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Communicative deviations of respondents in political video interviews in Ukrainian and German
(2021)
The research has the objective to establish the peculiarities of communicative deviations as a cognitive and at the same time discursive phenomenon in Ukrainian- and German-language video interviews from the viewpoint of respondents. The procedure of the research involves the integrated application of methods and techniques of pragmatics, deviatology and communicative linguistics. A new methodological basis has been developed for the reconstruction of communicative deviations using discourse analysis, namely for the reconstruction of a single event in two discursive environments, determining the communicative context and communication of interview in compared languages. The results of the research allow us to identify the features of communicative deviations in political interviews at the external, internal structural levels and at the situational level. The conclusions of the research indicate that the types of communicative deviations in political video interviews are universal in Ukrainian and German, but reflect national and cultural specifics given the peculiarities of both languages and each linguoculture, as well as existing realias, norms, conventions, maxims and rules of communication.
This paper reports on an ongoing international project of compiling a freely accessible online Dictionary of German Loans in Polish Dialects. The dictionary will be the first comprehensive lexicographic compendium of its kind, serving as a complement to existing resources on German lexical loans in the literary or standard language. The empirical results obtained in the project will shed new light on the distribution of German loanwords among different dialects, also in comparison to the well-documented situation in written Polish. The dictionary will have a strong focus on the dialectal distribution of Polish dialectal variants for a given German etymon, accessible through interactive cartographic representations and corresponding search options. The editorial process is realized with dedicated collaborative web tools. The new resource will be published as an integrated part of an online information system for German lexical borrowings in other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, and is therefore highly cross-linked with other loanword dictionaries on Polish as well as Slavic and further European languages.
In order to differentiate between figurative and literal usage of verb-noun combinations for the shared task on the disambiguation of German Verbal Idioms issued for KONVENS 2021, we apply and extend an approach originally developed for detecting idioms in a dataset consisting of random ngram samples. The classification is done by implementing a rather shallow, statistics-based pipeline without intensive preprocessing and examinations on the morphosyntactic and semantic level. We describe the overall approach, the differences between the original dataset and the dataset of the KONVENS task, provide experimental classification results, and analyse the individual contributions of our feature sets.
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
This article examines how the most frequent imperative forms of the verb to show in German (zeig mal) and Czech (ukaž) are deployed in object-centred sequences. Specifically, it focuses on smartphone-based showing activities as these were the main sequential environments of show imperatives in the datasets investigated. In both languages, the imperative form does not merely aim to elicit a responsive action from the smartphone holder (such as making the device available) but projects an individual course of action from the requester’s side in the form of an immediate visual inspection of the digital content. This inspection is carried out as part of a joint course of action, allowing the recipient to provide a more detailed response to a prior action. Therefore, this specific imperative form is proven to be cross-linguistically suited to technology-mediated inspection sequences.
In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as wenn ‘if’ and nur wenn ‘only if’ are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with wenn/nur wenn ‘if/only if’ and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., P/not-P), and subsequently completed the final sentence about Q (with or without negation). In Experiment 2, participants rated the truth or falsity of the consequent Q after reading a conditional sentence with wenn or nur wenn and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., If P, Q. P/not-P. // Therefore, Q?). Both experiments showed that neither wenn nor nur wenn were interpreted as biconditional CCs. Modus Ponens (If P, Q. P. // Therefore, Q) was validated for wenn, whereas it was not validated in the case of nur wenn. While Denial of the Antecedent (If P, Q. not-P. // Therefore, not-Q.) was validated in the case of nur wenn, it was not validated for wenn. The same method was used to test wenn vs. unter der Bedingung, dass ‘on condition that’ in Experiment 3, and wenn vs. vorausgesetzt, dass ‘provided that’ in Experiment 4. Experiment 5, using Affirmation of the Consequent (If P, Q. Q. // Therefore, P.) to test wenn vs. nur wenn replicated the results of Experiment 2. Taken together, the results show that in German, unter der Bedingung, dass is the most likely candidate of biconditional CCs whereas all others are not biconditional. The findings, in particular of nur wenn not being semantically biconditional, are discussed based on available formal analyses of conditionals.
Between January 2020 and summer 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary in order to enable communication under the new conditions during the corona pandemic. This rapid expansion of vocabulary has most notably affected lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics. General language dictionaries or terminological dictionaries have quickly reflected on how the German lexicon evolved during the corona pandemic: new entries were added, others were revised. This paper, however, focuses on the ways in which a German (specialized) neologism dictionary project, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" at the "Leibniz Institute for the German Language, Mannheim" published (online, see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/start.jsp) has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Neologisms are (following the definition applied here) lexical units or senses/meanings which emerge in a language community over a specific period of time of language development, which diffuse, are generally accepted as language norms, and which the majority of speakers perceive as new for some time. Thus, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" used to record neologisms only retrospectively, that is after their lexicalization. As a consequence, users of the dictionary were often not able to obtain details on words that were particularly conspicuous at a particular time in a specific discourse, thus raising questions concerning their meaning, correct spelling, etc. This, however, did not imply that the lexicographers of the project had not already collected these words with some preliminary information in a list of candidates for inclusion in an internal database. Therefore, the project started to publish online an index of monitored words including lexical units that had emerged since 2011, for which only time will tell whether they will diffuse and manifest as language norms. This list format was used since April 2020 to also issue a compilation of corona-related neologisms as part of the "Neologismenwörterbuch". In October 2021, this inventory included more than 1.800 Corona-related neologisms, and still, more than 700 candidates in an internal database awaited lexicographic description and inclusion into the online index (see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/listen/corona.jsp). In this paper many examples are presented to illustrate how new words, new senses and new uses in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic are reflected in the dictionary.
Schegloff (1996) has argued that grammars are “positionally-sensitive”, implying that the situated use and understanding of linguistic formats depends on their sequential position. Analyzing the German format Kannst du X? (corresponding to English Can you X?) based on 82 instances from a large corpus of talk-in-interaction (FOLK), this paper shows how different action-ascriptions to turns using the same format depend on various orders of context. We show that not only sequential position, but also epistemic status, interactional histories, multimodal conduct, and linguistic devices co-occurring in the same turn are decisive for the action implemented by the format. The range of actions performed with Kannst du X? and their close interpretive interrelationship suggest that they should not be viewed as a fixed inventory of context-dependent interpretations of the format. Rather, the format provides for a root-interpretation that can be adapted to local contextual contingencies, yielding situated action-ascriptions that depend on constraints created by contexts of use.
While there is a large amount of research in the field of Lexical Semantic Change Detection, only few approaches go beyond a standard benchmark evaluation of existing models. In this paper, we propose a shift of focus from change detection to change discovery, i.e., discovering novel word senses over time from the full corpus vocabulary. By heavily fine-tuning a type-based and a token-based approach on recently published German data, we demonstrate that both models can successfully be applied to discover new words undergoing meaning change. Furthermore, we provide an almost fully automated framework for both evaluation and discovery.
The automatic recognition of idioms poses a challenging problem for NLP applications. Whereas native speakers can intuitively handle multiword expressions whose compositional meanings are hard to trace back to individual word semantics, there is still ample scope for improvement regarding computational approaches. We assume that idiomatic constructions can be characterized by gradual intensities of semantic non-compositionality, formal fixedness, and unusual usage context, and introduce a number of measures for these characteristics, comprising count-based and predictive collocation measures together with measures of context (un)similarity. We evaluate our approach on a manually labelled gold standard, derived from a corpus of German pop lyrics. To this end, we apply a Random Forest classifier to analyze the individual contribution of features for automatically detecting idioms, and study the trade-off between recall and precision. Finally, we evaluate the classifier on an independent dataset of idioms extracted from a list of Wikipedia idioms, achieving state-of-the art accuracy.