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Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
Novel formats of construction-based description hold great potential for phenomena that fall through the cracks in traditional kinds of linguistic reference works. On the example of German verb argument structure constructions with a prepositional object, we demonstrate that a construction-based description of such phenomena is superior to existing lexicographic and grammaticographic treatments, but that it also poses a number of new problems. The most fundamental of these relates to the fact that construction-based analyses can be proposed on different levels of abstraction. We illustrate pertinent problems relating to the precise identification of constructional form and meaning and suggest a multi-layered descriptive format for web-based electronic reference constructica that can accommodate these challenges. Semantically, the proposed solution integrates both lumping and splitting perspectives on constructional grain size and permits users to flexibly zoom in and out on individual elements in the resource. Formally, it can capture variation in the number and marking of realised arguments as found in e.g. passives and transitivity alternations. Aspects of the theoretical controversy between Construction Grammar and Valency Theory are addressed where relevant, but our focus is on questions of description and the practical implementation of construction-based analyses in a suitable type of linguistic reference work.
Smooth turn-taking in conversation depends in part on speakers being able to communicate their intention to hold or cede the floor. Both prosodic and gestural cues have been shown to be used in this context. We investigate the interplay of pitch movements and hand gestures at locations at which speaker change becomes relevant, comparing their use in German and Swedish. We find that there are some shared functions of prosody and gesture with regard to turn-taking in the two languages, but that these shared functions appear to be mediated by the different phonological demands on pitch in the two languages.
Looking at gestures as a means for communication, they can serve conversational participants at several levels. As co-speech gestures, they can add information to the verbally expressed content and they can serve to manage turn-taking. In order to look closer at the interplay between these resources in face-to face conversation, we annotated hand gestures, syntactic completion points and the related turn-organisation, and measured the timing of gesture strokes and their lexical/phrasal referent. In a case study on German, we observe the trend that speakers vary less in gesturelexis on- and offsets when keeping the turn after syntactic completions than at speaker changes, backchannel or other locations of a conversation. This indicates that timing properties of non-verbal cues interact with verbal cues to manage turn-taking.
We examine the new task of detecting derogatory compounds (e.g. curry muncher). Derogatory compounds are much more difficult to detect than derogatory unigrams (e.g. idiot) since they are more sparsely represented in lexical resources previously found effective for this task (e.g. Wiktionary). We propose an unsupervised classification approach that incorporates linguistic properties of compounds. It mostly depends on a simple distributional representation. We compare our approach against previously established methods proposed for extracting derogatory unigrams.
We discuss the impact of data bias on abusive language detection. We show that classification scores on popular datasets reported in previous work are much lower under realistic settings in which this bias is reduced. Such biases are most notably observed on datasets that are created by focused sampling instead of random sampling. Datasets with a higher proportion of implicit abuse are more affected than datasets with a lower proportion.
We present a descriptive analysis on the two datasets from the shared task on Source, Subjective Expression and Target Extraction from Political Speeches (STEPS), the only existing German dataset for opinion role extraction of its size. Our analysis discusses the individual properties of the three components, subjective expressions, sources and targets and their relations towards each other. Our observations should help practitioners and researchers when building a system to extract opinion roles from German data.
A Supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets from German text
(2019)
We present the first systematic supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets on German language data. A wide choice of different features is presented, particularly syntactic features and generalization features. We point out specific differences between opinion sources and targets. Moreover, we explain why implicit sources can be extracted even with fairly generic features. In order to ensure comparability our classifier is trained and tested on the dataset of the STEPS shared task.
In diesem Artikel wird der Tempus-Modus-Gebrauch in indirekter Redewiedergabe im Niederdeutschen im Vergleich mit dem Hochdeutschen, Englischen und Norwegischen untersucht. Die hochdeutsche Standardsprache verfügt über eine voll ausgebaute Indikativ-Konjunktiv-Unterscheidung, wobei eine der Funktionen des Konjunktivs in der Markierung indirekter Rede besteht. Viele andere germanische Sprachen, hier vertreten durch das Englische und Norwegische, kennen keine vergleichbare Konjunktivkategorie (mehr). Indirekte Rede steht dort im Indikativ, wobei häufig das Phänomen der Tempusverschiebung zu beobachten ist. Das nördliche Niederdeutsche kennt ebenfalls keine distinkten Konjunktivformen, womit sich die Frage stellt, ob auch die Redewiedergabe wie in den anderen konjunktivlosen Sprachen funktioniert. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht dieser Frage im Rahmen einer empirischen Untersuchung nach. Als Datengrundlage dienen nordniederdeutsche Radionachrichten. Es zeigt sich, dass die Verteilung von Präsens und Präteritum in den niederdeutschen Radiodaten weiter ausfällt als in den konjunktivlosen Vergleichssprachen: Das Präsens tritt, wie im Hochdeutschen, auch dort auf, wo im Englischen und Norwegischen mit einer Verschiebung zum Präteritum zu rechnen wäre. Und für das Präteritum ergibt sich eine reportiv-konjunktivische Verwendung, die keine Entsprechung im Englischen oder Norwegischen hat.
Naming and titling have been discussed in sociolinguistics as markers of status or solidarity. However, these functions have not been studied on a larger scale or for social media data. We collect a corpus of tweets mentioning presidents of six G20 countries by various naming forms. We show that naming variation relates to stance towards the president in a way that is suggestive of a framing effect mediated by respectfulness. This confirms sociolinguistic theory of naming and titling as markers of status.
Little strokes fell great oaks. Creating CoRoLa, the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian
(2019)
The paper presents the quite long-standing tradition of Romanian corpus acquisition and processing, which reaches its peak with the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian language (CoRoLa). The paper describes decisions behind the kinds of texts collected, as well as processing and annotation steps, highlighting the structure and importance of metadata to the corpus. The reader is also introduced to the three ways in which (s)he can plunge into the rich linguistic data of the corpus, waiting to be discovered. Besides querying the corpus, word embeddings extracted from it are useful to various natural language processing applications and for linguists, when user-friendly interfaces offer them the possibility to exploit the data.
This paper describes a rule-based approach to detect direct speech without the help of any quotation markers. As datasets fictional and non-fictional texts were used. Our evaluation shows that the results appear stable throughout different datasets in the fictional domain and are comparable to the results achieved in related work.
The transfer of research data management from one institution to another infrastructural partner is all but trivial, but can be required, for instance, when an institution faces reorganization or closure. In a case study, we describe the migration of all research data, identify the challenges we encountered, and discuss how we addressed them. It shows that the moving of research data management to another institution is a feasible, but potentially costly enterprise. Being able to demonstrate the feasibility of research data migration supports the stance of data archives that users can expect high levels of trust and reliability when it comes to data safety and sustainability.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden auf der Grundlage authentischer Alltagsinteraktionen die Funktionsspektren der Modalpartikeln 'eben' und 'halt' beschrieben. Es wird dargelegt, dass die Partikeln keinesfalls synonym verwendet werden, sondern distinktive Verwendungen aufweisen. Für 'halt' zeigen sich die drei prominenten Verwendungsweisen i) der Kohärenzherstellung, ii) der Verweis auf gemeinsames Wissen und iii) der Einsatz zur informationsstrukturellen (Beitrags-)Gliederung. 'Eben' wird ebenfalls häufig zur Kohärenzherstellung eingesetzt, und trägt darüber hinaus besonders häufig als strategische Ressource zur rhetorischen Verstärkung einer Argumentation oder Schlussfolgerung bei. Abschließend werden die in der Literatur oft behauptete Ersetzbarkeit von 'halt' durch 'eben' und umgekehrt sowie die häufig zugeschriebene Konnotation von Unabänderlichkeit und Sprecherresignation diskutiert.
In this paper we present the results of a survey conducted among students of German Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in the years 2015–2017. The target group was composed of first-semester students from whom we collected data about their lexicographical competence at the start of the program. The results contain some interesting findings, e.g. students prefer online dictionaries, but the number of students using print dictionaries is comparable and we have also observed the rising number of students who use smartphone applications. The aim of the survey is to provide information for university instructors who teach German as a foreign language (DaF) and lexicography.
We present the second edition of the GermEval Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language. This shared task deals with the classification of German tweets from Twitter. Two subtasks were continued from the first edition, namely a coarse-grained binary classification task and a fine-grained multi-class classification task. As a novel subtask, we introduce the classification of offensive tweets as explicit or implicit.
The shared task had 13 participating groups submitting 28 runs for the coarse-grained
task, another 28 runs for the fine-grained task, and 17 runs for the implicit-explicit
task.
We evaluate the results of the systems submitted to the shared task. The shared task homepage can be found at https://projects.fzai.h-da.de/iggsa/
This paper focuses on easily confused items (so-called paronyms) in German in terms of their general, technical or academic contextual uses. It outlines the semantic discrepancies between contextual usages of pairs such as Methode/Methodologie/Methodik and unehelich/nichtehelich/außerehelich depending on their linguistic registers and varieties. While previous studies lack empirical evidence and primarily operate with morphological criteria (cf. Lăzărescu 1999) the descriptions here derive from corpus-based examinations of general written and of technical discourse. It is shown that causes of lexical confusion arise from formal, phonetic resemblances or semantic similarities, regular co-occurrence, incorrect morphological analogies and political governance of language. Context, knowledge, associations and experience determine the choice of lexical terms. Speakers need to apply linguistic and extra-linguistic principles in order to create adequate contexts. With the help of paronym examples and corpus data, these will be elucidated in more detail.
Der Beitrag führt in das Sonderheft „Paronymie im deutschen Sprachgebrauch“ ein und bündelt gewonnene Einblicke in die lexikologische, korpusanalytische sowie lexikografische Arbeit des Projektes „Paronymwörterbuch“. Er stellt wichtige Erkenntnisse zu Paronymen, ihrem Vorkommen, ihrer Ermittlung und Darstellung, aber auch zu den Methoden der Bedeutungsanalyse, ihren diskursiven Funktionen und dem Umgang mit Verwechslungspotenzial zusammenfassend dar. Vorgestellt werden Forschungsergebnisse, die sich vor allem auf die Verwendung von Paronymen in der öffentlichen Gebrauchssprache beziehen. Aber auch explorative Korpusverfahren werden erläutert sowie innovative, dynamische e-lexikografische Darstellungen präsentiert. Ausgewählte Probleme, die sowohl im Kontext der theoretischen Auseinandersetzung als auch mit der redaktionellen Erfassung von Paronymen auftreten, werden hier diskutiert. Das Sonderheft verbindet dabei theoretische und praktische lexikografische Herangehensweisen an ein bisher linguistisch wenig dokumentiertes Phänomen, das Muttersprachler/innen und Fremdsprachenlernende gleichermaßen verunsichert. Neben den Rückblicken werden ebenso die Ausblicke auf die kommenden Jahre und die damit verbundenen Fragestellungen des Projektes skizziert.
Dieser Beitrag zeigt, inwieweit im Projekt „Paronymwörterbuch“ korpuslinguistische und kognitiv-semantische Elemente bei der Entwicklung einer neuen Online-Ressource berücksichtigt wurden. Damit sollen lexikologische und lexikografische Aspekte miteinander erfolgreich verbunden und die Kluft zwischen linguistischer Theorie und redaktioneller Praxis etwas geschlossen werden. Konzeptuell ausgerichtete Angaben, die linguistische und enzyklopädische Informationen eng miteinander verknüpfen, werden in Korpusdaten ermittelt, interpretiert und z. T. abstrahiert. Sprachliches und außersprachliches Wissen lassen sich gemeinsam abspeichern. Dadurch ist es möglich, kontextuell abhängige sprachliche Informationen mit konzeptuellen Realisierungen und mit diskursiv-thematischen Besonderheiten zusammen nachzuschlagen. Darüber hinaus werden in diesem Beitrag anhand eines Beispiels wichtige dynamische Funktionalitäten des neuen Nachschlagewerkes „Paronyme – Dynamisch im Kontrast“ vorgestellt. So wird gezeigt, wie Artikelanordnungen variieren und verschiedene Perspektiven auf linguistische Phänomene eingenommen werden können. Um Informationen bedarfsgerecht und interessenspezifisch abrufen zu können, wurde eine multifunktionale Ressource geschaffen, die sehr flexibel auf verschiedene Nachschlagesituationen reagieren kann und den Bedürfnissen der Nutzer/innen gerechter wird.
Canadian heritage German across three generations: A diary-based study of language shift in action
(2019)
It is well known that migration has an effect on language use and language choice. If the language of origin is maintained after migration, it tends to change in the new contact setting. Often, migrants shift to the new majority language within few generations. The current paper examines a diary corpus containing data from three generations of one German-Canadian family, ranging from 1867 to 1909, and covering the second to fourth generation after immigration. The paper analyzes changes that can be observed between the generations, with respect to the language system as well as to the individuals’ decision on language choice. The data not only offer insight into the dynamics of acquiring a written register of a heritage language, and the eventual shift to the majority language. They also allow us to identify different linguistic profiles of heritage speakers within one community. It is discussed how these profiles can be linked to the individuals’ family backgrounds and how the combination of these backgrounds may have contributed to giving up the heritage language in favor of the majority language.
Resistance and adaptation to newspeakerness in educational institutions: two tales from Estonia
(2019)
The term ‘new speaker’ has recently emerged as an attempt by sociolinguists not only to understand the diferent types of speaker profles that can be found in contemporary societies, but also to grasp the underlying processes of becoming a legitimate speaker in a given society. In this article, we combine the results from two studies situated in two educational institutions in Estonia in order to fnd out about speakers’ language attitudes and experiences in connection to learning and using Estonian. We concentrate on members of the international community who have relatively recently arrived to the country. Our results indicate that these speakers fuctuate between two prototypical discourses, which we broadly dub as ‘resistance’ and ‘adaptation’ to newspeakerness. Our study thereby adds to current debates on ‘new speaker’ and language policy issues by illustrating how tensions around language legitimacy are played out on the ground in a small nation state such as Estonia.
German subjectively veridical sicher sein ‘be certain’ can embed ob-clauses in negative contexts, while subjectively veridical glauben ‘believe’ and nonveridical möglich sein ‘be possible’ cannot. The Logical Form of F isn’t certain if M is in Rome is regarded as the negated disjunction of two sentences ¬(cf σ ∨ cf ¬σ) or ¬cf σ ∧ ¬cf ¬σ. Be certain can have this LF because ¬cf σ and ¬cf ¬σ are compatible and nonveridical. Believe excludes this LF because ¬bf σ and ¬bf ¬σ are incompatible in a question-under-discussion context. It follows from this incompatibility and from the incompatibility of bf σ and bf ¬σ that bf ¬σ and ¬bf σ are equivalent. Therefore believe cannot be nonveridical. Be possible doesn’t allow the LF either. Similar to believe, ¬pf σ and ¬pf ¬σ are incompatible. But unlike believe, pf σ and pf ¬σ are compatible.
Im Folgenden soll der Versuch unternommen werden, die bisherigen Forschungen zur Sprachgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im Lichte ihres Erkenntnispotenzials für gegenwärtige historiografische Fragestellungen zu diskutieren. In einem ersten Schritt wird die Forschungsgeschichte zur Sprache des beziehungsweise im Nationalsozialismus von der frühen Nachkriegszeit bis in die 1980er-Jahre skizziert. Deutlich wird hier vor allem, dass in dieser Phase zwar wichtige Arbeiten entstanden sind, jedoch methodische und theoretische Begrenzungen zahlreiche blinde Flecken bestehen ließen. In einem zweiten Schritt wird dargelegt, mit welchen Erkenntnisinteressen und Instrumentarien die jüngere Forschung sich auf diese blinden Flecken konzentriert und welche Ergebnisse sie zutage gefördert hat. Dabei sollen vor allem diejenigen Aspekte benannt werden, die nach Ansicht des Verfassers bei einer noch zu schreibenden Sprach- und Kommunikationsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus zu beachten sind. Es handelt sich konkret um eine Ausweitung der Perspektive in Richtung unterschiedlicher Kommunikationssituationen und heterogener Akteurskonstellationen, um Sprachgebräuche unter den Diskursbedingungen des Nationalsozialismus angemessen beschreiben zu können.
Im Rahmen der korpusgestützten Lexikografie stellt die Kookkurrenzanalyse ein bewährtes Verfahren dar, um Massendaten aus Korpora im Corpus-driven-Ansatz zu einem Einzelstichwort vorzustrukturieren. Wie diese Daten im redaktionellen lexikografischen Prozess in die Wortartikelproduktion einfließen können, wurde beispielsweise beim allgemeinen einsprachigen Online-Wörterbuch elexiko erprobt, dokumentiert und umgesetzt. Für das Wörterbuch „Paronyme - Dynamisch im Kontrast“ bildet die Kookkurrenzanalyse gleichfalls einen Ausgangspunkt für die Arbeit an Wortartikeln, allerdings unter anderen Voraussetzungen: Der folgenreichste Unterschied in methodischer Hinsicht ist, dass im Paronymwörterbuch mindestens zwei Stichwörter vergleichend gegenübergestellt werden, um so semantische Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede explizit zu machen. Im Beitrag wird diskutiert, wie die Verfahren der Kookkurrenzanalyse und des nachfolgenden Vergleichs für die praktische Artikelarbeit beim Paronymwörterbuch variiert, spezifiziert und nutzbar gemacht wurden.
Der Beitrag beschreibt ein mehrfach annotiertes Korpus deutschsprachiger Songtexte als Datenbasis für interdisziplinäre Untersuchungsszenarien. Die Ressource erlaubt empirisch begründete Analysen sprachlicher Phänomene, systemischstruktureller Wechselbeziehungen und Tendenzen in den Texten moderner Popmusik. Vorgestellt werden Design und Annotationen des in thematische und autorenspezifische Archive stratifizierten Korpus sowie deskriptive Statistiken am Beispiel des Udo-Lindenberg-Archivs.
The article starts by outlining the theoretical and conceptual foundations in the field of multimodal interaction analysis, which, based on its spatiallinguistic orientation, deals with the meaning of space for the constitution of social meaning. Conceptually, we refer to the ideas of architecture-forinteraction and social topography. Empirically, we look towards the entire range of visually perceptible physical expressions of the Communion participants. We also focus on the spatial prerequisites and the space-related knowledge of the visitors, which becomes evident in their situational behaviour. From our point of view, Communion is not only a ritual in worship but also a task of coordination and positioning. We analyse video excerpts of two Communions in Lutheran-Protestant worship. The central question is: How do the people who hand out the sacrament to the participants take part in the procedure themselves (self-supply)? The video excerpts are from Germany(Rimbach and Zotzenbach, South Hesse). We see self-supply as a situational reproduction of institutional structures and relevancies. Methodologically, we first analyse an example in detail, in which we elaborate constitutive aspects of self-supply and the associated implications in the sense of an arising communitisation of the faithful. The subsequent analysis is carried out from a comparative perspective with reference to the results already obtained. The analyses lead to two basic models. Firstly, we identified a two-phase model in which first the churchgoers and then separately the institution’s representatives celebrate Communion. Structurally linked to this model is the is the diverging presence of those who have already completed the ritual, divergence resulting in two ensembles with their respective interaction space. The churchgoers watch the pastor and his assistants perform the ritual themselves. Secondly, we were able to formulate an integrative model in which the pastor celebrates Communion as one of the community. This preserves cohesion among all churchgoers and there is no ritual display of the institution’s representatives as in the two-phase model. As for model-shaping factors, two aspects become particularly clear: The first are the opportunities which the architecture-forinteraction, i.e. the concrete space for the Communion, provides. The second is the number of participants who perform the ceremony under these spatial conditions. Both aspects have a direct impact on the organisation of Communion, the movement within the church space and, indirectly, on the structure and implications of self-supply.
Automatic division of spoken language transcripts into sentence-like units is a challenging problem, caused by disfluencies, ungrammatical structures and the lack of punctuation. We present experiments on dividing up German spoken dialogues where we investigate the impact of task setup and data representation, encoding of context information as well as different model architectures for this task.
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
In this paper, we present WebAnno-MM, an extension of the popular web-based annotation tool WebAnno, which is designed for the linguistic annotation of transcribed spoken data with time aligned media files. Several new features have been implemented for our current use case: a novel teaching method based on pair-wise manual annotation of transcribed video data and systematic comparison of agreement between students. To enable the annotation of transcribed spoken language data, apart from technical and data model related challenges, WebAnno-MM offers an additional view to data: a (musical) score view for the inspection of parallel utterances, which is relevant for various methodological research questions regarding the analysis of interactions of spoken content.
This paper presents first steps towards metaphor detection in German poetry, in particular in expressionist poems. We create a dataset with adjective-noun pairs extracted from expressionist poems, manually annotated for metaphoricity. We discuss the annotation process and present models and experiments for metaphor detection where we investigate the impact of context and the domain dependence of the models.
Innerhalb der für das Paronymprojekt aufgestellten Stichwortliste lassen sich zahlreiche Wortbildungsmuster erkennen. Deren Übereinstimmung von theoretischer Wortbildung und praktischem Sprachgebrauch soll in diesem Beitrag anhand von zehn auf -freit-los endender Paronympaare untersucht werden. Es wird gezeigt, dass diese Wortbildungsgruppe in vielfacher Hinsicht in sich heterogen ist. So lässt sich weder eine Präferenz für eine Endung ausmachen, noch entsprechen die Endungen einer einheitlichen Bedeutung. Auch werden die Paronyme mal synonym, mal teil-synonym und mal semantisch gänzlich unabhängig voneinander verwendet. In diesem Beitrag wird anhand von konkreten Korpusbeispielen gezeigt, wie unterschiedlich sich die einzelnen, mit gleichen Endungen gebildeten Paronympaare kontextuell verhalten.
This paper investigates emergent pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus-based study, seven verbs in the first conjunct are analyzed regarding the degree of semantic bleaching and the development of subjective or aspectual meaning components. Moreover, it is shown that each verb shows distinct tendencies for co-ocurrences, especially with deictic adverbs in the first conjunct and with specific verbs and verb classes in the second conjunct. It is argued that pseudo-coordination is originally motivated by the need for ‘chunking’ in unplanned speech and that it is still prominently used in this function in German, in contrast to languages in which pseudo-coordination is grammaticalized further.
Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
Ein sehr mächtiges Instrument für die Untersuchung von Wörtern und Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen ihnen ist die Analyse typischer Verwendungskontexte - unabhängig davon, ob die Evidenzen auf Bedeutungskonstitution, ihre Veränderung oder Verwechslung hinweisen, drei Aspekte, die alle bei der Charakterisierung von Paronymie eine Rolle spielen. Auch wenn für die Ermittlung typischer Verwendungsmuster ausgereifte Methoden zur Verfügung stehen, so sollte beim Vergleich der Analysen doch beachtet werden, dass sie diversen Einflussgrößen unterliegen. Neben der Datengrundlage und der Definition und Handhabung des relevanten Kontextes wird im Folgenden besonders darauf eingegangen, welche Rolle verschiedene Teilmengen eines Flexionsparadigmas spielen können, wenn ein Lemma als dessen Gesamtmenge als sprachliche Bezugseinheit einer Untersuchung gewählt wurde. Veranschaulicht wird die Gedankenführung an der beispielhaften Betrachtung von Paronymkandidaten.
Am 7. und 8. September fand an der Universität Basel die 4. Sektionentagung der Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik (GAL) statt. Eine der 15 hier vertretenen Sektionen war die Migrationslinguistik, die von Peter Rosenberg (Frankfurt (Oder)) und Christoph Schroeder (Potsdam) geleitet wurde. Die sechs Vorträge dieser Sektion thematisierten laufende Projekte zur Spracharbeit mit Geflüchteten und ihre ersten Ergebnisse, die Gegenstand dieses Berichts sind.
Common Crawl is a considerably large, heterogeneous multilingual corpus comprised of crawled documents from the internet, surpassing 20TB of data and distributed as a set of more than 50 thousand plain text files where each contains many documents written in a wide variety of languages. Even though each document has a metadata block associated to it, this data lacks any information about the language in which each document is written, making it extremely difficult to use Common Crawl for monolingual applications. We propose a general, highly parallel, multithreaded pipeline to clean and classify Common Crawl by language; we specifically design it so that it runs efficiently on medium to low resource infrastructures where I/O speeds are the main constraint. We develop the pipeline so that it can be easily reapplied to any kind of heterogeneous corpus and so that it can be parameterised to a wide range of infrastructures. We also distribute a 6.3TB version of Common Crawl, filtered, classified by language, shuffled at line level in order to avoid copyright issues, and ready to be used for NLP applications.
This paper investigates self-initiated uses of mobile phones (such as texting or making a call) in everyday video-recorded conversations among Czech speakers. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis, it illustrates how participants publicly frame their own device use (for example, by announcements), and how co-present interlocutors respond to it. Previous studies have described how participants manage two concurrent communicative involvements, but have not provided detailed sequential descriptions of how device use can be negotiated and accounted for. This study shows that mobile device use in co-presence is not a priori problematic (or vice versa). Instead, participants frame their technology use in different ways according to various features of the social situation they treat as momentarily relevant. These features include the course of the conversation and how the device use relates to it, the overall participation framework and the opacity of the device use for co-present others.
In German oral discourse, previous research has shown that okay can be used both as a response token (e.g., for agreeing with the previous turn or for claiming a certain degree of understanding) and as a discourse marker (e.g., for closing conversational topics or sequences and/or indicating transitions). This contribution focuses on the use of okay as a response token and how it is connected with the speakers’ interactional state of knowledge (their understanding, their assumptions etc.). The analysis is based on video recorded everyday conversations in German and a sequential, micro-analytic approach (multimodal conversation analysis). The main function of conversational okay in the selected data set is related to indicating the acceptance of prior information. By okay, speakers however claim acceptance of a piece of information that they can’t verify or check. The analysis contrasts different sequences containing okay only with sequences in which change-of-state tokens such as ah and achso co-occur with okay. This illustrates that okay itself does not index prior information as new, and that it is not used for agreeing with or for confirming prior information. Instead it enables the speaker to adopt a kind of neutral, “non-agreeing” position towards a given piece of information.
The article shows how the topic of dictionaries can be dealt with in German language teaching and how this subject has the potential to acquaint learners with a descriptive and data-driven perspective on language. The project Denkwerk, realized as cooperation among the Institute for German Language, the University of Mannheim and two regional secondary schools, fostered the students’ intellectual
curiosity and their interest in discovering linguistic details. Using empirical methods like corpus analysis, pupils learned both how to write wiki-based dictionary articles on their own and how to publish them in the Denktionary, the dictionary of the project. Our contribution describes the didactic and organisational framework of the project, its aims and contents, its schedule of events, as well as the structure of dictionary articles in the Denktionary, and the observed advantages of such a wikibased system.
Die korpusbasierte Lexikografie ist ein interessanter und vielfältiger wissenschaftlicher Anwendungsbereich, der auch im muttersprachlichen Deutschunterricht und im Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-Unterricht eine größere Rolle einnehmen sollte. In unserem Beitrag stellen wir deshalb geeignete Korpora und Korpusanalysewerkzeuge vor, mit deren Hilfe Nutzerinnen und Nutzer einzelne Angabebereiche in einem Wörterbuch nicht nur nachvollziehen, sondern auch eigenständig erarbeiten können. Neben vorhandenen Ansätzen geschieht dies am Beispiel des Denktionarys, eines wikibasierten Wörterbuches, für das Schülerinnen und Schüler im Rahmen des Projekts Schüler machen Wörterbücher – Wörterbücher machen Schule im muttersprachlichen Deutschunterricht selbst korpusbasierte Artikel verfassten.
Die 21. Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung mit dem Rahmenthema „Vergleichende Gesprächsforschung“ fand vom 21.–23. März 2018 am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim statt. Das Ziel der Tagung war es, Forscherinnen und Forscher zusammenzubringen, die authentische Interaktionsdaten aus vergleichender Perspektive untersuchen. Das Rahmenthema der Tagung ergab sich aus dem steigenden Interesse an vergleichenden Fragestellungen innerhalb konversations- und gesprächsanalytischer Untersuchungen. Die Tagung nahm gezielt Vorgehensweisen und Methoden bei der Durchführung vergleichender Untersuchungen in den Blick. Die Vorträge, Projektpräsentationen und Datensitzungen erörterten 1. das Vergleichen als analytische Grundoperation der Konversations- und Gesprächsanalyse, 2. Vergleiche alternativer Ressourcen und Praktiken für spezifische Handlungen und Aktivitäten in der Interaktion sowie 3. methodologische Herausforderungen einer vergleichenden Gesprächsforschung.
In the past two decades, more and more dictionary usage studies have been published, but most of them deal with the question what users appreciate about dictionaries, which dictionaries they use and which information they need in specific situations. These studies presuppose that users indeed consult lexicographic resources. However, language teachers and lecturers of linguistics often have the impression that students use too few high-quality dictionaries in their every-day work. Against this background, we started an international cooperation project to collect empirical data evaluating that impression. Our aim was to evaluate what students (here from the Romance language area) actually do when they correct language problems. We used a new methodological setting to do this (screen recording with a thinking-aloud task). The empirical data we gained offers a broad insight into what language users really do when solving language-related tasks today.
The demo presents a minimalist, off-the-shelf AND tool which provides a fundamental AND operation, the comparison of two publications with ambiguous authors, as an easily accessible HTTP interface. The tool implements this operation using standard AND functionality, but puts particular emphasis on advanced methods from natural language processing (NLP) for comparing publication title semantics.
The Lehnwortportal Deutsch (2012 seqq.) serves as an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, synthesizing an increasing number of lexicographical dictionaries and providing basic cross-resource search options. The paper discusses the far-reaching revision of the system’s conceptual, lexicographical and technological underpinnings currently under way, focussing on their relevance for multilingual loanword lexicography.
Graphenbasierte Ansätze spielen in der digitalen Lexikografie eine immer stärkere Rolle. Essentiell für die Erstellung, Verwaltung und Nutzung graphenbasierter lexikografischer Ressourcen ist jedoch eine leistungsfähige und zugleich einfach zu handhabende Zugriffsstruktur, die Suchen nach komplexen Konstellationen in solchen Graphen ermöglicht. Für heutige Graphendatenbanken stehen zahlreiche Abfragesprachen zur Verfügung, deren Verwendung jedoch verhältnismäßig voraussetzungsreich ist.
Das Poster stellt einen webbasierten, frei konfigurierbaren Query Builder vor, der die Formulierung semantisch sehr komplexer Suchabfragen an eine (mit dem Tinkerpop-Standard kompatible) Property-Graphendatenbank ermöglicht. Die Abfrage erfolgt durch einfaches visuell-interaktives Zusammenstellen hierarchisch angeordneter Abfrageelemente und liefert Antworten in Echtzeit. Dabei wird von den Komplexitäten der verwendeten Low-level-Abfragesprache Gremlin abstrahiert. Der Query Builder ist ein zentrales Modul eines derzeit entwickelten Open-Source-Softwaresystems zur Verwaltung und Online-Publikation graph-erweiterter lexikografischer Ressourcen.
Das Phänomen der Paronymie hat bisher weder aus Sicht der Korpuslinguistik noch aus Sicht der kognitiven Linguistik große Beachtung gefunden. Bisherige Untersuchungen und erste Definitionsversuche stützten sich nicht auf empirische Analysen, sondern auf ein differenziertes strukturalistisches Modell, das, wenn nicht ausschließlich so doch primär, mit morphologischen Kriterien operiert (vgl. Läzärescu 1999). Sprachgebrauchsbasierte Befunde blieben bislang hingegen unberücksichtigt. Hier setzt dieser Artikel an: Er skizziert aus korpusbasierter und sprachgebrauchsorientierter Perspektive erste Ergebnisse zur Bestimmung und Unterscheidung von Arten der Paronymie hinsichtlich ihrer kommunikativen Funktion, ihrer Diskurszugehörigkeit sowie ihrer semantischen Eigenschaften. Ausgangspunkt ist eine kurze Darstellung des einzigen bisher vorliegenden Klassifikationsmodells von Läzärescu. Anschließend werden unterschiedliche Typen von Paronymen vorgestellt, die im Zuge der empirischen Analysen herausgearbeitet werden konnten. Der Beitrag plädiert für eine differenzierte Betrachtung des komplexen Phänomens, denn die eindimensionale, morphologisch motivierte Klassifikation wird dem Untersuchungsgegenstand nicht gerecht, da zudem sprachgebrauchs- sowie kognitiv-orientierte Parameter für eine Definition bzw. Typologisierung herangezogen werden müssen.
In the project LeGeDe („Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch”), we are developing a corpus-based lexicographical resource focusing on features of the lexicon of spoken German. To investigate the expectations of future users, two studies were conducted: interviews with a smaller group of experts and a large-scale online survey. We report on selected results, mainly from the online survey and with a focus on the learning perspective. We want to show if and to which extent the L2-learners’
expectations differ from those of native speakers and in which aspects the two groups agree. We also want to give an outlook on the possibilities that will be available to learners in the planned lexicographical resource.
This paper presents the prototype of a lexicographic resource for spoken German in interaction, which was conceived within the framework of the LeGeDe-project (LeGeDe=Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch). First of all, it summarizes the theoretical and methodological approaches that were used for the initial planning of the resource. The headword candidates were selected by analyzing corpus-based data. Therefore, the data of two corpora (written and spoken German) were compared with quantitative methods. The information that was gathered on the selected headword candidates can be assigned to two different sections: meanings and functions in interaction.
Additionally, two studies on the expectations of future users towards the resource were carried out. The results of these two studies were also taken into account in the development of the prototype. Focusing on the presentation of the resource’s content, the paper shows both the different lexicographical information in selected dictionary entries, and the information offered by the provided hyperlinks and external texts. As a conclusion, it summarizes the most important innovative aspects that were specifically developed for the implementation of such a resource.
Plädoyer für die Entwicklung einer digital-lexikografischen Kompetenz im Fremdsprachenunterricht
(2019)
The aim of this paper is to promote an explicit and active development of digital-lexicographical competence in foreign language teaching. The results of two online surveys conducted as part of the research project DICONALE-COMBIDIGILEX in connection with the teaching and learning process of German as a foreign language (= DaF) provide a comparative insight into the behaviour and attitude of both teachers and learners of DaF on the topic “Use of lexicographical resources in the process of DaF-acquisition”. The evaluation of the surveys shows, that the digitallexicographical competences in the process of DaF-acquisition must be promoted more intensively, since the existing lexicographic offer is not optimally used for teaching purposes both on the part of the teachers and on the part of the learners. To this end, the following three main lexicographical competences will be examined from a methodological-didactic and application-oriented perspective: (i) Adequate selection of the electronic resource regarding the communicative situation, (ii) development of disambiguation strategies for reception in L2 or translation from L2 and (iii) development of strategies for production and translation into L2. This research will ultimately lead to a debate on the use of the dictionary in the digital environment in the DaF-teaching and discuss its actual influence on the learning process.
Der Beitrag ist die Verschriftlichung der Laudatio, die die Autorin anlässlich des Festaktes zum 90. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Ulrich Engel am Leibniz‑Institut für Deutsche Sprache (=IDS) gehalten hat. Es handelt sich um eine persönliche Sicht auf fast drei Dekaden Forschungsarbeit, in denen zwischen Engel und der Germanistischen Abteilung der Universität Santiago de Compostela eine sehr enge Forschungskooperation bestand.
This paper analyzes the LL in the city of Bautzen / Budyšin in Germany, a town which is frequently considered the “capital” of the Slavonic minority of the Sorbs. It focuses on the societal role of Sorbian in relation to practices and ideologies of mainstream German society. The vast majority of signs in Bautzen / Budyšin are in German only. Sorbian is essentially restricted to explicitly Sorbian institutions and to local and regional administration. Interviews conducted in shops and on the streets reveal that paternalistic attitudes common to perceptions of language policies and minority languages in Germany dominate; practices maintain the common monolingual habitus in German society. Members of the majority population show little awareness of Sorbian issues, and Sorbian signage is seen as a generous gesture but considered essentially unnecessary. Only in most recent times, a reaction by the Sorbian community has challenged these practices and attitudes.
Mehrsprachigkeitsdiskurse im Bildungskontext in Lettland zwischen Populismus und Weltoffenheit
(2019)
Unser Aufsatz diskutiert aktuelle Debatten zu Sprachen und Mehrsprachigkeit im Bildungssystem in Lettland. Theoretischer Hintergrund sind Debatten zur Mehrsprachigkeit, zu Spracheinstellungen und zur heteroglossischen Ideologie. Nach einer kurzen historischen Einführung in Fragen des sprachlichen Ökosystems Lettlands stellen wir Beispiele aus der aktuellen Reform der Schulcurricula vor, die Mehrsprachigkeitsansätze aufgreifen. Diese Reformversuche werden allerdings durch weit verbreitete Diskurse in der lettischen Gesellschaft abgelehnt. Anhand von Reaktionen von Bildungspolitikern und in journalistischen Texten zeigen wir, wie einflussreich traditionelle Vorstellungen vom Sprachlernen nach wie vor sind und wie eine Modernisierung des Lettischunterrichts mit Fragen von nationaler Identität verbunden wird, in denen bisweilen sogar offen xenophobisch argumentiert wird. Gleichzeitig wird deutlich, wie im Diskurs im Interesse der „Rettung der lettischen Sprache“ mit Mythen und Halbwahrheiten operiert wird. Der dritte Teil des Aufsatzes stellt in diesem Kontext zwei Studien unter Lehrern in Lettland vor, in denen explizit nach Einstellungen und Praktiken zu Code-Switching, Translanguaging und ähnlichen Phänomenen gefragt wurde. In den Antworten zeigt sich die Spaltung der Gesellschaft; jedoch zeigen die Ergebnisse auch, dass Perspektiven für einen modernen und mehrsprachigen Sprachunterricht in Lettland durchaus vorhanden sind.
„Unserdeutsch”, a creole spoken in a former German South Pacific colony, and what is now Papua New Guinea, is being extensively documented and studied by linguists for the first time. There is no time to lose, because after a chequered history the world's only German-based creole – long ignored – is facing extinction.
This paper presents types and annotation layers of reply relations in computer- mediated communication (CMC). Reply relations hold between post units in CMC interactions and describe references from one given post to a previous post. We classify three types of reply relations in CMC interactions: first, technical replies, i. e. the possibility to reply directly to a previous post by clicking a ‘reply’ button; second, indentations, e. g. in wiki talk pages in which users insert their contributions in the existing talk page by indenting them and third, interpretative reply relations, i. e. the reply action is not realised formally but signalled by other structural or linguistics means such as address markers ‘@’, greetings, citations and/or Q-A structures. We take a look at existing practices in the description and representation of such relations in corpora and examples of chat, Wikipedia talk pages, Twitter and blogs. We then provide an annotation proposal that combines the different levels of description and representation of reply relations and which adheres to the schemas and practices for encoding CMC corpus documents within the TEI framework as defined by the TEI CMC SIG. It constitutes a prerequisite for correctly identifying higher levels of interactional relations such as dialogue acts or discussion trees.
Wird aus Sprache Gewalt?
(2019)
Nach dem Mord am Kasseler Regierungspräsidenten Walter Lübcke und weiteren Mordanschlägen in der jüngsten Vergangenheit wurde in Kommentaren und Stellungnahmen immer wieder behauptet, dass hier Sprache in Gewalt umgeschlagen sei. Dies ist einerseits naheliegend vor dem Hintergrund dessen, was wir über die Täter und ihre Äußerungen wissen. Was aber sagt die Wissenschaft dazu? Wie ist aus sprach- und kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Sicht dieser angenommene Zusammenhang zu bewerten?
Nach dem Mord am Kasseler Regierungspräsidenten Walter Lübcke und weiteren Mordanschlägen in der jüngsten Vergangenheit wurde in Kommentaren und Stellungnahmen immer wieder behauptet, dass hier Sprache in Gewalt umgeschlagen sei. Dies ist einerseits naheliegend vor dem Hintergrund dessen, was wir über die Täter und ihre Äußerungen wissen. Was aber sagt die Wissenschaft dazu?
This contribution aims to describe privacy, publicness and anonymity as essential analytic dimensions for media linguistic research. The dimensions are not inherent in and predetermined by the technical features and forms of communication provided by mobile devices, but are used by the participants as an orientation grid for shaping their online and offline practices in and with mobile media. Consid-ering both mobile device use in the public realm and the dissemina-tion of increasingly private content in social media (which is said to lead to ‘blurred boundaries’ between the private and the public), the paper provides a brief overview of the main developments in mobile media research: Studies adopting various approaches – e. g. socio-logical-ethnographic, linguistic and media studies – illustrate how publicness, privacy and anonymity are actively shaped and brought about by mobile media users in face-to-face and remote social en-counters. As this shows that publicness, privacy and anonymity are still relevant concepts for users, future media linguistics studies should focus on the dynamic multimodal practices by which they are contextualized and accomplished.
Zu den Beiträgen des Themenhefts.
Die in dem Themenheft versammelten Beiträge setzen sich unter verschiedenen Fragestellungen, im Rahmen unterschiedlicher methodischer Ansätze und jeweils eigener Datensets mit Öffentlichkeit, Privatheit und Anonymität im kommunikativen Handeln mit mobilen Medien auseinander.
Narratives 2.0. A Multi-dimensional approach to semi-public storytelling in WhatsApp voice messages
(2019)
Based on a corpus of voice message narratives in German WhatsApp group chats, the present study contributes to research on social media storytelling in that it focusses on stories of personal experience which are embedded in a communication platform which favours a continuous dialogic exchange, narrated to well-defined non-anonymous publics and multimodal (comprised of visual and audible posting types). To capture the characteristics of this type of social media storytelling, the paper argues that Ochs and Capps’ (2001) dimensional model originally developed for conversational narratives (including the dimensions of tellability, tellership, embeddedness, linearity, moral stance) should be expanded by the dimensions of publicness, multimodality and sequencing. The prototype of storytelling in WhatsApp group chats is based on recent personal experiences; it is related by a single teller as an initial, sequentially non-embedded and linearly organised “big package” story (in a single voice message sometimes introduced by a text message containing an abstract); other group members routinely document their evaluative stances in rather conventionalised text message responses in the semi-public group space.
This paper reports on the latest developments of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo and the German Reference Corpus in relation to three of the most important CMLC topics: interoperability, collaboration on corpus infrastructure building, and legal issues. Concerning interoperability, we present new ways to access DeReKo via KorAP on the API and on the plugin level. In addition we report about advancements in the EuReCo- and ICC-initiatives with the provision of comparable corpora, and about recent problems with license acquisitions and our solution approaches using an indemnification clause and model licenses that include scientific exploitation.
The DRuKoLA project
(2019)
DRuKoLA, the accompanying project in the making of the Corpus of Romanian Language, is a cooperation between German and Romanian computer scientists, corpus linguists and linguists, aiming at linking reference corpora of European languages under one corpus analysis tool able to manage big data. KorAP, the analysis tool developed at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (Mannheim), is being tailored for the Romanian language in a first attempt to reunite reference corpora under the EuReCo initiative, detailed in this paper. The paper describes the necessary steps of harmonization within KorAP and the corpus of Romanian language and discusses, as one important goal of this project, criteria and ways to build virtual comparable corpora to be used for contrastive linguistic analyses.
Einleitung
(2019)
We investigate whether prototypicality or prominence of semantic roles can account for role-related effects in sentence interpretation. We present two acceptability-rating experiments testing three different constructions: active, personal passive and DO-clefts involving the same type of transitive verbs that differ with respect to the agentive role features they select. Our results reveal that there is no cross-constructional advantage for prototypical roles (e.g., agents), hence disconfirming a central tenet of role prototypicality. Rather, acceptability clines depend on the construction under investigation, thereby highlighting different role features. This finding is in line with one core assumption of the prominence account stating that role features are flexibly highlighted depending on the discourse function of the respective construction.
Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size
(2019)
Recently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences where α is a free parameter. Varying this parameter makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting, because textual data are characterized by Zipf’s law, i.e., there are very few word types that occur very often (e.g., function words expressing grammatical relationships) and many word types with a very low frequency (e.g., content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel (consisting of approximately 365,000 articles and 237,000,000 words that were published between 1947 and 2017). We show that, analogous to most other measures in quantitative linguistics, similarity measures based on generalized entropies depend heavily on the sample size (i.e., text length). We argue that this makes it difficult to quantify lexical dynamics and language change and show that standard sampling approaches do not solve this problem. We discuss the consequences of the results for the statistical analysis of languages.
Classical null hypothesis significance tests are not appropriate in corpus linguistics, because the randomness assumption underlying these testing procedures is not fulfilled. Nevertheless, there are numerous scenarios where it would be beneficial to have some kind of test in order to judge the relevance of a result (e.g. a difference between two corpora) by answering the question whether the attribute of interest is pronounced enough to warrant the conclusion that it is substantial and not due to chance. In this paper, I outline such a test.
In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view//cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005.1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing.
Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd 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.
Lexikographische und lexikalische Ressourcen zum Deutschen werden an vielen unterschiedlichen Institutionen erarbeitet. Zum einen im Dudenverlag, der mit den gedruckten Wörterbüchern der Duden-Reihe und mit „Duden online“ die meistkonsultierten gegenwartssprachlichen Wörterbücher zum Deutschen erstellt, dann die Union deutscher Akademien, unter deren Dach an verschiedenen einzelnen Akademien zahlreiche historische wie auch synchrone Wörterbücher zum Deutschen erstellt werden (z. B. das „Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache“, das „Wörterbuchnetz“ sowie das geplante Informationssystem des neuen „Zentrums für digitale Lexikographie der deutschen Sprache“). Auch am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim werden wissenschaftliche wortschatzbezogene Ressourcen zum Deutschen erarbeitet und der (Fach-)Öffentlichkeit unter dem Dach von OWID, dem „Online-Wortschatz-Informationssystem Deutsch“, präsentiert. Obwohl wir uns in OWID auf Ressourcen zu spezialisierten Wortschatzbereichen konzentriert haben, erreichen wir Nutzerinnen und Nutzer in verschiedensten Ländern der Welt. Wir wollen hier die Gelegenheit wahrnehmen, den ZGL-Leserinnen und -Lesern unsere Ressourcen in OWID und OWIDplus näher vorzustellen.
This paper discusses German neologisms in the so-called “new-media” and presents a German corpus-based online dictionary of neologisms. Several neological morphemes and lexemes, as well as their meaning will be presented, showing that these new modes of communication are an important source of enrichment of German lexicon.
It is commonly agreed that the plural -s has become a part of Standard German inflection, yet in dialects such as Alemannic it is often seen as an intruder. We challenge this view based on data from a written survey amongst speakers of Swiss German dialects. Our analysis of pluralised loanwords (e.g. Mango) and abbreviations (e.g. WG ‘flat share’) shows a strong effect of both speakers’ age and grammatical gender that points towards a progressive integration of the plural -s into the dialectal system.While masculine and neuter nouns can express number syntagmatically (using articles that differ in singular and plural), feminine nouns rely heavily on suffixes (as the definite article is d’in both cases). A comparison of the -s plural with traditional dialectal plurals shows clear advantages for -s plurals in both cue strength (output) and scope (input) of the plural schema. We argue that it is due to this that feminine nouns show a significantly higher percentage of -s plurals compared with masculine and neuter nouns in speakers aged 25 and above. The difference disappears for younger speakers while the overall number of -s plurals increases drastically. Combined, we have an apparent time scenario that shows how the -s plural is first borrowed with nouns that rely on overt plural markers, and later spreads to most loans and other words with non-native structure.
We present an approach for automatic detection and correction of OCR-induced misspellings in historical texts. The main objective is the post-correction of the digitized Royal Society Corpus, a set of historical documents from 1665 to 1869. Due to the aged material the OCR procedure has made mistakes, thus leading to files corrupted by thousands of misspellings. This motivates a post processing step. The current correction technique is a pattern-based approach which due to its lack of generalization suffers from bad recall.
To generalize from the patterns we propose to use the noisy channel model. From the pattern based substitutions we train a corpus specific error model complemented with a language model. With an F1-Score of 0.61 the presented technique significantly outperforms the pattern based approach which has an F1-score of 0.28. Due to its more accurate error model it also outperforms other implementations of the noisy channel model.
Im vorliegenden Artikel werden einleitend Gegenstand, Fragestellung und Ziele einer Studie zu „absoluten“ Verwendungen von Modalverben in verbaler Interaktion vorgestellt, gefolgt von Bemerkungen zu Forschungskontext, Theorie, Methodik und Datengrundlage. Ergebnisse der Untersuchung werden unter drei Perspektiven präsentiert: Erstens geht es um Modalverbverwendungen, die sich in der Forschung zwischen Vollverbund Ellipsenerklärungen verorten, zweitens um Strukturen mit (grammatischen) Kontextbezügen, drittens um Konstruktionen und usuelle Handlungsformate. Den Abschluss bilden eine Diskussion der Befunde und ein Ausblick auf Vermittlungspotenziale interaktionslinguistischer Befunde im Bereich Deutsch als Fremdsprache.
The use of digital resources and tools across humanities disciplines is steadily increasing, giving rise to new research paradigms and associated methods that are commonly subsumed under the term digital humanities. Digital humanities does not constitute a new discipline in itself, but rather a new approach to humanities research that cuts across different existing humanities disciplines. While digital humanities extends well beyond language-based research, textual resources and spoken language materials play a central role in most humanities disciplines.
The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.
Text corpora come in many different shapes and sizes and carry heterogeneous annotations, depending on their purpose and design. The true benefit of corpora is rooted in their annotation and the method by which this data is encoded is an important factor in their interoperability. We have accumulated a large collection of multilingual and parallel corpora and encoded it in a unified format which is compatible with a broad range of NLP tools and corpus linguistic applications. In this paper, we present our corpus collection and describe a data model and the extensions to the popular CoNLL-U format that enable us to encode it.
Die lexikografische Behandlung von Neologismen aus der Perspektive hispanophoner DaF-Lernender
(2019)
Anhand von einigen medialen Kommunikationsverben wie mailen oder twittern wird das lexikografische Informationsangebot zu Neologismen auf seine Adäquatheit für die fremdsprachige Produktion untersucht. Die Untersuchung erfolgt aus der Perspektive eines spanischsprachigen DaF-Lernenden. Zur Analyse werden sowohl Neologismenwörterbücher und -datenbanken für das Deutsche als auch gängige, bilinguale Online-Wörterbücher für das Sprachenpaar Spanisch–Deutsch gezogen. Die Ergebnisse der lexikografischen Untersuchung werden exemplarisch mit korpusbasierten Daten aus einer Doktorarbeit verglichen. Die Befunde zeigen den Bedarf und die Notwendigkeit auf, die lexikografische Behandlung von (verbalen) Neologismen im spanisch–deutschen Kontext zu optimieren. Dabei soll — insbesondere — die fremdsprachige Textproduktion berücksichtigt werden.
This investigation targets a syntactic phenomenon of German which is commonly referred to as the absentive construction. The absentive is considered a universal grammatical category denoting absence. Its syntax is characterised by the occurrence of an auxiliary or copula verb accompanied by a non‐finite VP containing a main verb. The expression of absence, predicated over the clausal subject, is assumed to be based on a constructional meaning. Reviewing a wide range of syntactic and interpretive properties of this structure in German, we will demonstrate that certain empirical claims about the construction are not well founded and that its seemingly idiosyncratic properties are indeed available for compositional analyses. We will propose a structural analysis of its core syntactic and interpretive properties: The predication expresses the localisation of the subject at the location of the event, denoted by the infinitival verb. The interpretation of absence, then, can be explained by an implicature.
Die Vermittlung von Fachsprache gewinnt in der heutigen europäischen Gesellschaft, die von 'Bewegungen' unterschiedlicher Art charakterisiert ist, immer mehr an Relevanz, aber die Lernergruppen werden immer differenzierter und die Lehrenden, die meist keine Experten auf dem Fachgebiet sind, haben Schwierigkeiten lernergerechte Kurse zu gestalten, da die Möglichkeiten zur Aus- oder Fortbildung selten sind. Fragen, die offen stehen oder nur teilweise beantwortet wurden, gibt es noch viele und eine einheitliche Antwort ist nicht immer möglich, aber wir möchten trotzdem versuchen, anstatt von Problemfällen auch Experimente und Lösungen vorzustellen. Wir möchten zeigen, wie und mit welchen Mitteln und Werkzeugen Fachsprachen beschrieben werden können und welche Auswirkungen dies im Unterricht haben kann. Nach einem Überblick über die unterschiedlichen Definitionsmöglichkeiten von 'Fachsprache', zeigen wir, welche Auswirkungen die unterschiedlichen Schwerpunkte in der Lehre haben können. Abschließend werden wir ein kleines korpuslinguistisches Experiment vorstellen (Korpus mit den Aufsätzen zum Themenschwerpunkt 'Fachsprache' ZIF 2019-1), um mögliche Anregungen zur Benutzung von Korpora zu geben, da sich Korpora in allen Phasen des Unterrichts (vor, während und danach) sowohl für Lehrende als auch für Lernende positiv auswirken können.
Persuasionsstrategien in deutschen rechtsorientierten Zeitungen. Eine korpuslinguistische Studie
(2019)
Corpus Linguistics has often proved fruitful to examine different types of discourses, also the one of refugees. Aim of the paper is to show how language usage patterns can be focused on with the help of techniques grounded in Corpus Linguistics, giving information about themes and topoi. After showing what type of words (keywords, collocations) and what type of phenomena will be considered (topoi, metaphors and frames) in the article, the focus will shift on the methodology and the adopted criteria. After presenting the primary corpus (articles from right-oriented newspapers) and the comparison corpus (articles from 'Die Zeit') the main results of the analysis are presented and reflected on.
Tourlex: ein deutsch-italienisches Fachwörterbuch zur Tourismussprache für italienische DaF-Lerner
(2019)
Tourlex is a specialized bilingual online dictionary under construction hosted at the University of Mannheim with a particular focus on collocations and multi-word units. The languages included are German and Italian, but because of the need for online dictionaries of tourism language (Flinz 2015: 56) the framework is open to the inclusion of other languages. Tourlex is a corpus-based dictionary, i.e. the primary sources will be corpora, in particular a proper bilingual comparable corpus analysed with the tools Sketch Engine and Lexpan, and the freely accessible corpus DeReKo. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the main actions (already done but also in planning), according to the phases of the lexicographical process of a dictionary under construction. The description of each phase will be enriched by examples taken from the project, showing also how the decisions taken to satisfy the needs of the user, the Italian learner of German as a foreign language, had influenced the microstructure of the entries. We conclude with a final reflection on the data, facts, and ongoing problems.
We present web services implementing a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 "Language resource management - Transcription of spoken language". The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.