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Gestures can be brief and compact in their execution, but also elaborate and extended. One way to utilise this kinetic flexibility is to extend one’s gesture in time by holding it in its stroke position. This study explores the interactional function of gestural holds by investigating pointing gestures that are sustained beyond a sequence-initiating turn and into the responsive space following it. The study draws on video data from naturally occurring conversations in German and focuses on held pointing gestures after instructions and questions. It is shown that in both action environments, participants delay gestural closure to indicate that they still consider the addressee’s response to be insufficient.
Rejecting the validity of inferred attributions of incompetence in German talk-in-interaction
(2024)
This paper deals with pragmatic inference from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. In particular, we examine a specific variety of inferences - the attribution of incompetence which Self constructs on the basis of Other's prior action, hearable as positioning Self as incompetent (e.g., instructions, offers of assistance, advice); this attribution of incompetence concerns Self's execution of some practical task. This inference is indexed in Self's response, which highlights Self's expertise, or competence concerning the task at hand. We focus on two recurrent types of such responses in our data: (i) accounting for competence through formulations of prior experience with carrying out a practical action and (ii) explicit claims of competence for accomplishing this action. We analyze the interactional environments in which these responses occur, the ways in which the two practices index Self's understanding of being positioned as incompetent and the interactional work they do. Finally, we discuss how through rejecting and inferred attribution of incompetence, Self implicitly seeks to restore their face and defend their autonomy as an agent, yet, without entering an explicit identity-negotiation. Findings rest on the analysis of 20 cases found in video-recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in German from the corpus FOLK.
This presentation deals with collaborative turn-sequences (Lerner 2004), a syntactically coherent unit of talk that is jointly formulated by at least two speakers, in Czech and German everyday conversations. Based on conversation analysis (e.g., Schegloff 2007) and a multimodal approach to social interaction (e.g., Deppermann/Streeck 2018), we aim at comparing recurrent patterns and action types within co-constructional sequences in both languages. The practice of co-constructing turns-at-talk has been described for typologically different languages, especially for English (e.g., Lerner 1996, 2004), but also for languages such as Japanese (Hayashi 2003) or Finnish (Helasvuo 2004). For German, various forms and functions of co-constructions have already been investigated (e.g., Brenning 2015); for Czech, a detailed, interactionally based description is still pending (but see some initial observations in, e.g., Hoffmannová/Homoláč/Mrázková (eds.) 2019). Although the existence of co-constructions in different languages points to a cross-linguistic conversational practice, few explicitly comparative studies exist (see, e.g., Lerner/Takagi 1999, for English and Japanese). The language pair Czech-German has mainly been studied with respect to language contact and without specifically considering spoken language or complex conversational sequences (e.g., Nekula/Šichová/Valdrová 2013). Therefore, our second aim is to sketch out a first comparison of co-constructional sequences in German and Czech, thereby contributing to the growing field of comparative and cross-linguistic studies within conversation analysis (e.g., Betz et al. (eds.) 2021; Dingemanse/Enfield 2015; Sidnell (ed.) 2009). More specifically, we will present three main sequential patterns of co-constructional sequences, focusing on the type of action a second speaker carries out by completing a first speaker’s possibly incomplete turn-at-talk, and on how the initial speaker then responds to
this suggested completion (Lerner 2004). Excerpts from video recordings of Czech and German ordinary conversations will illustrate these recurrent co-constructional sequence types, i.e., offering help during word searches (see example 1 above), displaying understanding, or claiming independent knowledge. The third objective of this paper is to underline the participants’ orientation to similar interactional problems, solved by specific syntactic and/or lexical formats in Czech and German. Considering the more recent focus on the embodied dimension of co-constructional practices (e.g., Dressel 2020), we will also investigate the multimodal formatting of a started utterance as more or less “permeable” (Lerner 1996) for co-participant completion, the participants’ mutual embodied orientation, and possible embodied responses to others’ turn-completions (such as head nods or eyebrow flashes, cf. De Stefani 2021). More generally, this contribution reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a cross-linguistic comparison of complex multimodal sequences.
It is a ubiquitous phenomenon of everyday interaction that participants confront their co-participants for behaviour that they assess as undesirable or in some other way untoward. In a set of video data of informal interaction from the PECII corpus (Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction), cases of such sanctions have been collected in English, German, Italian and Polish data. This study presents work in progress and focuses on interrogatively formatted sanctions, in particular on non-polar interrogatives. It has already been shown that interrogatives can do much more than ask questions (Huddleston 1994). They can also function as directives (Lindström et al. 2017) or, more specifically, as requests (Curl/Drew 2008), as invitations (Margutti/Galatolo 2018) or reproaches (Klattenberg 2021), among others. What makes them interesting for cross-linguistic comparison is that the four languages that are considered provide different morphological and (morpho-)syntactical ressources for the realization of interrogative phrases. For example, German provides the option of building in the modal particle denn that reveals a previous lack of clarity and obliges the co-participant(s) to deliver the missing information (Deppermann 2009). Of course, the other three languages have modal particles, too (e.g. allora in Italian or though in English), but they do not seem to convey the same semantic and interactional qualities as denn. From an interactional point of view, one could think that interrogatives are a typical and effective way of solliciting accounts, since formally they open up a conditionally relevant space for an answer or a
reaction. But as the data shows, this does not guarantee that they are actually responded to. Another relevant aspect in the context of sanctions is that the interrogative format seems to carry a certain ‚openness‘ that might be seen as a mitigating effect and thus provides an interesting point of comparison with other mitigating devices. This study uses the methods of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. It is based on a collection of 148 interrogative sanctions (out of which 84 are non-polar interrogatives) covering the four languages. I draw on coded data from roughly 1000 cases to get a first overall idea of how the interrogative format might differ from other formats, and how it might interrelate with specific features – for example, if subsequently an account is delivered. Going more into depth, the interrogative sanctions will then be analyzed with respect to their formal design (e.g. polar questions vs. content questions vs. tag questions, Rossano 2010; Hayano 2013) and to their pragmatic implications. I also analyze reactions to such sanctions – both formally (cf. Enfield et al. 2019, 279) and, again, from an interactional perspective (e.g. acceptance/compliance vs. challenging/defiance; Kent 2012; Cekaite 2020). A more detailed zooming in on the sequential unfolding of some particularly interesting
instances of sanctioning interrogatives will make the picture complete.
Contrastive analysis of climate-related neologisms registered in GermanN and French Wikipedia
(2023)
Neologisms represent new social norms, tendencies, controversies and attitudes. They denote new or changed concepts which are constantly being negotiated between different members of the discourse community (Wodak 2022 and Catalano/Waugh (eds.) 2020). Neologisms help to identify new communicative patterns and narratives which illustrate different strings of discourse in everyday life. In recent years, many neologisms relating to the subject of the environment and climate have been emerging around the world mainly due to dominant discussions on climate change and the movement “Fridays for Future”. In German, for example, neologisms such as Klimakleber, klimaresilient and globaler Streik and in French neologisms such as éco-anxiété, justice climatique and écocitoyen could be observed. These neologisms occur in many domains of life, for example in politics, media and also in advertising, which means that “l’importance croissante des enjeux environnementaux dans les discours politiques, médiatiques et publicitaires” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22) can be identified. However, it is not only the occurrence of environment- or climate-related topics that is increasing, but also the rising polarisation of the public debate. The polarisation within public discourse is based on the fact that there are opposing positions which are represented by new or recently relevant terms such as activistes du climat (or Klimaaktivisten) and climatosceptiques (or Klimaskeptiker) (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22). Due to different identifications with one or the other side, one can also speak of an “affrontement idéologique” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 23). 1 The explosive nature and the high complexity of the debate on climate and the environmental issues mean that many words are naturally unfamiliar to people. This is especially true with regard to neologisms. In addition, it is often not only the new word itself but also the signified concept that is initially unknown. When people then look up words, they often do so on the Internet. Wikipedia as a “free encyclopedia” (Wikipedia 2023) is particularly well suited as an object of study with regard to neologisms, since factual knowledge is given special attention there. Furthermore, this reference guide is perceived as a regular source of agreed and common knowledge on all sorts of subjects. Hence, the descriptions found here represent social agreement on controversial terms and discussions to some degree. In this paper, German and French neologisms from the subject area of climate and environment will be examined primarily in Wikipedia, but also in the neighbouring resource Wiktionary,2 which is “a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary” (Wiktionary 2023). Since Wikipedia and Wiktionary are available in French and in German, 21010. International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC) both are equally suitable for the contrastive analysis. Thus, Wikipedia articles which are accessible in both languages (e.g. Klimanotstand and État d›urgence climatique) or Wikipedia articles about similar events and phenomena (e.g. Letzte Generation and Dernière Rénovation) will be compared. For example, we will have a closer look at other new terms specifying different thematic aspects of the discourse of climate and environment. We will mainly refer to those lexical items which can be found in the respective articles in both languages. Special emphasis will be on overlaps and differences, thematic foci, speaker’s positions and evaluative terms.
In G, E, I, and H there are constructions with accusative NPs being the external argument of an infinitival, (1) to (4). In P these accusative NPs can only co-occur with an adjectival participle, (5), a construction also occurring in E, (6). The talk compares the syntactic and semantic structure of these constructions focussing on the syntactic category of the nonfinite clause, the status of the accusative NP, the status of the infinitive, restructuring effects, and embedding predicates (including aspect).
i. As to G, E, I, and H, the infinitival clause is regarded as a TP, i.e., a small clause. Its accusative NP and infinitival predicate form a unit – [4], [12], [8]. The AcI denotes, according to [4], an eventuality, which prevents it from being negated. Its subject is case marked by the matrix predicate, either by ECM or subject-to-object raising – [9] and [10]. AcI-constructions can show clause union effects, (7). H additionally allows Dative subjects in infinitive clauses, the latter only being licensed by impersonal predicates and co-occurring with an agreeing infinitive, (8a), – [3]. In case there is no agreeing infinitive, the Dative NP is the experiencer of the matrix clause, (8b). As for Italian, it allows Nominative subject NPs in the infinitive clause, (9a, b).
ii. As to P, small clause constructions differ structurally from E, G, I and H ones – [6], [7]. P small clauses are realizable by copula constructions with verbal być ‘be’ pronominal to ‘it’, (10), or “dual” copula elements, (cooccurrence of a pronominal and a verbal element, [1]), varying with respect to selectional restrictions (part of speech or case within complement phrases, extraction possibilities, [1]). The P counterpart to the AcI-constructions is the secondary predication over an accusative object via an adjectival present participle, (5), (11) and (12). The adjectival participle construction is systematically paraphrasable via clauses introduced by jak ‘how’ (11’) and (12’). In Polish, adjectival phrases like recytującego wiersz ‘reciting’, (11), and wracającego z podróży ‘returning’, (12), clearly function as adjuncts of the accusative object go ‘him’. In our talk, we will compare this P view to languages with typical AcI-constructions, where the AcI-clause is standardly analyzed as a complement of a matrix verb.
This conversation analytic study compares the use of negation particles in spoken German and Persian, namely nein/nee and na. While these particles have a range of functions in both languages (Ghaderi 2022; Imo 2017), their use in response to news remains understudied. We focus on nein/nee and na in two sequential contexts: (i) after prior disconfirmations (Extract (a)) and (ii) in response to either solicited or unsolicited informings (see Extracts (b) and (c), respectively). In both contexts, nein/nee and na mark unexpectedness and open up an opportunity space for more, but they do so in different ways and with different outcomes. Nein/nee- and na-turns after disconfirming, often minimal responses to first-position confirmable turns mark the prior as unexpected (or even contrasting with the nein/nee/na-speaker’s expectations) and thus as expandable/accountable (cf. Ford 2001; Gubina/Betz 2021). Nein/nee/na-turns after informings (e.g., announcements that display a story teller’s negative emotional stance) differ not only in sequential position but also in prosodic realization. They can be either falling or rising, but all are characterized by marked prosody, i.e., lengthening, very low onset, smiling or breathy voice, or high overall pitch. Through position and turn design features, such nein/nee- and na-turns not only mark a prior turn as counter to (normative) expectations, but may also display the speaker’s affective stance and affiliate with the affective stance of the prior interactant. By comparing the use of nein/nee and na in German and Persian in the two functions illustrated in Extracts (a) and (b/c), we will show (i) how nein/nee- and na-turns shape interactional trajectories after responsive actions and (ii) what role the particles play in managing news and stance-taking as well as epistemic and affective positioning. Apart from revealing similarities in the use of German and Persian negation particles, the results of our crosslinguistic comparison will demonstrate that even if different languages have similar practices for specific actions, the use of these practices is language- and culture-specific. This means that even similar practices in different languages have their own “collateral effects” (Sidnell/Enfield 2012), linguistic and prosodic characteristic features, and, at least sometimes, consequences for social actions accomplished in the specific language (e.g., Dingemanse/Blythe/Dirksmeyer 2014; Evans/Levinson 2009; Floyd/Rossi/Enfield (eds.) 2020; Fox et al. 2009). Our study uses the method of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2013) and draws on more than 80 hours of audio and video recordings of spontaneous interactions (co-present, via video link, and on the telephone) in everyday and institutional contexts.
The issue: We discuss (declarative) prepositional object clauses (PO-clauses) in the West Germanic languages Dutch (NL), German (DE), and English (EN). In Dutch and German, PO-clauses occur with a prepositional proform (=PPF, Dutch: ervan, erover, etc.; German: drauf/darauf, drüber/darüber, etc.). This proform is optional with some verbs (1). In English, by contrast, P embeds a clausal complement in the case of gerunds or indirect questions (2), however, P is obligatorily absent when the embedded CP is a that-clause in its base positionv(3a). However, when the that-clause is passivized or topicalized, the stranded P is obligatory (3b). Given this scenario, we will address the following questions: i) Are there structural differences between PO-clauses with a P/PPF and those in which the P/PPF is optionally or obligatorily omitted? ii) In particular, do PO-clauses without P/PPF structurally coincide with direct object (=DO) clauses? iii) To what extent are case and nominal properties of clauses relevant? We use wh-extraction as a relevant test for such differences.
Previous research: Based on pronominalization and topicalization data in German and Dutch, PO-clauses are different from DO-clauses independent of the presence of the PPF (see, e.g., Breindl 1989; Zifonun/Hoffmann/Strecker 1997; Berman 2003; Broekhuis/Corver 2015 and references therein) (4,5). English pronominalization and topicalization data (3b) appear to point in the same direction (Fischer 1997; Berman 2003; Delicado Cantero 2013). However, the obligatory absence of P before that-clauses in base position indicates a convergence with DO-clauses.
Experimental evidence: To provide further evidence to these questions we tested PO-clauses in all three languages for long wh-extraction, which is usually possible for DO-clauses in English and Dutch, and in German for southern regional varieties. For German and Dutch we conducted rating studies using the thermometer method (Featherston 2008). Each study contained two sets of sentences: the first set tested long wh-extraction with regular DO-clauses (6). The second set tested wh-extraction from PO-clauses with and without PPFs (7), respectively. The results show no significant difference in extraction with PO-clauses whether or not the PPF was present even for those speakers who otherwise accept long-distance extraction in German. This supports a uniform analysis of PO-clauses with and without the PPF in contrast to DO-clauses. For English we tested extraction with verbs that select for PP-objects in two configurations: V+that-clause and V+P-gerund (8) in comparison to sentences without extraction. Participants rated sentences on a scale of 1 (unnatural) to 7 (natural). We included the gerund for English as this is a regular alternative for such objects. The results show that extraction is licit in both configurations. This suggests that English PO-clauses are different from German and Dutch PO-clauses: They rather behave as DO-clauses allowing for extraction. Note though, that the availability of extraction from P+gerund also shows that PPs are not islands for extraction in English. Overall, this shows that there is a split between English vs. German/Dutch PO-clauses when the P/PPF is absent. While these clauses behave like PO-clauses in the latter languages, extraction does not show a difference between DO- and PO-clauses in English. We will discuss the results in relation to the questions i)–iii) above.
Ways out of the dictionary: hyperlinks to other sources in German and African online dictionaries
(2023)
This study examines a number of German and African online dictionaries to see how they make use of the possibility of linking to external sources (e.g. other dictionaries, encyclopaedias, or even corpus data). The article investigates which hyperlinks occur at which places in the word articles and how these are presented to the dictionary users. This is done against the background of metalexicographic considerations on the planning of outer features and the mediostructure in online dictionaries as well as different categorizations of hyperlinks in online reference works. The results show that retro-digitized dictionaries make virtually no use of hyperlinks to external sources. Genuine online dictionaries, on the other hand, do, but often in a form that needs improvement, since, for example, explanations of dictionary-external links are not always found in the user guide and their design is different even within a dictionary.
Introducing Interactive Grammar: How to Develop Language Competence with Research-based Learning
(2023)
We present the implementation of an interactive e-learning platform for both classroom study and self-study, that helps developing German language competence – vocabulary, spelling, and grammar – on various levels and for everyday life applications. The LernGrammis portal addresses school and highschool students, (prospective) teachers, and L2 learners of German equally, each with appropriate educational content and interactive components. It thus offers the digital networking infrastructure for education a unique, freely available and scientifically based learning resource. Applying the innovative concept of „Research-based Learning (RBL)“, LernGrammis provides teachers with ideas for lesson planning, and learners with dedicated modules to develop new skills through exploring authentic language resources and by this means answering customised low-threshold research questions. Using proven practical examples, we demonstrate the approach, its strengths and possibilities, as well as initial user feedback evaluation results.
Pseudo-coordinated sitzen and stehen in spoken German: a case of emergent progressive aspect?
(2023)
This paper investigates the aspectual potential of posture verb pseudocoordination in spoken German. In a corpus study of sitzen ‘sit’ and stehen ‘stand’, it is shown that despite a preference for activity verbs, verbs of all aspectual classes occur in the second conjunct. The posture verb imposes its durative meaning component on the second verb, thus making a progressive interpretation of the construction possible. Apart from this emergent aspectual function, German posture verb pseudocoordination has a subjective function (conveying the speaker’s beliefs about the subject referent’s stance), and a discourse pragmatic function (information packaging).
In social interaction, different kinds of word-meaning can become problematic for participants. This study analyzes two meta-semantic practices, definitions and specifications, which are used in response to clarification requests in German implemented by the format Was heißt X (‘What does X mean?’). In the data studied, definitions are used to convey generalizable lexical meanings of mostly technical terms. These terms are either unknown to requesters, or, in pedagogical contexts, requesters ask in order to check the addressee’s knowledge. Specifications, in contrast, clarify aspects of local speaker meanings of ordinary expressions (e.g., reference, participants in an event, standards applied to scalar expressions). Both definitions and specifications are recipient-designed with respect to the (presumed) knowledge of the addressee and tailored to the topical and practical relevancies of the current interaction. Both practices attest to the flexibility and situatedness of speakers’ semantic understandings and to the systematicity of using meta-semantic practices differentially for different kinds of semantic problems. Data are come from mundane and institutional interaction in German from the public corpus FOLK.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus is a freely available collection of YouTube comments written under German-speaking videos by young people between 2008 and 2018. The article uses the NottDeuYTSch corpus to investigate how YouTube comments can be used to produce learning materials and how corpora of Digitally-Mediated Communication can benefit intermediate learners of German. The article details the effects of authentic communication within YouTube comments on teenage learners, examining how they can influence the psycholinguistic factors of motivation, foreign language anxiety, and willingness to communicate. The article also discusses the benefits and limitations of using authentic corpus material for the development of teaching material.
This paper introduces the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube-Sprache (‘The Nottingham German YouTube Language Corpus’ - or NottDeuYTSch corpus). The corpus comprises over 33 million words, taken from roughly 3 million YouTube comments published between 2008 and 2018, written by a young, German-speaking demographic. The NottDeuYTSch corpus provides an authentic and representative linguistic snapshot of young German speakers and offers significant opportunities for in-depth research in several linguistic fields, such as lexis, morphology, syntax, orthography, multilingualism, and conversational and discursive analysis.
In many European languages, propositional arguments (PAs) can be realized as different types of structures. Cross-linguistically, complex structures with PAs show a systematic correlation between the strength of the semantic bond and the syntactic union (cf. Givón 2001; Wurmbrand/Lohninger 2023). Also, different languages show similarities with respect to the (lexical) licensing of different PAs (cf. Noonan 1985; Givón 2001; Cristofaro 2003 on different predicate types). However, on a more fine-grained level, a variation across languages can be observed both with respect to the syntactic-semantic properties of PAs as well as to their licensing and usage. This presentation takes a multi-contrastive view of different types of PAs as syntactic subjects and objects by looking at five European languages: EN, DE, IT, PL and HU. Our goal is to identify the parameters of variation in the clausal domain with PAs and by this to contribute to a better understanding of the individual language systems on the one hand and the nature of the linguistic variation in the clausal domain on the other hand. Phenomena and Methodology: We investigate the following types of PAs: direct object (DO) clauses (1), prepositional object (PO) clauses (2), subject clauses (3), and nominalizations (4, 5). Additionally, we discuss clause union phenomena (6, 7). The analyzed parameters include among others finiteness, linear position of the PA, (non) presence of a correlative element, (non) presence of a complementizer, lexical-semantic class of the embedding verb. The phenomena are analyzed based on corpus data (using mono- and multilingual corpora), experimental data (acceptability judgement surveys) or introspective data.
Despite being an official language of several countries in Central and Western Europe, German is not formally recognised as the official language of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, in certain situations the use of the German language, including the spelling rules, is subject to state regulation (by acts of Federal Parliament orby administrative decisions). This article presents the content of this regulation, its scope, and the historical context in which it was adopted.
Our current era of globalization is characterized above all by increased mobility, namely by the increasing mobility of people and the development of new communication technologies, including the mobility of linguistic signs and resources. This process raises new theoretical and methodological questions in linguistics, which results in the development of a new sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) in recent years. One of the most obvious ways to trace this new and dynamic development is to analyze individual language repertoires, especially those of migrants. In this essay, I examine aspects of the communicative repertoire of a refugee who fled to Germany in 2015 to escape the civil war in Syria. I draw on two interviews I conducted with him (in the following I refer to him by the pseudonym „Baran“). The first interview with Baran was recorded in 2016, a few months after his arrival in Germany. The second interview is from 2023, seven years later. In both recordings, German was the dominant language of interaction. I will analyze and show the characteristics of his German at the beginning of his immigration, how he resorts to practices of language mixing between German, Turkish and English (which has recently also been referred to as translanguaging) and how his German has developed over the course of the past seven years.
We introduce DeReKoGram, a novel frequency dataset containing lemma and part-of-speech (POS) information for 1-, 2-, and 3-grams from the German Reference Corpus. The dataset contains information based on a corpus of 43.2 billion tokens and is divided into 16 parts based on 16 corpus folds. We describe how the dataset was created and structured. By evaluating the distribution over the 16 folds, we show that it is possible to work with a subset of the folds in many use cases (e.g., to save computational resources). In a case study, we investigate the growth of vocabulary (as well as the number of hapax legomena) as an increasing number of folds are included in the analysis. We cross-combine this with the various cleaning stages of the dataset. We also give some guidance in the form of Python, R, and Stata markdown scripts on how to work with the resource.
This paper describes general requirements for evaluating and documenting NLP tools with a focus on morphological analysers and the design of a Gold Standard. It is argued that any evaluation must be measurable and documentation thereof must be made accessible for any user of the tool. The documentation must be of a kind that it enables the user to compare different tools offering the same service, hence the descriptions must contain measurable values. A Gold Standard presents a vital part of any measurable evaluation process, therefore, the corpus-based design of a Gold Standard, its creation and problems that occur are reported upon here. Our project concentrates on SMOR, a morphological analyser for German that is to be offered as a web-service. We not only utilize this analyser for designing the Gold Standard, but also evaluate the tool itself at the same time. Note that the project is ongoing, therefore, we cannot present final results.
Corpus-based identification and disambiguation of reading indicators for German nominalizations
(2010)
Corpus data is often structurally and lexically ambiguous; corpus extraction methodologies thus must be made aware of ambiguities. Therefore, given an extraction task, all relevant ambiguities must be identified. To resolve these ambiguities, contextual data responsible for one or another reading is to be considered. In the context of our present work, German -ung-nominalizations and their sortal readings are under examination. A number of these nominalizations may be read as an event or a result, depending on the semantic group they belong to. Here, we concentrate on nominalizations of verbs of saying (henceforth: "verba dicendi"), identify their context partners and their influence on the sortal reading of the nominalizations in question. We present a tool which calculates the sortal reading of such nominalizations and thus may improve not only corpus extraction, but also e.g. machine translation. Lastly, we describe successful attempts to identify the correct sortal reading, conclusions and future work.
Communicative deviations of respondents in political video interviews in Ukrainian and German
(2021)
The research has the objective to establish the peculiarities of communicative deviations as a cognitive and at the same time discursive phenomenon in Ukrainian- and German-language video interviews from the viewpoint of respondents. The procedure of the research involves the integrated application of methods and techniques of pragmatics, deviatology and communicative linguistics. A new methodological basis has been developed for the reconstruction of communicative deviations using discourse analysis, namely for the reconstruction of a single event in two discursive environments, determining the communicative context and communication of interview in compared languages. The results of the research allow us to identify the features of communicative deviations in political interviews at the external, internal structural levels and at the situational level. The conclusions of the research indicate that the types of communicative deviations in political video interviews are universal in Ukrainian and German, but reflect national and cultural specifics given the peculiarities of both languages and each linguoculture, as well as existing realias, norms, conventions, maxims and rules of communication.
The article analyzes communicative deviations that occur during the communication between German native speakers and non-native speakers, particularly Ukrainians. Despite existing intercultural and sociolinguistic studies, the analysis of language specificity that causes communicative deviations, failures and misunderstandings remains relevant and understudied. The purpose of this article is to identify and explore the German language peculiarities that cause misunderstandings in communication for non-native speakers, in particular Ukrainian speakers, and offer the algorithm for the representatives of different ethnic communities to help them avoid and resolve possible conflicts given the study of German as a foreign language. The status of the concept of communicative deviation in intercultural communication under conditions of insufficient communicative competence is determined in this article. The study uses the term communicative deviation in favor of a generalized term, a broad concept of linguistic, speech and communicative deviations in dialogic speech, in particular between native German speakers and non-native speakers. The empirical research was based on the speech activity of Ukrainian students during classes at the Department of German Studies and Translation (levels B2–C1) of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in 2019–2021 academic years and definitions from the Universal Dictionary of German Duden, in addition to the materials reflected in textbooks and teaching manuals as well as from authentic German-language sources. Communicative deviations are identified and analyzed in phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic aspects.
In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building performing routines is in focus. Our study builds on collections of consecutive performances of the same instructional task coming from a corpus of video-recordings of 30 h of theater rehearsals of professional actors in German. Over time, instructions and their implementations are routinely coordinated by virtue of accumulated shared interactional experience: Instructions become shorter, the timing of responses becomes increasingly compacted and long negotiations are reduced to a two-part sequence of instruction and implementation. Overall, a routine of how to perform the scene emerges. Over interactional histories, patterns of projection of next actions emanating from instructions become reliable and can be used by respondents as sources for anticipating and performing relevant next actions. The study contributes to our understanding of how shared knowledge and routines accumulate over shared interactional experiences in publicly performed and reciprocally perceived ways and how this impinges on the efficiency of joint action.
Picnick and Sauerkraut: German–English intra-writer variation in script and language (1867–1900)
(2023)
Intra-writer variation is a wide-spread phenomenon that nevertheless has received only limited research attention so far. Different addressees, bi- and multilingualism, or changing life phases are among the factors that contribute to such variation. In a study of diary entries by one writer covering three decades (1867–1900), this chapter investigates patterns of intra-writer variation between German and English (language and script) in nineteenth-century Canada, with a special focus on single word borrowings, person reference and place names. The long-term perspective provides a unique insight into the dynamics of a bilingual writer’s emerging sociolinguistic competence as reflected by the flexible yet structured use of his resources within the social space of a bilingual community.
Neologisms, i.e., new words or meanings, are finding their way into everyday language use all the time. In the process, already existing elements of a language are recombined or linguistic material from other languages is borrowed. But are borrowed neologisms accepted similarly well by the speech community as neologisms that were formed from “native” material? We investigate this question based on neologisms in German. Building on the corresponding results of a corpus study, we test the hypothesis of whether “native” neologisms are more readily accepted than those borrowed from English. To do so, we use a psycholinguistic experimental paradigm that allows us to estimate the degree of uncertainty of the participants based on the mouse trajectories of their responses. Unexpectedly, our results suggest that the neologisms borrowed from English are accepted more frequently, more quickly, and more easily than the “native” ones. These effects, however, are restricted to people born after 1980, the so-called millenials. We propose potential explanations for this mismatch between corpus results and experimental data and argue, among other things, for a reinterpretation of previous corpus studies.
This paper reports on an ongoing international project of compiling a freely accessible online Dictionary of German Loans in Polish Dialects. The dictionary will be the first comprehensive lexicographic compendium of its kind, serving as a complement to existing resources on German lexical loans in the literary or standard language. The empirical results obtained in the project will shed new light on the distribution of German loanwords among different dialects, also in comparison to the well-documented situation in written Polish. The dictionary will have a strong focus on the dialectal distribution of Polish dialectal variants for a given German etymon, accessible through interactive cartographic representations and corresponding search options. The editorial process is realized with dedicated collaborative web tools. The new resource will be published as an integrated part of an online information system for German lexical borrowings in other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, and is therefore highly cross-linked with other loanword dictionaries on Polish as well as Slavic and further European languages.
In order to differentiate between figurative and literal usage of verb-noun combinations for the shared task on the disambiguation of German Verbal Idioms issued for KONVENS 2021, we apply and extend an approach originally developed for detecting idioms in a dataset consisting of random ngram samples. The classification is done by implementing a rather shallow, statistics-based pipeline without intensive preprocessing and examinations on the morphosyntactic and semantic level. We describe the overall approach, the differences between the original dataset and the dataset of the KONVENS task, provide experimental classification results, and analyse the individual contributions of our feature sets.
Comprehending conditional statements is fundamental for hypothetical reasoning about situations. However, the online comprehension of conditional statements containing different conditional connectives is still debated. We report two self-paced reading experiments on German conditionals presenting the conditional connectives wenn (‘if’) and nur wenn (‘only if’) in identical discourse contexts. In Experiment 1, participants read a conditional sentence followed by the confirmed antecedent p and the confirmed or negated consequent q. The final, critical sentence was presented word by word and contained a positive or negative quantifier (ein/kein ‘one/no’). Reading times of the two quantifiers did not differ between the two conditional connectives. In Experiment 2, presenting a negated antecedent, reading times for the critical positive quantifier (ein) did not differ between conditional connectives, while reading times for the negative quantifier (kein) were shorter for nur wenn than for wenn. The results show that comprehenders form distinct predictions about discourse continuations due to differences in the lexical semantics of the tested conditional connectives, shedding light on the role of conditional connectives in the online interpretation of conditionals in general.
The question of whether a letter is a grapheme or not is a perennial issue in writing research. The answer depends on which criteria are used to differentiate between letters and graphemes and, ultimately,how the unit ‘grapheme’ is defined. This problem is particularly relevant to complex graphemes, i.e. sequences of letters that behave like a single grapheme in certain respects. Typical for German is the ‹ch›. This paper argues for a scalar concept of graphemes, which compares the grapheme status of each of the units under investigation. For this purpose, new criteria for the identification of complex graphemes are used, which originate from handwriting analysis. There, it is shown that complex graphemes are connected with each other disproportionately often and also have deviating letter forms disproportionately often.
Rules of behavior are fundamental to human sociality. Whether on the road, at the dinner table, or during a game, people monitor one another’s behavior for conformity to rules and may take action to rectify violations. In this study, we examine two ways in which rules are enforced during games: instructions and reminders. Building on prior research, we identify instructions as actions produced to rectify violations based on another’s lack of knowledge of the relevant rule; knowledge that the instruction is designed to impart. In contrast to this, the actions we refer to as reminders are designed to enforce rules presupposing the transgressor’s competence and treating the violation as the result of forgetfulness or oversight. We show that instructing and reminding actions differ in turn design, sequential development, the epistemic stances taken by transgressors and enforcers, and in how the action affects the progressivity of the interaction. Data are in German and Italian from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (PECII).
Between classical symbolic word sense disambiguation (wsd) using explicit deep semantic representations of sentences and texts and statistical wsd using word co-occurrence information, there is a recent tendency towards mediating methods. Similar to so-called lightweight semantics (Marek, 2009) we suggest to only make sparse use of semantic information. We describe an approximation model based upon flat underspecified discourse representation structures (FUDRSs, cf. Eberle, 2004) that weighs knowledge about context structure, lexical semantic restrictions and interpretation preferences. We give a catalogue of guidelines for human annotation of texts by corresponding indicators. Using this, the reliability of an analysis tool that implements the model can be tested with respect to annotation precision and disambiguation prediction and how both can be improved by bootstrapping the knowledge of the system using corpus information. For the balanced test corpus considered the recognition rate of the preferred reading is 80-90% (depending on the smoothing of parse errors).
We present recognizers for four very different types of speech, thought and writing representation (STWR) for German texts. The implementation is based on deep learning with two different customized contextual embeddings, namely FLAIR embeddings and BERT embeddings. This paper gives an evaluation of our recognizers with a particular focus on the differences in performance we observed between those two embeddings. FLAIR performed best for direct STWR (F1=0.85), BERT for indirect (F1=0.76) and free indirect (F1=0.59) STWR. For reported STWR, the comparison was inconclusive, but BERT gave the best average results and best individual model (F1=0.60). Our best recognizers, our customized language embeddings and most of our test and training data are freely available and can be found via www.redewiedergabe.de or at github.com/redewiedergabe.
Within a rapidly digitalising society, it is important to understand how the learning and teaching of digital skills play out in situ, particularly amongst older adults who acquire these skills later in life. This paper focuses on participants engaged in the process of learning digital skills in adult education courses. Using video recordings from adult education centres in Finland and Germany, we explore how students mobilise their teachers’ assistance when encountering problems with their smartphones, laptops or tablets. Prior research on social interaction has shown that assistance can be recruited through a variety of verbal and embodied formats. In this specific educational setting, participants can use complaints about their digital skills or mobile devices to obtain assistance. Utilising multimodal conversation analysis, we describe two basic sequence types involving students’ complaints, discuss their cross-linguistic characteristics, and reflect on their connection to this educational setting and digital devices.
In theater as a bodily-spatial art form, much emphasis is placed on the way actors perform movements in space as an important multimodal resource for creating meaning. In theater rehearsals, movements are created in series of directors' instructions and actors' implementations. Directors' instructions on how to conduct a movement often draw on embodied demonstrations in contrast to verbal descriptions. For instance, to instruct an actress to act like a school girl a director can use depictive (he demonstrates the expected behavior) instead of descriptive (“can you act like a school girl”) means. Drawing on a corpus of 400 h video recordings of rehearsal interactions in three German professional theater productions, from which we selected 265 cases, we examine ways to instruct movement-based actions in theater rehearsals. Using a multimodally extended ethnomethodological-conversation analytical approach, we focus on the multimodal details that constitute demonstrations as complex action types. For the present article, we have chosen nine instances, through which we aim to illuminate (1) The difference in using embodied demonstrations versus verbal descriptions to instruct; (2) typical ways directors combine verbal descriptions with embodied demonstrations in their instructions. First, we ask what constitutes a demonstration and what it achieves in comparison to verbal descriptions. Using a typical case, we illustrate four characteristics of demonstrations that all of the cases we studied share. Demonstrations (1) are embedded in instructional activities; (2) show and do not tell; (3) are responded to by emulating what was shown; (4) are rhetorically shaped to convey the instruction's focus. However, none of the 265 demonstrations we investigated were produced without verbal descriptions. In a second step we therefore ask in which typical ways verbal descriptions accompany embodied demonstrations when directors instruct actors how to play a scene. We distinguish four basic types. Verbal descriptions can be used (1) to build the demonstration itself; (2) to delineate a demonstration verbally within an instruction; (3) to indicate positive (what should be done) and negative (what should be avoided) versions of demonstrations; (4) as an independent means to describe the instruction's focus in addition to the demonstration. Our study contributes to research on how embodied resources are used to create meaning and how they combine with and depend on verbal resources.
Sometimes in interaction, a speaker articulates an overt interpretation of prior talk. Such moments have been studied as involving the repair of a problem with the other’s talk or as formulating an understanding of the matter at hand. Stepping back from the established notions of formulations and repair, we examine the variety of actions speakers do with the practice of offering an interpretation, and the order within this domain. Results show half a dozen usage types of interpretations in mundane interaction. These form a largely continuous territory of action, with recognizably distinct usage types as well as cases falling between these (proto)typical uses. We locate order in the domain of interpretations using the method of semantic maps and show that, contrary to earlier assumptions in the literature, interpretations that formulate an understanding of the matter at hand are actually quite pervasive in ordinary talk. These findings contribute to research on action formation and advance our understanding of understanding in interaction. Data are video- and audio-recordings of mundane social interaction in the German language from a variety of settings.
In this article we examine moments in which parents or other caregivers overtly invoke rules during episodes in which they take issue with, intervene against, and try to change a child’s ongoing behavior or action(s). Drawing on interactional data from four different languages (English, Finnish, German, Polish) and using Conversation Analytic methods, we first illustrate the variety of ways in which parents may use such overt rule invocations as part of their behavior modification attempts, showing them to be functionally versatile interactional objects. Their interactional flexibility notwithstanding, we find that parents typically invoke rules when, in the course of the intervention episode, they encounter trouble with achieving an acceptable compliant outcome. To get at the distinct import of rule formulations in this context, we then compare them to two sequential alternatives: parental expressions of an experienced negative affective state, and parental threats. While the former emphasize aspects of social solidarity, the latter seek to enforce compliance by foregrounding a power asymmetry between the parent and the child. Rule formulations, by contrast, are designedly impersonal and appear to be directed at what the parents construe as shortcomings in common-sense practical reasoning on the child’s part. Reflexively, the child is thereby cast as not having properly applied common-sense ‘practical reason’ when engaging in what is treated as the problematic behavior or action. Overt rule invocations can, therefore, be understood as indexical appeals to practical reason.
eThis paper first attempts a state-of-the art overview of what is known about women in the history of lexicography up to the early twentieth century. It then focusses more closely on the German and German-English lexicographical traditions to 1900, examining them from three different perspectives (following Russell’s 2018 study of women in English lexicography): women as users and dedicatees of dictionaries; women as contributors to and compilers of lexicographical works; and (in a very preliminary way) women and female sexuality as represented in German/English bilingual dictionaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Russell (2018) was able to identify some 24 dictionaries invoking women as patrons, dedicatees or potential users before 1700, and some 150 works in English lexicography by women between 1500 and 1900, besides the contribution of hundreds of women as supporters and helpers, not least as unpaid readers and sub-editors for the Oxford English Dictionary. Equivalent research in other languages is lacking, but this paper presents some of the known examples of women as lexicographers. The evidence tends to support Russell’s finding for English, that women were more likely to find a place in lexicography outside the mainstream: sometimes in a more private sphere (like Hester Piozzi); often in bilingual lexicography (such as Margrethe Thiele, working on a Danish-French dictionary), including missionary and or colonizing activity (such as Cinie Louw in Africa, Daisy Bates in Australia); and in dialect description (Coronedi Berti in Italy, Luisa Lacal and María Moliner in Spain). Within the German-speaking context, women who participated in lexicographical work themselves are hard to identify before the late nineteenth century, though those few women who did have access to education were often engaged in language learning, including translation activity, and they were likely users of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Christian Ludwig’s (1706) English-German dictionary – the first of its kind – was dedicated to the Electoral Princess Sophia of Hanover. Elizabeth Weir may have been the first named female compiler of a German dictionary, with her bilingual New German Dictionary (1888). Rather better known are the cases of Agathe Lasch and Luise Pusch, who, as pioneering women in the field of German linguistics, ultimately led major lexicographical projects documenting German regional varieties in the first half of the twentieth century (Middle Low German and Hamburgish in the case of Lasch; the Hessisch Nassau dialect dictionary in the case of Berthold). In the light of existing research on gender and sexuality in the history of English lexicography (e. g. Iamartino 2010; Turton 2019), I conclude with a preliminary exploration how woman and sexuality have been represented in dictionaries of German and English, taking the words Hure and woman in bilingual German-English dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as my case studies.
This paper presents the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a new, freely accessible publication platform for resources on German lexical borrowings in other languages, to be launched in the second half of 2022. The system will host digital-native sources as well as existing, digitized paper dictionaries on loanwords, initially for some 15 recipient languages. All resources remain accessible as individual standalone dictionaries; in addition, data on words (etyma, loanwords etc.) together with their senses and relations to each other is represented as a cross-resource network in a graph database, with careful distinction between information present in the original sources and the curated portal network data resulting from matching and merging information on, e. g., lexical units appearing in multiple dictionaries. Special tooling is available for manually creating graphs from dictionary entries during digitization and for editing and augmenting the graph database. The user interface allows users to browse individual dictionaries, navigate through the underlying graph and ‘click together’ complex queries on borrowing constellations in the graph in an intuitive way. The web application will be available as open source.
The public as linguistic authority: Why users turn to internet forums to differentiate between words
(2022)
This paper addresses the question of why we face unsatisfactory German dictionary entries when looking up and comparing two similar lexical terms that are loan words, new words, (near) synonyms, or confusables. It explains how users are aware of existing reference works but still search or post on language forums, often after consulting a dictionary and experiencing a range of dictionary based problems. Firstly, these dictionary based difficulties will be scrutinised in more detail with respect to content, function, presentation, and the language of definitions. Entries documenting loan words and commonly confused pairs from different lexical reference resources serve as examples to show the short comings. Secondly, I will explain why learning about your target group involves studying discussion forums. Forums are a valuable source for detailed user studies, enabling the examination of different communicative needs, concrete linguistic questions, speakers’ intuitions, and people’s reactions to posts and comments. Thirdly, with the help of two examples I will describe how the study of chats and forums had a major impact on the development of a recently compiled German dictionary of confusables. Finally, that same problem solving approach is applied to the idea of a future dictionary of neologisms and their synonyms.
Word Families in Diachrony. An epoch-spanning structure for the word families of older German
(2022)
The ‘Word Families in Diachrony’ project (WoDia), for which a funding application to the DFG is in preparation, aims to provide a database driven online research environment that will enable processes of change in the entire historical vocabulary of German to be investigated by focusing on the changes in word families and the individual means of word formation. WoDia will embed the vocabularies of Old High German (OHG), Middle High German (MHG), Old Saxon (OS), and Middle Low German (MLG) in a database, resulting in a word-family structure for High and Low German from the beginnings up to the 15th century (for High German) and up to the 17th century (for Low German). The basis of the vocabulary is provided by reference dictionaries of the four historical varieties, whereas the word families’ historical structure is based on the word-family dictionary of OHG by Jochen Splett (1992). Each lemma in the database will be assigned, where appropriate, to a word family. The individual word-formation elements and the word-formation hierarchy will be mapped in a structural formula. The etymologically corresponding lemmas and word families of the different periods/varieties of older German will be linked so that an analysis across the varieties will also be possible. The annotations of word families in the database (e. g., relating to word structure) will be supplemented by linking their lemmas to the online dictionaries and to the reference corpora of Old German (OS and OHG), MHG, and MLG.
The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).
The Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) was established in Mannheim in 1964. Since then, it has been at the forefront of innovation in German linguistics as a hub for digital language data. This chapter presents various lessons learnt from over five decades of work by the IDS, ranging from the importance of sustainability, through its strong technical base and FAIR principles, to the IDS’ role in national and international cooperation projects and its expertise on legal and ethical issues related to language resources and language technology.
The paper deals with the process of computer-aided transcription regarding Arabic-German data material for interaction-based studies. First of all, it sheds light upon some major methodological challenges posed by the conversation-analytic approaches: due to current corpus technology, the reciprocity, linearity, and simultaneity of linguistic activities cannot be reconstructed in an analytically proper way when using the Arabic characters in multilingual and bidirectional transcripts. The difficulty of transcribing Arabic encounters is also compounded by the fact that Spoken Arabic as well as its varieties and phenomena have not been standardised enough (for conversation-analytic purposes). Therefore, the second part of this paper is dedicated to preliminary, self-developed solutions, namely a systematic method for transcribing Spoken Arabic.
This paper presents the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a new, freely accessible publication platform for resources on German lexical borrowings in other languages, to be launched in the second half of 2022. The system will host digital-native sources as well as existing, digitized paper dictionaries on loanwords, initially for some 15 recipient languages. All resources remain accessible as individual standalone dictionaries; in addition, data on words (etyma, loanwords etc.) together with their senses and relations to each other is represented as a cross-resource network in a graph database, with careful distinction between information present in the original sources and the curated portal network data resulting from matching and merging information on, e. g., lexical units appearing in multiple dictionaries. Special tooling is available for manually creating graphs from dictionary entries during digitization and for editing and augmenting the graph database. The user interface allows users to browse individual dictionaries, navigate through the underlying graph and ‘click together’ complex queries on borrowing constellations in the graph in an intuitive way. The web application will be available as open source.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena that challenge the received division of labour between lexicon and grammar, and hence often fall through the cracks of traditional dictionaries and grammars. Such phenomena call for novel, pattern-based types of linguistic reference works (see various papers in Herbst 2019). The present paper introduces one such resource: MAP (“Musterbank argumentmarkierender Präpositionen”), a web-based corpus-linguistic patternbank of prepositional argument structure constructions in German. The paper gives an overview of the design and functionality of the MAP-prototype currently developed at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. We give a brief account of the data and our analytic workflow, illustrate the descriptions that make up the resource and sketch available options for querying it for specific lexical, semantic and structural properties of the data.
When comparing different tools in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the quality of their results usually has first priority. This is also true for tokenization. In the context of large and diverse corpora for linguistic research purposes, however, other criteria also play a role – not least sufficient speed to process the data in an acceptable amount of time. In this paper we evaluate several state-ofthe-art tokenization tools for German – including our own – with regard to theses criteria. We conclude that while not all tools are applicable in this setting, no compromises regarding quality need to be made.
The public as linguistic authority: Why users turn to internet forums to differentiate between words
(2022)
This paper addresses the question of why we face unsatisfactory German dictionary entries when looking up and comparing two similar lexical terms that are loan words, new words, (near)-synonyms, or confusables. It explains how users are aware of existing reference works but still search or post on language forums, often after consulting a dictionary and experiencing a range of dictionary-based problems. Firstly, these dictionary-based difficulties will be scrutinised in more detail with respect to content, function, presentation, and the language of definitions. Entries documenting loan words and commonly confused pairs from different lexical reference resources serve as examples to show the shortcomings. Secondly, I will explain why learning about your target group involves studying discussion forums. Forums are a valuable source for detailed user studies, enabling the examination of different communicative needs, concrete linguistic questions, speakers’ intuitions, and people’s reactions to posts and comments. Thirdly, with the help of two examples I will describe how the study of chats and forums had a major impact on the development of a recently compiled German dictionary of confusables. Finally, that same problem-solving approach is applied to the idea of a future dictionary of neologisms and their synonyms.
Dictionaries are often a reflection of their time; their respective (socio-)historical context influences how the meaning of certain lexical units is described. This also applies to descriptions of personal terms such as man or woman. Lexicographers have a special responsibility to comprehensively investigate current language use before describing it in the dictionary. Accordingly, contemporary academic dictionaries are usually corpus-based. However, it is important to acknowledge that language is always embedded in cultural contexts. Our case study investigates differences in the linguistic contexts of the use of man and woman, drawing from a range of language collections (in our case fiction books, popular magazines and newspapers). We explain how potential differences in corpus construction would therefore influence the “reality”1 depicted in the dictionary. In doing so, we address the far-reaching consequences that the choice of corpus-linguistic basis for an empirical dictionary has on semantic descriptions in dictionary entries.
Furthermore, we situate the case study within the context of gender-linguistic issues and discuss how lexicographic teams can engage with how dictionaries might perpetuate traditional role concepts when describing language use.
Germany’s diverse history in the 20th century raises the question of how social upheavals were constituted in and through political discourse. By analysing basic concepts, the research network “The 20th century in basic concepts” (based at the Leibniz institutes IDS, ZfL, ZZF) aims to identify continuities and discontinuities in political and social discourse. In this way, historical sediments of the present are to be uncovered and those challenges identified that emerged in the course of the 20th century and continue to shape political discourse until the present.
This paper presents a compositional annotation scheme to capture the clusivity properties of personal pronouns in context, that is their ability to construct and manage in-groups and out-groups by including/excluding the audience and/or non-speech act participants in reference to groups that also include the speaker. We apply and test our schema on pronoun instances in speeches taken from the German parliament. The speeches cover a time period from 2017-2021 and comprise manual annotations for 3,126 sentences. We achieve high inter-annotator agreement for our new schema, with a Cohen’s κ in the range of 89.7-93.2 and a percentage agreement of > 96%. Our exploratory analysis of in/exclusive pronoun use in the parliamentary setting provides some face validity for our new schema. Finally, we present baseline experiments for automatically predicting clusivity in political debates, with promising results for many referential constellations, yielding an overall 84.9% micro F1 for all pronouns.
This paper presents an algorithm and an implementation for efficient tokenization of texts of space-delimited languages based on a deterministic finite state automaton. Two representations of the underlying data structure are presented and a model implementation for German is compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The presented solution is faster than other tools while maintaining comparable quality.
We present the use of count-based and predictive language models for exploring language use in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. For collocation analysis along the syntagmatic axis we employ traditional association measures based on co-occurrence counts as well as predictive association measures derived from the output weights of skipgram word embeddings. For inspecting the semantic neighbourhood of words along the paradigmatic axis we visualize the high dimensional word embeddings in two dimensions using t-stochastic neighbourhood embeddings. Together, these visualizations provide a complementary, explorative approach to analysing very large corpora in addition to corpus querying. Moreover, we discuss count-based and predictive models w.r.t. scalability and maintainability in very large corpora.
In this paper, we address two problems in indexing and querying spoken language corpora with overlapping speaker contributions. First, we look into how token distance and token precedence can be measured when multiple primary data streams are available and when transcriptions happen to be tokenized, but are not synchronized with the sound at the level of individual tokens. We propose and experiment with a speaker based search mode that enables any speaker’s transcription tier to be the basic tokenization layer whereby the contributions of other speakers are mapped to this given tier. Secondly, we address two distinct methods of how speaker overlaps can be captured in the TEI based ISO Standard for Spoken Language Transcriptions (ISO 24624:2016) and how they can be queried by MTAS – an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying text with multilevel annotations. We illustrate the problems, introduce possible solutions and discuss their benefits and drawbacks.
In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as wenn ‘if’ and nur wenn ‘only if’ are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with wenn/nur wenn ‘if/only if’ and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., P/not-P), and subsequently completed the final sentence about Q (with or without negation). In Experiment 2, participants rated the truth or falsity of the consequent Q after reading a conditional sentence with wenn or nur wenn and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., If P, Q. P/not-P. // Therefore, Q?). Both experiments showed that neither wenn nor nur wenn were interpreted as biconditional CCs. Modus Ponens (If P, Q. P. // Therefore, Q) was validated for wenn, whereas it was not validated in the case of nur wenn. While Denial of the Antecedent (If P, Q. not-P. // Therefore, not-Q.) was validated in the case of nur wenn, it was not validated for wenn. The same method was used to test wenn vs. unter der Bedingung, dass ‘on condition that’ in Experiment 3, and wenn vs. vorausgesetzt, dass ‘provided that’ in Experiment 4. Experiment 5, using Affirmation of the Consequent (If P, Q. Q. // Therefore, P.) to test wenn vs. nur wenn replicated the results of Experiment 2. Taken together, the results show that in German, unter der Bedingung, dass is the most likely candidate of biconditional CCs whereas all others are not biconditional. The findings, in particular of nur wenn not being semantically biconditional, are discussed based on available formal analyses of conditionals.
In conversation, interlocutors rarely leave long gaps between turns, suggesting that next speakers begin to plan their turns while listening to the previous speaker. The present experiment used analyses of speech onset latencies and eye-movements in a task-oriented dialogue paradigm to investigate when speakers start planning their responses. German speakers heard a confederate describe sets of objects in utterances that either ended in a noun [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad (“I have a door and a bicycle”)] or a verb form [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad besorgt (“I have gotten a door and a bicycle”)], while the presence or absence of the final verb either was or was not predictable from the preceding sentence structure. In response, participants had to name any unnamed objects they could see in their own displays with utterances such as Ich habe ein Ei (“I have an egg”). The results show that speakers begin to plan their turns as soon as sufficient information is available to do so, irrespective of further incoming words.
This study investigates the language used by six German Gangsta rappers to establish and maintain their identity and authenticity as rappers, in songs released between 2015 and 2016. Gangsta rap is a subgenre of Hip-Hop that emphasises ‘the rappers’ street credibility in texts describing tough [urban] neighbourhoods, violence, misogyny, and the achievement of material wealth’ (Bower 379). The culture of Gangsta rap attracts overwhelmingly negative mainstream media coverage (Muggs; Roper) and is often accused of corrupting ‘standard’ language (Krummheuer). The lyrical content of the songs is indeed controversial and has been previously covered by many academics (Byrd; Littlejohn and Putnam; Bower; Rollefson), as has the emergence of Hip-Hop in Germany (Elflein; Pennay; Nitzsche and Grünzweig).
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.
Schegloff (1996) has argued that grammars are “positionally-sensitive”, implying that the situated use and understanding of linguistic formats depends on their sequential position. Analyzing the German format Kannst du X? (corresponding to English Can you X?) based on 82 instances from a large corpus of talk-in-interaction (FOLK), this paper shows how different action-ascriptions to turns using the same format depend on various orders of context. We show that not only sequential position, but also epistemic status, interactional histories, multimodal conduct, and linguistic devices co-occurring in the same turn are decisive for the action implemented by the format. The range of actions performed with Kannst du X? and their close interpretive interrelationship suggest that they should not be viewed as a fixed inventory of context-dependent interpretations of the format. Rather, the format provides for a root-interpretation that can be adapted to local contextual contingencies, yielding situated action-ascriptions that depend on constraints created by contexts of use.
While there is a large amount of research in the field of Lexical Semantic Change Detection, only few approaches go beyond a standard benchmark evaluation of existing models. In this paper, we propose a shift of focus from change detection to change discovery, i.e., discovering novel word senses over time from the full corpus vocabulary. By heavily fine-tuning a type-based and a token-based approach on recently published German data, we demonstrate that both models can successfully be applied to discover new words undergoing meaning change. Furthermore, we provide an almost fully automated framework for both evaluation and discovery.
The automatic recognition of idioms poses a challenging problem for NLP applications. Whereas native speakers can intuitively handle multiword expressions whose compositional meanings are hard to trace back to individual word semantics, there is still ample scope for improvement regarding computational approaches. We assume that idiomatic constructions can be characterized by gradual intensities of semantic non-compositionality, formal fixedness, and unusual usage context, and introduce a number of measures for these characteristics, comprising count-based and predictive collocation measures together with measures of context (un)similarity. We evaluate our approach on a manually labelled gold standard, derived from a corpus of German pop lyrics. To this end, we apply a Random Forest classifier to analyze the individual contribution of features for automatically detecting idioms, and study the trade-off between recall and precision. Finally, we evaluate the classifier on an independent dataset of idioms extracted from a list of Wikipedia idioms, achieving state-of-the art accuracy.
The German e-dictionary documenting confusables Paronyme – Dynamisch im Kontrast contains lexemes which are similar in sound, spelling and/or meaning, e.g. autoritär/autoritativ, innovativ/innovatorisch. These can cause uncertainty as to their appropriate use. The monolingual guide could be easily expanded to become a multilingual platform for commonly confused items by incorporating language modules. The value of this visionary resource is manifold. Firstly, e-dictionaries of confusables have not yet been compiled for most European languages; consequently, the German resource could serve as a model of practice. Secondly, it would be able to explain the usage of false friends. Thirdly, cognates and loan word equivalents would be offered for simultaneous consultation. Fourthly, users could find out whether, for example, a German pair is semantically equivalent to a pair in another language. Finally, it would inform users about cases where a pair of semantically similar words in one language has only one lexical counterpart in another language. This paper is an appeal for visionary projects and collaborative enterprises. I will outline the dictionary’s layout and contents as shown by its contrastive entries. I will demonstrate potential additions, which would make it possible to build up a large platform for easily misused words in different languages.
Research on multimodal interaction has shown that simultaneity of embodied behavior and talk is constitutive for social action. In this study, we demonstrate different temporal relationships between verbal and embodied actions. We focus on uses of German darf/kann ich? (“may/can I?”) in which speakers initiate, or even complete the embodied action that is addressed by the turn before the recipient’s response. We argue that through such embodied conduct, the speaker bodily enacts high agency, which is at odds with the low deontic stance they express through their darf/kann ich?-TCUs. In doing so, speakers presuppose that the intersubjective permissibility of the action is highly probable or even certain. Moreover, we demonstrate how the speaker’s embodied action, joint perceptual salience of referents, and the projectability of the action addressed with darf/kann ich? allow for a lean syntactic design of darf/kann ich?-TCUs (i.e., pronominalization, object omission, and main verb omission). Our findings underscore the reflexive relationship between lean syntax, sequential organization and multimodal conduct.
Taking the use of the esthetic term wabi sabi (Japanese compound noun) in a series of German- and English-language theater rehearsals as an example, this article studies the emergence of shared meanings and uses of an expression over an interactional history. We track how shared understandings and uses of wabi sabi develop over the course of a series of theater rehearsals. We focus on the practices by which understandings of wabi sabi are displayed, adopted, and negotiated. We discuss complexities and intransparencies of the manifestation of common ground in multiparty interactions and its relationship to the emergence of routine uses of the expression. Data are in English and German with English translation.
The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.
The European language world is characterized by an ideology of monolingualism and national languages. This language-related world view interacts with social debates and definitions about linguistic autonomy, diversity, and variation. For the description of border minorities and their sociolinguistic situation, however, this view reaches its limits. In this article, the conceptual difficulties with a language area that crosses national borders are examined. It deals with the minority in East Lorraine (France) in particular. On the language-historical level, this minority is closely related to the language of its (big) neighbor Germany. At the same time, it looks back on a conflictive history with this country, has never filled a (subordinated) political–administrative unit, and has experienced very little public support. We want to address the questions of how speakers themselves reflect on their linguistic situation and what concepts and argumentative figures they bring up in relation to what (Germanic) variety. To this end, we look at statements from guideline-based interviews. In the paper, we present first observations gained through qualitative content analysis.
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.
This study investigates how driving school instructors adapt their instructions to constraints and affordances of different activity types. Adopting a Conversation Analytic approach and building on a comparative corpus of theoretical and practical driving lessons in German, it compares sequences of instructions of the execution of the “shoulder check” (i.e., checking the blind spot) in stationary theoretical versus mobile practical driving lessons. In theoretical lessons, the instructor uses vivid and humorous embodied instructions. In practical driving lessons, the instructor orients to the complex multi‐activity and delivers instructions in a succinct manner, considering the students’ previous knowledge and the embeddedness into the global tasks. The paper shows how instructional practices are sensitive to contextual contingencies which they reflect and treat by their situated design.
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.
Song lyrics can be considered as a text genre that has features of both written and spoken discourse, and potentially provides extensive linguistic and cultural information to scientists from various disciplines. However, pop songs play a rather subordinate role in empirical language research so far - most likely due to the absence of scientifically valid and sustainable resources. The present paper introduces a multiply annotated corpus of German lyrics as a publicly available basis for multidisciplinary research. The resource contains three types of data for the investigation and evaluation of quite distinct phenomena: TEI-compliant song lyrics as primary data, linguistically and literary motivated annotations, and extralinguistic metadata. It promotes empirically/statistically grounded analyses of genre-specific features, systemic-structural correlations and tendencies in the texts of contemporary pop music. The corpus has been stratified into thematic and author-specific archives; the paper presents some basic descriptive statistics, as well as the public online frontend with its built-in evaluation forms and live visualisations.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
In this paper, we present our work-inprogress to automatically identify free indirect representation (FI), a type of thought representation used in literary texts. With a deep learning approach using contextual string embeddings, we achieve f1 scores between 0.45 and 0.5 (sentence-based evaluation for the FI category) on two very different German corpora, a clear improvement on earlier attempts for this task. We show how consistently marked direct speech can help in this task. In our evaluation, we also consider human inter-annotator scores and thus address measures of certainty for this difficult phenomenon.
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.
Since 2013 representatives of several French and German CMC corpus projects have developed three customizations of the TEI-P5 standard for text encoding in order to adapt the encoding schema and models provided by the TEI to the structural peculiarities of CMC discourse. Based on the three schema versions, a 4th version has been created which takes into account the experiences from encoding our corpora and which is specifically designed for the submission of a feature request to the TEI council. On our poster we would present the structure of this schema and its relations (commonalities and differences) to the previous schemas.
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.
We study German affixoids, a type of morpheme in between affixes and free stems. Several properties have been associated with them – increased productivity; a bleached semantics, which is often evaluative and/or intensifying and thus of relevance to sentiment analysis; and the existence of a free morpheme counterpart – but not been validated empirically. In experiments on a new data set that we make available, we put these key assumptions from the morphological literature to the test and show that despite the fact that affixoids generate many low-frequency formations, we can classify these as affixoid or non-affixoid instances with a best F1-score of 74%.
We present the pilot edition of the GermEval Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language. This shared task deals with the classification of German tweets from Twitter. It comprises two tasks, a coarse-grained binary classification task and a fine-grained multi-class classification task. The shared task had 20 participants submitting 51 runs for the coarse-grained task and 25 runs for the fine-grained task. Since this is a pilot task, we describe the process of extracting the raw-data for the data collection and the annotation schema. We evaluate the results of the systems submitted to the shared task. The shared task homepage can be found at https://projects.cai. fbi.h-da.de/iggsa/
Offensive language in social media is a problem currently widely discussed. Researchers in language technology have started to work on solutions to support the classification of offensive posts. We present the pilot edition of the GermEval Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language. This shared task deals with the classification of German tweets from Twitter. GermEval 2018 is the fourth workshop in a series of shared tasks on German processing.
In this paper, we describe MLSA, a publicly available multi-layered reference corpus for German-language sentiment analysis. The construction of the corpus is based on the manual annotation of 270 German-language sentences considering three different layers of granularity. The sentence-layer annotation, as the most coarse-grained annotation, focuses on aspects of objectivity, subjectivity and the overall polarity of the respective sentences. Layer 2 is concerned with polarity on the word- and phrase-level, annotating both subjective and factual language. The annotations on Layer 3 focus on the expression-level, denoting frames of private states such as objective and direct speech events. These three layers and their respective annotations are intended to be fully independent of each other. At the same time, exploring for and discovering interactions that may exist between different layers should also be possible. The reliability of the respective annotations was assessed using the average pairwise agreement and Fleiss’ multi-rater measures. We believe that MLSA is a beneficial resource for sentiment analysis research, algorithms and applications that focus on the German language.
We propose a new type of subword embedding designed to provide more information about unknown compounds, a major source for OOV words in German. We present an extrinsic evaluation where we use the compound embeddings as input to a neural dependency parser and compare the results to the ones obtained with other types of embeddings. Our evaluation shows that adding compound embeddings yields a significant improvement of 2% LAS over using word embeddings when no POS information is available. When adding POS embeddings to the input, however, the effect levels out. This suggests that it is not the missing information about the semantics of the unknown words that causes problems for parsing German, but the lack of morphological information for unknown words. To augment our evaluation, we also test the new embeddings in a language modelling task that requires both syntactic and semantic information.
To improve grammatical function labelling for German, we augment the labelling component of a neural dependency parser with a decision history. We present different ways to encode the history, using different LSTM architectures, and show that our models yield significant improvements, resulting in a LAS for German that is close to the best result from the SPMRL 2014 shared task (without the reranker).
Language shift after migration has been reported to occur within three generations. While this pattern holds in many cases there is also some counter evidence. In this paper, family documents from a German immigration community in Canada are investigated to trace individual decisions of language choice that contributed to an extended process of shift taking four generations and more than a century.
This paper presents Release 2.0 of the SALSA corpus, a German resource for lexical semantics. The new corpus release provides new annotations for German nouns, complementing the existing annotations of German verbs in Release 1.0. The corpus now includes around 24,000 sentences with more than 36,000 annotated instances. It was designed with an eye towards NLP applications such as semantic role labeling but will also be a useful resource for linguistic studies in lexical semantics.
We present a testsuite for POS tagging German web data. Our testsuite provides the original raw text as well as the gold tokenisations and is annotated for parts-of-speech. The testsuite includes a new dataset for German tweets, with a current size of 3,940 tokens. To increase the size of the data, we harmonised the annotations in already existing web corpora, based on the Stuttgart-Tübingen Tag Set. The current version of the corpus has an overall size of 48,344 tokens of web data, around half of it from Twitter. We also present experiments, showing how different experimental setups (training set size, additional out-of-domain training data, self-training) influence the accuracy of the taggers. All resources and models will be made publicly available to the research community.
This paper studies the morphological productivity of German N+N compounding patterns from a diachronic perspective. It argues that the productivity of compounds increases due to syntactic influence from genitive constructions (“improper compounds”) in Early New High German. Both quantitative and qualitative productivity measures are adapted from derivational morphology and tested on compound data from the Mainz Corpus of (Early) New High German (1500–1710).
Except for some recent advances in spoken language lexicography (cf. Verdonik & Sepesy Maučec 2017, Hansen & Hansen 2012, Siepmann 2015), traditional lexicographic work is mainly oriented towards the written language. In this paper, we describe a method we used to identify relevant headword candidates for a lexicographic resource for spoken language that is currently being developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS, Mannheim). We describe the challenges of the headword selection for a dictionary of spoken language, and having made considerations regarding our headword concept, we present the corpus-based procedures that we used in order to facilitate the headword selection. After presenting the results regarding the selection of one-word lemmas, we discuss the opportunities and limitations of our approach.
We present the conceptual foundations and basic features of fLexiCoGraph, a generic software package for creating and presenting curated human-oriented lexicographical resources that are roughly modeled according to Měchura’s (2016) idea of graph-augmented trees. The system is currently under development and will be made accessible as open source software. As a sample use case we discuss an existing online database of loanwords borrowed from German into other languages which is based on a growing number of language-specific loanword dictionaries (Lehnwortportal Deutsch). The paper outlines the conceptual foundations of fLexiCoGraph’s hybrid graph/XML data model. To establish a database, XML-based resources may be imported or even input manually. An additional graph database layer is then constructed from these XML source documents in a freely configurable, but automated way; subsequently, the resulting graph can be manipulated and enlarged through a visual user interface in such a way that keeps the relationship to the source document information explicit at all times. We sketch the tooling support for different kinds of graph-level editing processes, including mechanisms for dealing with updated XML source documents and coping with duplicate or inconsistent information, and briefly discuss the browser interface for end users.
German is a language with complex morphological processes. Its long and often ambiguous word forms present a bottleneck problem in natural language processing. As a step towards morphological analyses of high quality, this paper introduces a morphological treebank for German. It is derived from the linguistic database CELEX which is a standard resource for German morphology. We build on its refurbished, modernized and partially revised version. The derivation of the morphological trees is not trivial, especially for such cases of conversions which are morpho-semantically opaque and merely of diachronic interest. We develop solutions and present exemplary analyses. The resulting database comprises about 40,000 morphological trees of a German base vocabulary whose format and grade of detail can be chosen according to the requirements of the applications. The Perl scripts for the generation of the treebank are publicly available on github. In our discussion, we show some future directions for morphological treebanks. In particular, we aim at the combination with other reliable lexical resources such as GermaNet.
Complement phrases are essential for constructing well-formed sentences in German. Identifying verb complements and categorizing complement classes is challenging even for linguists who are specialized in the field of verb valency. Against this background, we introduce an ML-based algorithm which is able to identify and classify complement phrases of any German verb in any written sentence context. We use a large training set consisting of example sentences from a valency dictionary, enriched with POS tagging, and the ML-based technique of Conditional Random Fields (CRF) to generate the classification models.
This paper discusses current trends in DeReKo, the German Reference Corpus, concerning legal issues around the recent German copyright reform with positive implications for corpus building and corpus linguistics in general, recent corpus extensions in the genres of popular magazines, journals, historical texts, and web-based football reports. Besides, DeReKo is finally accessible via the new
corpus research platform KorAP, offering registered users several news features in comparison with its predecessor COSMAS II.