal polarity shifters that covers the entirety of verbs found in WordNet. We provide a fine-grained annotation of individual word senses, as well as information for each verbal shifter on the syntactic scopes that it can affect.
Das praxonymbildende Konfix -gate zur Benennung von Skandalen nimmt sowohl im Deutschen als auch im Englischen einen Sonderstatus ein: Es ist in beiden Sprachen eines der wenigen onymischen Wortbildungselemente und hat eine hohe Produktivität. Dennoch wurde das Konfix bislang in der Onomastik nicht, in der Wortbildung nur unsystematisch erforscht und diskutiert. Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass -gate nach der politisch brisanten Watergate-Affäre in den 1970er Jahren zunächst für größere politische Skandale, heute jedoch überwiegend zur Benennung trivialer und medial aufgebauschter Skandale verwendet wird (Eierlikör-Gate, Watsch’n- Gate), gehen wir in diesem Beitrag linguistischen Fragen dieser Trivialisierung nach. Dazu fokussiert unsere korpusbasierte Analyse auf die diachrone Entwicklung der verwendeten Erstglieder (Onyme vs. Appellative), sowie die Korre-lation dieser Benennungsstrategien mit unterschiedlichen Skandaltypen (politisch, gesellschaftlich, boulevardesk) und diskutiert Parallelen und Divergenzen zwischen beiden Sprachen. Als Konfix mit besonders hoher Onymizität weist -gate Vorteile gegenüber weniger onymischen Konkurrenzbezeichnungen (-affäre/-Skandal) auf, da auch Ereignisnamen mit appellativischen Erstgliedern eindeutig als Praxonyme erkennbar sind. Appellativische Erstglieder sind wiederum besonders geeignet für triviale Skandale. Direkte Folge der Trivialisierung ist ein deutlicher Typenanstieg bei niedriger Tokenfrequenz. Die semantischen Entwicklungen sind in beiden Sprachen zu beobachten, verlaufen im Deutschen allerdings sichtbar zeitlich verzögert. Die Hauptunterschiede liegen in der deutlicheren Trivialisierung von -gate im Deutschen einerseits sowie einer weniger ausgeprägten Korrelation von Appellativen und Trivialität im Englischen andererseits; letzteres kann darauf zurückgeführt werden, dass Appellative im Englischen vor allem in den 1990ern der Unterscheidung zwischen einer Vielzahl an politischen Skandalen dienten. Insgesamt lassen sich an –gate relevante Fragestellungen sowohl der Onomastik als auch der Wortbildungs- und Lehnwortforschung diskutieren.
In the course of the last years, digital lexicography has opened up a variety of avenues fostering the conceptualisation, application and use of constructicons, a type of lexicographical reference work which has revealed itself highly promising in terms of connectivity and flexibility, at the same time, however, also challenging as to its technical implementation. The present paper takes up the ambitious aim to propose some reflections as well as a first draft for a possible model of a multilingual ‘periphrasticon’ as a subtype of a bigger constructicon focusing on a specific typology-related structural feature, i. e. periphrasticity. Taking periphrastic verbal constructions in French, Italian and Spanish as a starting point, it tries to sketch out a unified constructional network including not only equivalent (or corresponding) constructions within Romance, but also establishing (formal and functional) cross-linguistic connections to German and English. Comprising the major languages available to most language learners in (at least) German-speaking environments, the model is also supposed to pave the way for multilingual constructicography which, on the one hand, is able to account for intra- and cross-linguistic relations and, on the other hand, can also prove a valuable tool for language learning and use.
Thesauri have long been recognized as valuable structured resources aiding Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled vocabulary which serves to coordinate data indexing and retrieval. The paper presents a bilingual Greek and English specialized thesaurus that is being developed as the backbone of a platform aimed at enhancing and enriching the cultural experiences of visitors in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece. The cultural component of the intended platform comprises textual data, images of artifacts and living entities (animals and plants in the area), as well as audio and video. The thesaurus covers the domains of Archaeology, Literature, Mythology, and Travel; therefore, it can be viewed as a set of inter-linked thesauri. Where applicable, terms and names in the database are also geo-referenced.