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Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic and statistical cues are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language.
This study examines asymmetries between so-called inherent and contextual categories in relation to the morphological complexity of the nominal and verbal inflectional domain of languages. The observations are traced back to the influence of adult L2 learning in scenarios of intense language contact. A method for a simple comparison of the amount of inherent versus contextual categories is proposed and applied to the German-based creole language Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) in comparison to its lexifier language. The same procedure will be applied to two further language pairs. The grammatical systems of Unserdeutsch and other contact languages display a noticeable asymmetry regarding their structural complexity. Analysing different kinds of evidence, the explanatory key factor seems to be the role of (adult) L2 acquisition in the history of a language, whereby languages with periods of widespread L2 acquisition tend to lose contextual features. This impression is reinforced by general tendencies in pidgin and creole languages. Beyond that, there seems to be a tendency for inherent categories to be more strongly associated with the verb, while contextual categories seem to be more strongly associated with the noun. This leads to an asymmetry in categorical complexity between the noun phrase and the verb phrase in languages that experienced periods of intense L2 learning.
As immigration and mobility increases, so do interactions between people from different linguistic backgrounds. Yet while linguistic diversity offers many benefits, it also comes with a number of challenges. In seven empirical articles and one commentary, this Special Issue addresses some of the most significant language challenges facing researchers in the 21st century: the power language has to form and perpetuate stereotypes, the contribution language makes to intersectional identities, and the role of language in shaping intergroup relations. By presenting work that aims to shed light on some of these issues, the goal of this Special Issue is to (a) highlight language as integral to social processes and (b) inspire researchers to address the challenges we face. To keep pace with the world’s constantly evolving linguistic landscape, it is essential that we make progress toward harnessing language’s power in ways that benefit 21st century globalized societies.
Nonnative-accented speakers face prevalent discrimination. The assumption that people freely express negative sentiments toward nonnative speakers has also guided common research methods. However, recent studies did not consistently find downgrading, so that prejudice against nonnative accents might even be questioned at first sight. The present theoretical article will bridge these contradictory findings in three ways: (a) We illustrate that nonnative speakers with foreign accents frequently may not be downgraded in commonly used first-impression and employment scenario paradigms. It appears that relatively controlled responding may be influenced by norms and motivations to respond without prejudice, whereas negative biases emerge in spontaneous responding. (b) We present an integrative view based on knowledge on modern forms of prejudice to develop modern notions of accent-ism, which allow for predictions when accent biases are (not) likely to surface. (c) We conclude with implications for interventions and a tailored research agenda.
In this Paper, we describe a schema and models which have been developed for the representation of corpora of computer-mediated communicatin (CMC corpora) using the representation framework provided by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). We characterise CMC discourse as dialogic, sequentially organised interchange between humans and point out that many features of CMC are not adequately handled by current corpus encoding schemas and tools. We formulate desiderata for a representation of CMC in encoding schemes and argue why the TEI is a suitable framework for the encoding of CMC corpora. We propose a model of basic CMC units (utterances, posts, and nonverbal activities) and the macro- and micro-level structures of interactions in CMC environments. Based on these models, we introduce CMC-core, a TEI customisation for the encoding of CMC corpora, which defines CMC-specific encoding features on the four levels of elements, model classes, attribute classes, and modules of the TEI infrastructure. The description of our customisation is illustrated by encoding examples from corpora by researchers of the TEI SIG CMC, representing a variety of CMC genres, i.e. chat, wiki talk, twitter, blog, and Second Life interactions. The material described, i.e. schemata, encoding examples, and documentation, is available from the of the TEI CMC SIG Wiki and will accompany a feature request to the TEI council in late 2019.
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience a variety of symptoms sometimes including atypicalities in language use. The study explored diferences in semantic network organisation of adults with ASD without intellectual impairment. We assessed clusters and switches in verbal fuency tasks (‘animals’, ‘human feature’, ‘verbs’, ‘r-words’) via curve ftting in combination with corpus-driven analysis of semantic relatedness and evaluated socio-emotional and motor action related content. Compared to participants without ASD (n=39), participants with ASD (n=32) tended to produce smaller clusters, longer switches, and fewer words in semantic conditions (no p values survived Bonferroni-correction), whereas relatedness and content were similar. In ASD, semantic networks underlying cluster formation appeared comparably small without afecting strength of associations or content.
This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
In diesem Beitrag stellen wir die Ergebnisse einer Studie über die Intonation von Frageaktivitäten in deutschen Alltagsgesprächen vor. Unsere Untersuchung erforscht, inwieweit die Intonation zur Kontextualisierung von konversationellen Fragen beiträgt. In der Analyse stützen wir uns auf das autosegmental-metrische Modell von Peters und das taxonomische Modell der interaktionalen Prosodieforschung von Selting. Diese Modelle beschreiben jeweils phonologische oder pragmatische Aspekte der Frageintonation, zwei Dimensionen, die für sich genommen, keine vollständige Beschreibung liefern können. Auf der Grundlage authentischer Gesprächsdaten aus dem Korpus FOLK argumentieren wir für die Kompatibilität des autosegmental-metrischen Modells von Peters und des taxonomischen Modells der Frageintonation von Selting. Die Merkmale aus beiden Modellen lassen sich zu Bündeln kombinieren, die es erlauben, die Intonation von Fragen zu erfassen.
To ensure short gaps between turns in conversation, next speakers regularly start planning their utterance in overlap with the incoming turn. Three experiments investigate which stages of utterance planning are executed in overlap. E1 establishes effects of associative and phonological relatedness of pictures and words in a switch-task from picture naming to lexical decision. E2 focuses on effects of phonological relatedness and investigates potential shifts in the time-course of production planning during background speech. E3 required participants to verbally answer questions as a base task. In critical trials, however, participants switched to visual lexical decision just after they began planning their answer. The task-switch was time-locked to participants' gaze for response planning. Results show that word form encoding is done as early as possible and not postponed until the end of the incoming turn. Hence, planning a response during the incoming turn is executed at least until word form activation.
Despite the importance of the agent role for language grammar and processing, its definition and features are still controversially discussed in the literature on semantic roles. Moreover, diagnostic tests to dissociate agentive from non-agentive roles are typically applied with qualitative introspection data. We investigated whether quantitative acceptability ratings obtained with a well-established agentivity test, the DO-cleft, provide evidence for the feature-based prototype account of (Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic protoroles and argument selction. Language 67(3). 547-619) postulating that agentivity increases with the number of agentive features that a role subsumes. We used four different intransitive verb classes in German and collected acceptability judgements from non-expert native speakers of German. Our results show that sentence acceptability increases linearly with the number of agentive features and, hence, agentivity. Moreover, our findings confirm that sentience belongs to the group of proto-agent features. In summary, this suggests that a multidimensional account including a specific mechanism for role prototypicality (feature accumulation) successfully captures gradient acceptability clines. Quantitative acceptability estimates are a meaningful addition to linguistic theorizing.
Professional and technical practice and the technical character of social interaction.
The focus on communication in research on professional and scientific language somehow reflects the intention of John L. Austin’s phrase “How to do things with words?” But a description based on the concept of communication ultimately also relies on linguistic idiosyncrasies. We will look at things the other way round and ask first “how to do (professional) things” and then look at the linguistic units used specifically for this purpose. Professionalism in this view takes very different forms for different types of actions (“practices”). Although reliability and professional authority are central features of all linguistic realizations to be considered, they are represented in very different ways. As a result, professionalism not only shows in the high degree of explicitness of technical prose typical for written scientific discussion. It is also reflected in the high degree of implicitness of speech that accompanies and constitutes practical action.
In Theaterproben entwickeln Beteiligte gemeinsam eine Inszenierung, die zur Aufführung gebracht wird. Ein wesentliches Mittel dazu ist das Vorspielen von Teilen des Stücks und das anschließende Besprechen. Dies geschieht üblicherweise in Rollenteilung: Die Schauspielenden führen Teile des Stücks vor, während die Regie zuschaut und gegebenenfalls interveniert, woran sich Besprechungen anschließen können. Dieser Teil von Theaterproben, in dem abwechselnd vorgespielt und besprochen wird, haben wir Spielprobe genannt (siehe Einleitung zu diesem Themenheft). Eine wesentliche interaktionsorganisatorische Aufgabe von Spielproben besteht für die Beteiligten darin, Schauspielaktivitäten und Besprechungsaktivitäten miteinander zu verzahnen. Dies geschieht durch Transitionspraktiken, die das Spiel entweder unterbrechen oder wieder eröffnen. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht Transitionspraktiken in Spielproben als ein konstitutives Moment ihrer interaktiven Organisation. Fokussiert werden Praktiken, die das Spiel unterbrechen, so genannte Interventionen. Nach einer detaillierten Fallanalyse, die eine prototypische Transition vom Spiel ins Besprechen und zurück ins Spiel veranschaulicht (Kap. 4.1/4.2), widmet sich der Rest des Beitrags der Analyse einer Kollektion von Interventionen. Es zeigt sich, dass Interventionen normativen Orientierungen unterliegen und verwendete Praktiken hinsichtlich verschiedener Dimensionen (etwa Ursache/Grund der Intervention) systematisch variieren.
In the present article we argue that all communication is medial in the sense that every human sign-based interaction is shaped by medial aspects from the outset. We propose a dynamic, semiotic concept of media that focuses on the process-related aspect of mediality, and we test the applicability of this concept using as an example the second presidential debate between Clinton and Trump in 2016. The analysis shows in detail how the sign processing during the debate is continuously shaped by structural aspects of television and specific traits of political communication in television. This includes how the camerawork creates meaning and how the protagonists both use the affordances of this special mediality. Therefore, it is not adequate in our view to separate the technical aspects of the medium, the ‘hardware’, from the processual aspects and the structural conditions of communication. While some aspects of the interaction are directly constituted by the medium, others are more indirectly shaped and influenced by it, especially by its institutional dimension – we understand them as second-order media effects. The whole medial procedure with its specific mediality is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of meaning-making. We distinguish the medial procedure from the semiotic modes employed, the language games played and the competence of the players involved.
T-Shirt Lexicography
(2020)
This article presents a study of graphic inscriptions on garments such as T-shirts, inscriptions that resemble entries in general monolingual dictionaries of German. Referred to here as "T-shirt lexicography," the collected material is analyzed in terms of its form, content, and function, focusing on lexicographical aspects. T-shirt lexicography is an example of vernacular lexicography inasmuch as different lexicographical traditions are assumed (correctly as well as erroneously) by the (unknown) authors, but also adapted to their specific needs.
Zwischen den Jahren oder eine Zeit zwischen den Zeiten. Sprachliche Betrachtungen zur "Normalität"
(2020)
Historiquement, les variétés germaniques de la Moselle-Est (ancienne région Lorraine) font partie du continuum dialectal de l’allemand. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, leur utilisation (y compris celle de l’allemand standard) a été fortement réprimée et la francisation résolument poursuivie. Depuis quelques décennies maintenant, des efforts ont été faits pour élever les dialectes de la Moselle-Est au statut de langue indépendante afin de marquer une distance par rapport à la langue allemande, de permettre leur identification et de pouvoir les réutiliser. Le paysage linguistique donne une bonne indication de la manière dont coexistent les différents groupes linguistiques et une indication sur le statut de leurs langues. Dans le cadre d’une analyse qualitative, les contextes d’apparition, les fonctions et les auteurs des éléments linguistiques visibles dans l’espace public en allemand standard et dialectal seront discutés pour la Moselle-Est. Il s’avère qu’ils constituent des exceptions notables, distribuées de manière significative. L’allemand (standard) apparaît dans les inscriptions historiques ainsi que dans le domaine des relations internationales, et est donc implicitement exogénéisé. En revanche, on trouve le dialecte (appelé « platt ») dans des contextes ayant des références locales et portant sur des aspects identitaires.
The annual microcensus provides Germany’s most important official statistics. Unlike a census it does not cover the whole population, but a representative 1%-sample of it. In 2017, the German microcensus asked a question on the language of the population, i.e. ‘Which language is mainly spoken in your household?’ Unfortunately, the question, its design and its position within the whole microcensus’ questionnaire feature several shortcomings. The main shortcoming is that multilingual repertoires cannot be captured by it. Recommendations for the improvement of the microcensus’ language question: first and foremost the question (i.e. its wording, design, and answer options) should make it possible to count multilingual repertoires.
Text und Sprache digital
(2020)
Von Nichtstun und Erholung (an Weihnachten und zu anderen Zeiten) (aus der Rubrik Neuer Wortschatz)
(2020)
This article explores a sequence organizational phenomenon that results from the use of a loosely specifiable turn format (viz., That’s + wh-clause) for launching (next) sequences while at the same time connecting back to a prior turn. Using this practice creates a sequential juncture, i.e., a pivot-like nexus between one sequence and a next. In third position, such junctures serve to accomplish seamless sequential transitions from one sequence into a next by presenting the latter as locally occasioned. The practice may, however, also be deployed in second position to launch actions that have not been made relevant or provided for by the preceding action and exhibit response relevance themselves. The sequential junctures then become retro-sequential in character: They transform the projected trajectory of the sequence in progress and create interlocking sequential structures. These findings highlight that sequence is practice, while pointing to understudied interconnections between tying and sequentiality. Data are in English.
Using video-recordings from one day of a theater project for young adults, this paper investigates how the meaning of novel verbal expressions is interactionally constituted and elaborated over the interactional history of a series of activities. We examine how the theater director introduces and instructs the group in the Chekhovian technique of acting, which is based on “imagining with the body,” and how the imaginary elements of the technique are “brought into existence” in the language of the instructions. By tracking shifts in the instructor’s use of the key expressions invisible/imaginary/inner body or movement through a series of exercises, we demonstrate how they are increasingly treated as real and perceivable bodily conduct. The analyses focus on the instructor’s attribution of factual and agentive properties to these expressions, and the changes that these properties undergo over the series of instructions. This case demonstrates the significance of longitudinal processes for the establishment of shared meaning in social interaction. The study thereby contributes to the field of interactional semantics and to longitudinal studies of social interaction.
This paper presents the corpus-based lexicographical prototype that was developed within the framework of the project Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch (=LeGeDe) as a thirdparty funded project. Research results regarding the information offered in dictionaries have shown that there is a necessity for information on spoken lexis and its interactional functions. The resulting LeGeDe-prototype is based on these needs and desiderata and is thus an innovative example for the adequate representation of spoken language in online dictionaries. It is available online since September 2019 (https://www.owid.de/legede/). In the following sections, after first focusing on the presentation of the project’s goals, the data basis, the intended end user, and the applied methods, we will illustrate the microstructure of the prototype and the information provided in a dictionary entry based on the lemma eben. Finally, we will summarize innovative aspects that are important for the implementation of such a resource.
Im Beitrag steht das LeGeDe-Drittmittelprojekt und der im Laufe der Projektzeit entwickelte korpusbasierte lexikografische Prototyp zu Besonderheiten des gesprochenen Deutsch in der Interaktion im Zentrum der Betrachtung. Die Entwicklung einer lexikografischen Ressource dieser Art knüpft an die vielfältigen Erfahrungen in der Erstellung von korpusbasierten Onlinewörterbüchern (insbesondere am Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim) und an aktuelle Methoden der korpusbasierten Lexikologie sowie der Interaktionsanalyse an und nimmt als multimedialer Prototyp für die korpusbasierte lexikografische Behandlung von gesprochensprachlichen Phänomenen eine innovative Position in der modernen Onlinelexikografie ein. Der Beitrag befasst sich im Abschnitt zur LeGeDe-Projektpräsentation ausführlich mit projektrelevanten Forschungsfragen, Projektzielen, der empirischen Datengrundlage und empirisch erhobenen Erwartungshaltungen an eine Ressource zum gesprochenen Deutsch. Die Darstellung der komplexen Struktur des LeGeDe-Prototyps wird mit zahlreichen Beispielen illustriert. In Verbindung mit der zentralen Information zur Makro- und Mikrostruktur und den lexikografischen Umtexten werden die vielfältigen Vernetzungs- und Zugriffsstrukturen aufgezeigt. Ergänzend zum abschließenden Fazit liefert der Beitrag in einem Ausblick umfangreiche Vorschläge für die zukünftige lexikografische Arbeit mit gesprochensprachlichen Korpusdaten.
Le bilinguisme en Moselle-Est. Un projet de documentation linguistique de la situation actuelle.
(2020)
Qui parle aujourd'hui quelle langue avec qui et à quelle occasion? Quelles idées les habitants de la Moselle germanophone associent-ils aux dialectes et aux langues? Comment le Platt lorrain est-il transmis? à quoi cela ressemble-t-il dans les différents coins de la Moselle ? Pour répondre à ces questions, le Leibniz- Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) a lancé un projet de documentation sonore pour la recherche linguistique.
According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self is usually much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, enacted self. In contrast to everyday interaction, psychotherapists regularly topicalize the performative self explicitly. In our paper, we study how therapists respond to clients' narratives by interpretations of the client's conduct, shifting from the autobiographical identity of the told self, which is the focus of the client's story, to the present performative self of the client. Drawing on video recordings from three psychodynamic therapies (tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Psychotherapie) with 25 sessions each, we will analyze in detail five extracts of therapists' shifts from the representational to the performative self. We highlight four findings:
• Whereas, clients' narratives often serve to support identity claims in terms of personal psychological and moral characteristics, therapists rather tend to focus on clients' feelings, motives, current behavior, and ways of interacting.
• In response to clients' stories, therapists first show empathy and confirm clients' accounts, before shifting to clients' performative self.
• Therapists ground the shift to clients' performative self by references to clients' observable behavior.
• Therapists do not simply expect affiliation with their views on clients' performative self. Rather, they use such shifts to promote the clients' self-exploration. Yet, if clients resist to explore their selves in more detail, therapists more explicitly ascribe motives and feelings that clients do not seem to be aware of. The shift in positioning levels thus seems to have a preparatory function for engendering therapeutic insights.
The majority of new words in dictionaries are included following a certain period of time during which they have become more frequent in use and established morphosyntactic and orthographic features consistent with the language system they are borrowed into. In case of borrowed new words, inclusion often takes place at a transitional state of assimilation to the language system, where delayed orthographic or phonetic change cannot be ruled out and the differentiation between standard-conforming and non-standard orthographic word forms of a lemma oftentimes depends on the proximity between the writing systems of the donor and the recipient language. Following a brief overview of loan words and their lexicographical description in the Neologismenwörterbuch, a specialized online dictionary for neologisms in contemporary German, this paper presents findings of an investigative case study on dictionary entries for a neologism borrowed from a logographic language system and discusses the potential of a corpus-based description of new loan words.
This paper analyses the variation we find in the realization of finite clausal complements in the position of prepositional objects in a set of Germanic languages. The Germanic languages differ with respect to whether prepositions can directly select a clause (North Germanic) or not and instead need a prepositional proform (Continental West Germanic). Within the Continental West Germanic languages, we find further differences with respect to the constituent structures. We propose that German strong vs. weak prepositional proforms (e.g. drauf vs. darauf) differ with respect to their syntax, while this is not the case for the Dutch forms (ervan vs. daarvan). What the Germanic languages under consideration share is that the prepositional element can be covert, except in English. English shows only limited evidence for the presence of P with finite clauses in the position of prepositional objects generally, but only with a selected set of verbs. This investigation is a first step towards a broader study of the nature of clauses in prepositional object positions and the implications for the syntax of clausal complementation.
The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest crisis the world has had to face since World War II. It does not come as a surprise that it is also having an impact on language as our primary communication tool. In this short paper, we present three inter-connected resources that are designed to capture and illustrate these effects on a subset of the German language: An RSS corpus of German-language newsfeeds (with freely available untruncated frequency lists), a continuously updated HTML page tracking the diversity of the vocabulary in the RSS corpus and a Shiny web application that enables other researchers and the broader public to explore the corpus in terms of basic frequencies.
This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
Der Einfluss extremistischer Gewaltereignisse auf das Framing von Extremismus in Online-Medien
(2020)
In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir die Darstellung von Rechtsextremismus, Linksextremismus und Islamismus im medialen Diskurs am Beispiel von SPIEGEL Online, einem der deutschen Leitmedien. Wir leiten vier zentrale Dimensionen für die Konzeptualisierung von Extremismen ab: Ideologie und Organisation, Herkunft der Akteure, Stellung zur Gesellschaft und Typische Handlungen. Wir beobachten die Entwicklung der Darstellung der drei Extremismen an möglichen Bruchpunkten: Wir untersuchen das assoziative Framing der drei Extremismen vor und nach prominenten extremismusbezogenen Gewaltereignissen, namentlich die Anschläge des 11. September, die Veröffentlichung des NSU-Skandals und linksextremistische Aktivitäten während des G20-Gipfels in Hamburg. Mittels einer Kollokationsanalyse identifizieren wir mit den Extremismen assoziierte Aspekte und ordnen diese den Konzeptualisierungsdimensionen zu. Wir beobachten Veränderungen im Framing, die durch die ausgewählten Ereignisse bedingt sind, und vergleichen das resultierende Framing mit den Kerndefinitionen des Verfassungsschutzes aus dem Bericht des Jahres 2017, um mögliche Unterschiede in der Konzeptualisierung von Extremismen mit möglicherweise unterschiedlichen Handlungslogiken als Resultat divergierender Konzeptualisierungen herauszuarbeiten.
Linguistic Variation and Change in 250 Years of English Scientific Writing: A Data-Driven Approach
(2020)
We trace the evolution of Scientific English through the Late Modern period to modern time on the basis of a comprehensive corpus composed of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the first and longest-running English scientific journal established in 1665. Specifically, we explore the linguistic imprints of specialization and diversification in the science domain which accumulate in the formation of “scientific language” and field-specific sublanguages/registers (chemistry, biology etc.). We pursue an exploratory, data-driven approach using state-of-the-art computational language models and combine them with selected information-theoretic measures (entropy, relative entropy) for comparing models along relevant dimensions of variation (time, register). Focusing on selected linguistic variables (lexis, grammar), we show how we deploy computational language models for capturing linguistic variation and change and discuss benefits and limitations.
Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individuallevel information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients (M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses (M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (k = .85 to k = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.
As part of a larger research paradigm on understanding client change in the helping professions from an interprofessional perspective, this paper applies a conversation analytic approach to investigate therapists’ requesting examples (REs) and their interactional and sequential contribution to clients’ change during the diagnostic evaluation process. The analyzed data comprises 15 videotaped intake interviews that followed the system of Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis. Therapists’ requesting examples in psychodiagnostic interviews explicitly or implicitly criticize the patient’s prior turn as insufficient. They also open a retro-sequence and in the following turns provide for a description that helps clarify meaning and evince psychic or relational aspects of the topic at hand. While the therapist’s prior request initiates the patient’s insufficient presentation, the patient’s example presentation is regularly followed by the therapist’s summarizing comments or by further requests. Requesting examples thus are a particular case of requests that follow expandable responses regarding the sequential organization; yet, given that they make examples conditionally relevant, they are more specific. With the help of this sequential organization, participants co-construct common knowledge which allows the therapist to pursue the overall aim of therapy, which is to increase the patients’ awareness of their distorted perceptions, and thus to pave the way for change.
Editorial
(2020)
The present article shows an experimental subject investigation on elements of video telephony in relation to experiencing and feeling connectedness and intimacy within private interpersonal communication. Particular interests are questions about possible relationships between image detail, angle of view or perspective as well as image format or the foreign and personal perception of the communicators. Central to this is the question of whether the practices and interactions of users in dealing with communication technology can be used to derive possible conclusions on negotiation measures or even adaptation services. The obtained results are presented on the basis of an introductory theoretical discussion. It is followed by a summary and analysis as well as an outlook on the further use and significance of the results.
Dieser Beitrag analysiert auf der Grundlage der Wikipedia-Korpora des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Spra-che morphosyntaktische Phänomene im deutsch-italienischen Vergleich. Konkret fokussiert die Fallstudie Konfixe, die ursprünglich lateinischen bzw. griechischen Ursprungs waren und zunächst überwiegend für den Bereich der Medizinfachsprache entlehnt wurden. Mittlerweile werden diese mit veränderter Semantik jedoch auch für gemeinsprachliche Wortbildungsprodukte eingesetzt: So finden sich -phob- (D) und -fob- (IT) sowie -man- (D) und -man- (IT) in gemeinsprachlichen Wortbildungsprodukten, die formale und funk-tionale Äquivalenzen im Deutschen und Italienischen aufweisen. Wikipedia-Autor/-innen nutzen die als Krankheitsmetaphern zu deutenden Termini wie Lösch(o)manie oder cancellomania auf den Diskussionsseiten der Online-Enzyklopädie dazu, das Verhalten anderer Autor/-innen in der kollaborativen Textproduktion der Wikipedia metadiskursiv zu normieren.
Die diesjährige Jahrestagung des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim mit dem Titel „Deutsch in Europa“ zielte auf eine Perspektivenerweiterung ab. In zwölf Fachvorträgen, neun Projektvorstellungen im Rahmen einer Methodenmesse und einer Podiumsdiskussion wurden sprachpolitische, grammatische und methodische Aspekte des sprachlichen Nebeneinanders in Europa, des Sprachvergleichs und des Deutscherwerbs diskutiert.
Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der Beschreibung des Korpus Deutsch in Namibia (DNam), das über die Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD) frei zugänglich ist. Bei diesem Korpus handelt es sich um eine neue digitale Ressource, die den Sprachgebrauch der deutschsprachigen Minderheit in Namibia sowie die zugehörigen Spracheinstellungen umfassend und systematisch dokumentiert. Wir beschreiben die Datenerhebung und die dabei angewandten Methoden (freie Gespräche, „Sprachsituationen“, semi-strukturierte Interviews), die Datenaufbereitung inklusive Transkription, Normalisierung und Tagging sowie die Eigenschaften des verfügbaren Korpus (Umfang, verfügbare Metadaten usw.) und einige grundlegende Funktionalitäten im Rahmen der DGD. Erste Forschungsergebnisse, die mithilfe der neuen Ressource erzielt wurden, veranschaulichen die vielseitige Nutzbarkeit des Korpus für Fragestellungen aus den Bereichen Kontakt-, Variations-
und Soziolinguistik.
Nachruf auf Helmut Frosch
(2020)
Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology
(2020)
It has often been argued that argument structure in spoken discourse is less complex than in written discourse. This paper argues that lean argument structure, in particular, argument omission, gives evidence of how the production and understanding of linguistic structures is adapted to the interactive, material, and temporal ecology of talk-in-interaction. It is shown how lean argument structure builds on participants' ongoing bodily conduct, joint perceptual salience, joint attention, and their Orientation to expectable next actions within a joint project. The phenomena discusscd in this paper are verb-derived discourse markers and tags, analepsis in responsive actions, and ellipsis in first actions, such as requests and instructions. The study draws from transcripts and audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in German from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK).
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 paper describes the development of a systematic approach to the creation, management and curation of linguistic resources, particularly spoken language corpora. It also presents first steps towards a framework for continuous quality control to be used within external research projects by non-technical users, and discuss various domain and discipline specific problems and individual solutions. The creation of spoken language corpora is not only a time-consuming and costly process, but the created resources often represent intangible cultural heritage, containing recordings of, for example, extinct languages or historical events. Since high quality resources are needed to enable re-use in as many future contexts as possible, researchers need to be provided with the necessary means for quality control. We believe that this includes methods and tools adapted to Humanities researchers as non-technical users, and that these methods and tools need to be developed to support existing tasks and goals of research projects.
Fragen sind zentrale Interventionen im Coaching. Trotzdem gibt es kaum Erkenntnisse darüber, wie sie zur Veränderung bei Klientinnen und Klienten beitragen. Mit ihrem Fokus auf die sequenzielle Abfolge von Äußerungen wie „Frage – Antwort – Reaktion“ kann die linguistische Gesprächsanalyse dieses Veränderungspotenzial von Fragen beschreiben und so auch für die (Weiterbildungs-)Praxis oder Personalwirtschaft zugänglich machen.
This is an introduction to a special issue of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America. It offers a characterization of neology and describes the Globalex-sponsored workshop at which the papers in the issue originated. It provides an overview of the papers, which treat lexicographical neology and neological lexicography in Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Frisian, Greek, Korean, Spanish, and Swahili and address relevant aspects of lexicography in those languages, presenting state-of-the-art research into neology and ideas about modern lexicographic treatment of neologisms in various dictionary types.
Coaching outcome research convincingly argues that coaching is effective and facilitates change in clients. While coaching practice literature depicts questions as key vehicle for such change, empirical findings as regards the local and global change potential of questions are so far largely missing in both (psychological) outcome research and (linguistic and psychological) process research on coaching. The local change potential of questions refers to a turn-by-turn transformation as a result of their sequentiality, the global change potential is related to the power of questions to initiate, process and finalize established phases of change. This programmatic article on questions, or rather questioning sequences, in executive coaching pursues two goals: firstly, it takes stock of available insights into questions in coaching and advocates for Conversation Analysis as a fruitful methodological framework to assess the local change potential of questioning sequences. Secondly, it points to the limitations of a local turn-by-turn approach to unravel the overall change potential of questions and calls for an interdisciplinary approach to bring both local and global effectiveness into relation. Such an approach is premised on conversational sequentiality and psychological theories of change and facilitates research on questioning sequences as both local and global agents of change across the continuum of coaching sessions. We present the TSPP Model as a first result of such an interdisciplinary cooperation.
This article deals with narratives of traumatic experiences of parental violence in childhood, told by adult narrators in the context of clinical adult attachment interviews. The study rests on a corpus of interviews with 20 patients suffering from fibromyalgia, who were interviewed in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Nine of the patients reported repeated experiences of parental violence. The article focuses on extracts from two interviews, which provide for a maximal contrast concerning the practices of telling experiences of violence and which are ‘clear cases’ of the practices that are characteristic of the whole corpus. The main differences between the different ways of telling concern:
• With respect to the ascription of guilt and responsibility, parental violence is portrayed as legitimate pedagogic action versus as being evil-minded and guilty without rational justification.
• With respect to the process of the telling, we find narrative trajectories over which an initial vague gloss is increasingly unpacked by reports of highly violent actions versus narratives in which violence is overtly stated and morally ascribed from its very first mention.
This article describes the development of the digital infrastructure at a research data centre for audio-visual linguistic research data, the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) at the University of Hamburg in Germany, over the past ten years. The typical resource hosted in the HZSK Repository, the core component of the infrastructure, is a collection of recordings with time-aligned transcripts and additional contextual data, a spoken language corpus. Since the centre has a thematic focus on multilingualism and linguistic diversity and provides its service to researchers within linguistics and other disciplines, the development of the infrastructure was driven by diverse usage scenarios and user needs on the one hand, and by the common technical requirements for certified service centres of the CLARIN infrastructure on the other. Beyond the technical details, the article also aims to be a contribution to the discussion on responsibilities and services within emerging digital research data infrastructures and the fundamental issues in sustainability of research software engineering, concluding that in order to truly cater to user needs across the research data lifecycle, we still need to bridge the gap between discipline-specific research methods in the process of digitalisation and generic digital research data management approaches.
This paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units with ich dachte ('I thought') in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in which ich dachte is used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has) held contrasts with some other, contextually salient assumption. We show that practices which have been studied for English I thought are also routinely used in German: ich dachte is a means to manage epistemic incongruencies and to contrast an incorrect with a correct assumption in narratives. In addition, ich dachte is also used to account for the speaker's own prior actions which may have looked problematic because they built on misunderstandings which the speaker only discovered later. Moreover, ich dachte-practices may also be used to create comic effects by reporting an earlier, absurd assumption. The practices are discussed with regard to their role in regaining common ground, in managing relationships, in maintaining the identity of a rational actor, and in terms of their exploitation for other conversational interests. Special attention is paid to how co-occurring linguistic features, and sequential and pragmatic factors, account for local interpretations of ich dachte.
Das "Verzeichnis grundlegender grammatischer Fachbegriffe" 2019. Anliegen, Konzeption, Perspektiven
(2020)
"Systemrelevant" - eine sprachwissenschaftliche Betrachtung des Begriffs aus aktuellem Anlass
(2020)
Nachruf auf Ulrich Engel
(2020)
Paronymie und Sprachwandel
(2020)
Dieser Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welche Faktoren beim Bedeutungswandel von deutschen Paronymen (z. B. effektiv/effizient, virtuell/virtual, nicht ehelich/unehelich/außerehelich) eine Rolle spielen und wie sich diese im aktuellen Sprachgebrauch zeigen. Dabei können gerade Korpusanalysen unterschiedliche Tendenzen sprachlicher Entwicklung aufdecken. Als morphologische Alternativen können Paronyme durchaus das sprachliche Inventar bereichern und der Sprachgemeinschaft neue lexikalische Varianten zur Verfügung stellen. In anderen Fällen konkurrieren Paronyme stark miteinander und dadurch verändern sich Verwendungsweisen. Zusätzlich ist häufiger fehlerhafter Gebrauch ein wichtiger Impuls für semantische Veränderungen. Als Ergebnis beobachten wir semantische Angleichungen oder lexikalische Verdrängungen. Zahlreiche Ausdrücke haben sich in der jüngsten Sprachgeschichte semantisch, stilistisch oder diskursiv spezialisiert, um veränderten sprachlichen Bedürfnissen sowie neuen kommunikativen Situationen Rechnung zu tragen. Die Ursachen und Folgen des Wandels von paronymen Zweifelsfällen sind vielschichtig. In diesem Beitrag werden einige konkrete Ausdrücke näher beleuchtet, ihre gebrauchsorientierte Untersuchung, aber auch Möglichkeiten der lexikografischen Dokumentation werden erörtert.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of word formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DeReKo and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag gehen wir von der Prämisse aus, dass die Angemessenheit sprachlicher Formen nicht pauschal, sondern anhand des jeweiligen Kontexts zu beurteilen ist. Anhand einer Online-Fragebogenstudie mit durch weil eingeleiteten Nebensätzen untersuchen wir die Hypothese, dass Varianten, die nicht dem Schriftstandard entsprechen, in Kommunikationsformen, die sich weniger an standard- und schriftsprachlichen Normen orientieren, als (mindestens) ebenso angemessen oder zumindest unterschiedlich wahrgenommen werden wie eine schriftstandardsprachliche Variante. Wir untersuchen dies anhand von drei Aufgaben: Rezeption, Produktion und Assoziation zu bestimmten Medien und Textsorten. Wir können zeigen, dass die schriftnormgerechte Variante durchweg als am akzeptabelsten eingeschätzt wird. In allen drei Aufgaben finden sich aber auch eindeutige und übereinstimmende Effekte, die nahelegen, dass die verschiedenen Varianten in Abhängigkeit der Textsorte doch unterschiedlich eingeschätzt, produziert und assoziiert werden.
Heute wird mehr geschrieben als je zuvor und die digitale Kommunikation trägt wesentlich dazu bei; ein großer Teil des heutigen Schreibens ist dialogisches Schreiben im Alltag. Konsequenterweise wird die Online-Kommunikation zunehmend Thema in Bildungskontexten und in der Deutschdidaktik. Offen ist aber weiterhin, wie Texte des interaktionsorientierten Schreibens bewertet werden sollen, die sich von solchen des textorientierten Schreibens in vielerlei Hinsicht unterscheiden können. Während es für textorientiertes Schreiben Normen gibt, die in Sprachkodizes erfasst sind, ist es nicht klar, was der Bezugspunkt für interaktionsorientierte Texte sein könnte. In diesem Beitrag analysieren wir die Verwendung von Konnektoren in der Online-Kommunikation und die Repräsentation von online-spezifischen Besonderheiten in Sprachressourcen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass spezifische Online-Verwendungsweisen von Konnektoren in Sprachkodizes kaum berücksichtigt und beschrieben werden.
Die Textqualität von Social-Media-Texten unterscheidet sich deutlich von der Textqualität traditioneller monologischer Texte, weshalb neue Textqualitätskategorien für Social-Media-Texte benötigt werden. Der Beitrag beschreibt zunächst, wie in einer Studie zwölf Schreibratgeber für Social-Media-Texte auf Belegstellen des Zürcher Textanalyserasters durchsucht wurden und wie darüber hinaus mittels qualitativer Inhaltsanalyse neue Textqualitätskategorien von Social-Media-Texten in den Ratgebern bestimmt und geordnet wurden. In einem zweiten Schritt werden die Ergebnisse dieser Studie aufgeführt, die Belegstellen des Zürcher Rasters und die aus der Studie gewonnenen und geordneten Kategorien einzeln erläutert. Mit den acht neuen Textqualitätskategorien für Social-Media-Texte wurde das Mannheimer Analyseraster angefertigt, das zur Analyse von Social-Media-Texten angewendet werden kann und den letzten Abschnitt des Beitrags bildet.
Der Beitrag beschreibt einen Ansatz zur Qualitätsbewertung multimodaler Hypertexte und internetbasierter Interaktion. Das Modell fußt auf Ansätzen zur Bewertung von Textqualität in linear organisierten Schrifttexten, insbesondere dem Zürcher Textqualitätenraster, das bereits im prädigitalen Zeitalter für eine große empirische Untersuchung zum Schreibgebrauch in Aufsatztexten genutzt wurde. Der Beitrag beschreibt und begründet, welche Erweiterungen für multimodale Hypertexte und internetbasierte Interaktion erforderlich sind. Vertiefend wird dabei das Konzept der Kohärenz behandelt, das für lineare Texte und für Hypertexte gleichermaßen relevant ist. An Beispielen wird gezeigt, wie Hyperlinks als digitale Kohärenzbildungshilfen bei der Hypertextproduktion und beim interaktionsorientierten Schreiben eingesetzt werden. Die Kohärenzanalyse wird erweitert um zwei neue Aspekte: 1) die interaktionale Kohärenz zwischen Beiträgen verschiedener Personen in der digitalen Interaktion (z. B. beim Chatten oder in Online-Diskussionen) und 2) die multimodale Kohärenz zwischen Text-, Bild-, Audio- und Videoelementen.
Das Kommunizieren in Sozialen Medien und der Umgang mit Hypertexten ist im Jahr 2020 kein Randphänomen mehr. Die sprachlichen Besonderheiten internetbasierter Kommunikation und Sozialer Medien sind mittlerweile auch gut erforscht und beschrieben, allerdings werden diese bislang in deutschen Grammatiken, mit Ausnahme von Hoffmann (2014), allenfalls am Rande behandelt. Selbst neuere Ansätze zur Textanalyse, z. B. Ágel (2017), konzentrieren sich auf gestaltstabile, linear organisierte Schrifttexte. Dasselbe gilt für Ansätze, die primär für die Bewertung von Schreibprodukten in Bildungskontexten entwickelt wurden.
Mit der Tagung zu Bauernkomödien des 17. Jahrhunderts verfolgten Markus Denkler (Münster) und Michael Elmentaler (Kiel) ein ungewöhnliches Konzept, das einen besonders intensiven wissenschaftlichen Austausch ermöglichte: Gemeinsame Textgrundlage für alle Beitragenden stellten zwölf hoch- und niederdeutsche Bauernkomödien aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (ca. 1593–1701) dar. Dabei handelt es sich um Dramen mit bäuerlichen Figuren, die eine komödiantische Ausrichtung haben und in Prosaform verfasst sind. Alle Vortragenden erhielten im Vorfeld Zugriff auf die Sammlung und entwickelten daraus in der Folge Fragestellungen für ihre Vorträge. Inhaltlich ergaben sich drei Blöcke. Zwei literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge ordneten die Textsorte literatur- und kulturhistorisch ein. Daran schlossen sich ein umfangreicher Block zur historischen Dialogforschung und Pragmatik und ein etwas kürzerer zu historischer Varietätenlinguistik und Grammatik an.