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The article deals with communicative failures of journalists in “YouTube” celebrity video interviews in the Ukrainian and German linguacultures from the point of view of social interaction and the theory of speech genres at all structural levels of the communicative genre construction, establishing common and distinctive features in both linguacultures. The analysis made it possible to conclude that behind a language (speech) failure there is a violation caused by a journalist, a respondent, or an external noise.
Die lexikografische Behandlung von Neologismen aus der Perspektive hispanophoner DaF-Lernender
(2019)
Anhand von einigen medialen Kommunikationsverben wie mailen oder twittern wird das lexikografische Informationsangebot zu Neologismen auf seine Adäquatheit für die fremdsprachige Produktion untersucht. Die Untersuchung erfolgt aus der Perspektive eines spanischsprachigen DaF-Lernenden. Zur Analyse werden sowohl Neologismenwörterbücher und -datenbanken für das Deutsche als auch gängige, bilinguale Online-Wörterbücher für das Sprachenpaar Spanisch–Deutsch gezogen. Die Ergebnisse der lexikografischen Untersuchung werden exemplarisch mit korpusbasierten Daten aus einer Doktorarbeit verglichen. Die Befunde zeigen den Bedarf und die Notwendigkeit auf, die lexikografische Behandlung von (verbalen) Neologismen im spanisch–deutschen Kontext zu optimieren. Dabei soll — insbesondere — die fremdsprachige Textproduktion berücksichtigt werden.
Mehrsprachigkeitsdiskurse im Bildungskontext in Lettland zwischen Populismus und Weltoffenheit
(2019)
Unser Aufsatz diskutiert aktuelle Debatten zu Sprachen und Mehrsprachigkeit im Bildungssystem in Lettland. Theoretischer Hintergrund sind Debatten zur Mehrsprachigkeit, zu Spracheinstellungen und zur heteroglossischen Ideologie. Nach einer kurzen historischen Einführung in Fragen des sprachlichen Ökosystems Lettlands stellen wir Beispiele aus der aktuellen Reform der Schulcurricula vor, die Mehrsprachigkeitsansätze aufgreifen. Diese Reformversuche werden allerdings durch weit verbreitete Diskurse in der lettischen Gesellschaft abgelehnt. Anhand von Reaktionen von Bildungspolitikern und in journalistischen Texten zeigen wir, wie einflussreich traditionelle Vorstellungen vom Sprachlernen nach wie vor sind und wie eine Modernisierung des Lettischunterrichts mit Fragen von nationaler Identität verbunden wird, in denen bisweilen sogar offen xenophobisch argumentiert wird. Gleichzeitig wird deutlich, wie im Diskurs im Interesse der „Rettung der lettischen Sprache“ mit Mythen und Halbwahrheiten operiert wird. Der dritte Teil des Aufsatzes stellt in diesem Kontext zwei Studien unter Lehrern in Lettland vor, in denen explizit nach Einstellungen und Praktiken zu Code-Switching, Translanguaging und ähnlichen Phänomenen gefragt wurde. In den Antworten zeigt sich die Spaltung der Gesellschaft; jedoch zeigen die Ergebnisse auch, dass Perspektiven für einen modernen und mehrsprachigen Sprachunterricht in Lettland durchaus vorhanden sind.
This paper analyzes the LL in the city of Bautzen / Budyšin in Germany, a town which is frequently considered the “capital” of the Slavonic minority of the Sorbs. It focuses on the societal role of Sorbian in relation to practices and ideologies of mainstream German society. The vast majority of signs in Bautzen / Budyšin are in German only. Sorbian is essentially restricted to explicitly Sorbian institutions and to local and regional administration. Interviews conducted in shops and on the streets reveal that paternalistic attitudes common to perceptions of language policies and minority languages in Germany dominate; practices maintain the common monolingual habitus in German society. Members of the majority population show little awareness of Sorbian issues, and Sorbian signage is seen as a generous gesture but considered essentially unnecessary. Only in most recent times, a reaction by the Sorbian community has challenged these practices and attitudes.
Resistance and adaptation to newspeakerness in educational institutions: two tales from Estonia
(2019)
The term ‘new speaker’ has recently emerged as an attempt by sociolinguists not only to understand the diferent types of speaker profles that can be found in contemporary societies, but also to grasp the underlying processes of becoming a legitimate speaker in a given society. In this article, we combine the results from two studies situated in two educational institutions in Estonia in order to fnd out about speakers’ language attitudes and experiences in connection to learning and using Estonian. We concentrate on members of the international community who have relatively recently arrived to the country. Our results indicate that these speakers fuctuate between two prototypical discourses, which we broadly dub as ‘resistance’ and ‘adaptation’ to newspeakerness. Our study thereby adds to current debates on ‘new speaker’ and language policy issues by illustrating how tensions around language legitimacy are played out on the ground in a small nation state such as Estonia.
This paper focuses on so called syntactic projection phenomena in the German language. This term from the German Gesprächsforschung is used to define the fact that an utterance or part of it foreshadows another one. This paper aims at pointing out how such projection phenomena are consciously exploited for rhethorical purposes. This will be observed on the basis of excerpts from the Stuttgart 21 mediation talks. The linguistic analysis carried out in this paper will focus on syntactic projection phenomena involving the use of causal adverbial connectives deshalb and deswegen.
This paper aims at investigating the usage of present subjunctive (Konjunktiv I), which is traditionally labelled as a feature of standard written language and therefore as typically occurring in communication genres based on it such as press texts and reporting, in everyday spoken German. Through an analysis of corpus data performed according to theory and method of Interactional Linguistics and encompassing private, institutional and public interactional domains, the paper will show how this particular verb form expresses different epistemic stances according to its syntactic embedment.
Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich mit dem computergestützten Transkriptionsverfahren arabisch-deutscher Gesprächsdaten für interaktionsbezogene Untersuchungen auseinander. Zunächst werden wesentliche methodische Herausforderungen der gesprächsanalytischen Arbeit adressiert: Hinsichtlich der derzeitigen Korpustechnologie ermöglicht die Verwendung von arabischen Schriftzeichen in einem mehrsprachigen, bidirektionalen Transkript keine analysegerechte Rekonstruktion von Reziprozität, Linearität und Simultaneität sprachlichen Handelns. Zudem ist die Verschriftung von arabischen Gesprächsdaten aufgrund der unzureichenden (gesprächsanalytischen) Beschäftigung mit den standardfernen Varietäten und gesprochensprachlichen Phänomenen erschwert. Daher widmet sich der zweite Teil des Beitrags den bisher erarbeiteten und erprobten Lösungsansätzen ̶ einem stringenten, gesprächsanalytisch fundierten Transkriptionssystem für gesprochenes Arabisch.
Speech planning is a sophisticated process. In dialog, it regularly starts in overlap with an incoming turn by a conversation partner. We show that planning spoken responses in overlap with incoming turns is associated with higher processing load than planning in silence. In a dialogic experiment, participants took turns with a confederate describing lists of objects. The confederate’s utterances (to which participants responded) were pre-recorded and varied in whether they ended in a verb or an object noun and whether this ending was predictable or not. We found that response planning in overlap with sentence-final verbs evokes larger task-evoked pupillary responses, while end predictability had no effect. This finding indicates that planning in overlap leads to higher processing load for next speakers in dialog and that next speakers do not proactively modulate the time course of their response planning based on their predictions of turn endings. The turn-taking system exerts pressure on the language processing system by pushing speakers to plan in overlap despite the ensuing increase in processing load.
Im Folgenden soll der Versuch unternommen werden, die bisherigen Forschungen zur Sprachgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im Lichte ihres Erkenntnispotenzials für gegenwärtige historiografische Fragestellungen zu diskutieren. In einem ersten Schritt wird die Forschungsgeschichte zur Sprache des beziehungsweise im Nationalsozialismus von der frühen Nachkriegszeit bis in die 1980er-Jahre skizziert. Deutlich wird hier vor allem, dass in dieser Phase zwar wichtige Arbeiten entstanden sind, jedoch methodische und theoretische Begrenzungen zahlreiche blinde Flecken bestehen ließen. In einem zweiten Schritt wird dargelegt, mit welchen Erkenntnisinteressen und Instrumentarien die jüngere Forschung sich auf diese blinden Flecken konzentriert und welche Ergebnisse sie zutage gefördert hat. Dabei sollen vor allem diejenigen Aspekte benannt werden, die nach Ansicht des Verfassers bei einer noch zu schreibenden Sprach- und Kommunikationsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus zu beachten sind. Es handelt sich konkret um eine Ausweitung der Perspektive in Richtung unterschiedlicher Kommunikationssituationen und heterogener Akteurskonstellationen, um Sprachgebräuche unter den Diskursbedingungen des Nationalsozialismus angemessen beschreiben zu können.
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.
Zu den Beiträgen des Themenhefts.
Die in dem Themenheft versammelten Beiträge setzen sich unter verschiedenen Fragestellungen, im Rahmen unterschiedlicher methodischer Ansätze und jeweils eigener Datensets mit Öffentlichkeit, Privatheit und Anonymität im kommunikativen Handeln mit mobilen Medien auseinander.
This paper investigates self-initiated uses of mobile phones (such as texting or making a call) in everyday video-recorded conversations among Czech speakers. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis, it illustrates how participants publicly frame their own device use (for example, by announcements), and how co-present interlocutors respond to it. Previous studies have described how participants manage two concurrent communicative involvements, but have not provided detailed sequential descriptions of how device use can be negotiated and accounted for. This study shows that mobile device use in co-presence is not a priori problematic (or vice versa). Instead, participants frame their technology use in different ways according to various features of the social situation they treat as momentarily relevant. These features include the course of the conversation and how the device use relates to it, the overall participation framework and the opacity of the device use for co-present others.
Although the N400 was originally discovered in a paradigm designed to elicit a P300 (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980), its relationship with the P300 and how both overlapping event-related potentials (ERPs) determine behavioral profiles is still elusive. Here we conducted an ERP (N = 20) and a multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) experiment (N = 16) on distinct participant samples using an antonym paradigm (The opposite of black is white/nice/yellow with acceptability judgment). We hypothesized that SAT profiles incorporate processes of task-related decision-making (P300) and stimulus-related expectation violation (N400). We replicated previous ERP results (Roehm et al., 2007): in the correct condition (white), the expected target elicits a P300, while both expectation violations engender an N400 [reduced for related (yellow) vs. unrelated targets (nice)]. Using multivariate Bayesian mixed-effects models, we modeled the P300 and N400 responses simultaneously and found that correlation between residuals and subject-level random effects of each response window was minimal, suggesting that the components are largely independent. For the SAT data, we found that antonyms and unrelated targets had a similar slope (rate of increase in accuracy over time) and an asymptote at ceiling, while related targets showed both a lower slope and a lower asymptote, reaching only approximately 80% accuracy. Using a GLMM-based approach (Davidson and Martin, 2013), we modeled these dynamics using response time and condition as predictors. Replacing the predictor for condition with the averaged P300 and N400 amplitudes from the ERP experiment, we achieved identical model performance. We then examined the piecewise contribution of the P300 and N400 amplitudes with partial effects (see Hohenstein and Kliegl, 2015). Unsurprisingly, the P300 amplitude was the strongest contributor to the SAT-curve in the antonym condition and the N400 was the strongest contributor in the unrelated condition. In brief, this is the first demonstration of how overlapping ERP responses in one sample of participants predict behavioral SAT profiles of another sample. The P300 and N400 reflect two independent but interacting processes and the competition between these processes is reflected differently in behavioral parameters of speed and accuracy.
Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
Ein CERN der deutschen Sprache. Überlegungen zu einem Dokumentationszentrum der deutschen Sprache
(2019)
In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisited, using ten years’ worth of it rather than just two, and using the improved methodology. We conclude that there is indeed a positive relationship. In addition, we show that online dictionary look-up behaviour is remarkably similar across languages, even when, as in our case, one is dealing with languages from very dissimilar language families. Furthermore, online dictionaries turn out to have minimum look-up success rates, below which they simply cannot go. These minima are language-sensitive and vary depending on the regularity of the searched-for entries, but are otherwise constant no matter the size of randomly sampled dictionaries. Corpus-informed sampling always improves on any random method. Lastly, from the point of view of the graphical user interface, we argue that the average user of an online bilingual dictionary is better served with a single search box, rather than separate search boxes for each dictionary side.
This contribution aims to describe privacy, publicness and anonymity as essential analytic dimensions for media linguistic research. The dimensions are not inherent in and predetermined by the technical features and forms of communication provided by mobile devices, but are used by the participants as an orientation grid for shaping their online and offline practices in and with mobile media. Consid-ering both mobile device use in the public realm and the dissemina-tion of increasingly private content in social media (which is said to lead to ‘blurred boundaries’ between the private and the public), the paper provides a brief overview of the main developments in mobile media research: Studies adopting various approaches – e. g. socio-logical-ethnographic, linguistic and media studies – illustrate how publicness, privacy and anonymity are actively shaped and brought about by mobile media users in face-to-face and remote social en-counters. As this shows that publicness, privacy and anonymity are still relevant concepts for users, future media linguistics studies should focus on the dynamic multimodal practices by which they are contextualized and accomplished.
Narratives 2.0. A Multi-dimensional approach to semi-public storytelling in WhatsApp voice messages
(2019)
Based on a corpus of voice message narratives in German WhatsApp group chats, the present study contributes to research on social media storytelling in that it focusses on stories of personal experience which are embedded in a communication platform which favours a continuous dialogic exchange, narrated to well-defined non-anonymous publics and multimodal (comprised of visual and audible posting types). To capture the characteristics of this type of social media storytelling, the paper argues that Ochs and Capps’ (2001) dimensional model originally developed for conversational narratives (including the dimensions of tellability, tellership, embeddedness, linearity, moral stance) should be expanded by the dimensions of publicness, multimodality and sequencing. The prototype of storytelling in WhatsApp group chats is based on recent personal experiences; it is related by a single teller as an initial, sequentially non-embedded and linearly organised “big package” story (in a single voice message sometimes introduced by a text message containing an abstract); other group members routinely document their evaluative stances in rather conventionalised text message responses in the semi-public group space.
Classical null hypothesis significance tests are not appropriate in corpus linguistics, because the randomness assumption underlying these testing procedures is not fulfilled. Nevertheless, there are numerous scenarios where it would be beneficial to have some kind of test in order to judge the relevance of a result (e.g. a difference between two corpora) by answering the question whether the attribute of interest is pronounced enough to warrant the conclusion that it is substantial and not due to chance. In this paper, I outline such a test.
Intergroup conflict im Sprachgebrauch rechtspopulistischer Gruppierungen am Beispiel von "Pegida"
(2019)
Populismus spaltet Gesellschaften – so lautet eine häufig zu hörende und zu lesende Auffassung. Als offensichtlichste Form der Spaltung erscheint dabei die gruppenbezogene Spaltung zwischen denjenigen, die populistischen Bewegungen und Parteien anhängen und denjenigen, die das mehr oder weniger entschieden nicht tun. Die Risse in der Gesellschaft zeigen sich jedoch nicht nur in Bezug auf diesen Gruppenkonflikt. Er ist nur eine Linie in einem Netz von tatsächlichen oder auch nur wahrgenommenen und rhetorisch konstruierten Frakturen, die von populistischen Gruppierungen hervorgehoben oder möglicherweise auch erst geschaffen werden und Eingang in den öffentlichen Diskurs finden.
Muskelversagen? Großartig! - Framing von Fachbegriffen aufgrund unterschiedlichen Weltwissens
(2019)
Most authors agree that modal particles - a dass of function words widely considered characteristic of Modem German - cannot receive prosodic stress, though the reasons for this restriction have not yet been satisfactorily explained. This paper argues that unstressability follows from the general contribution of modal particles to compositional utterance meaning, which requires them to take scope over focus-background structures. Form and function of modal particle meanings are modelled and illustrated for five representative examples - the particles wohl, ja, eigentlich, eben and halt. It is argued that these as well as other particles, whenever they occur under prosodic stress, cannot preserve the meaning nor the syntactic behaviour of modal particles. All instances of stressed particles in German must therefore be categorized in other functional classes.
Die korpusbasierte Lexikografie ist ein interessanter und vielfältiger wissenschaftlicher Anwendungsbereich, der auch im muttersprachlichen Deutschunterricht und im Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-Unterricht eine größere Rolle einnehmen sollte. In unserem Beitrag stellen wir deshalb geeignete Korpora und Korpusanalysewerkzeuge vor, mit deren Hilfe Nutzerinnen und Nutzer einzelne Angabebereiche in einem Wörterbuch nicht nur nachvollziehen, sondern auch eigenständig erarbeiten können. Neben vorhandenen Ansätzen geschieht dies am Beispiel des Denktionarys, eines wikibasierten Wörterbuches, für das Schülerinnen und Schüler im Rahmen des Projekts Schüler machen Wörterbücher – Wörterbücher machen Schule im muttersprachlichen Deutschunterricht selbst korpusbasierte Artikel verfassten.
The article starts by outlining the theoretical and conceptual foundations in the field of multimodal interaction analysis, which, based on its spatiallinguistic orientation, deals with the meaning of space for the constitution of social meaning. Conceptually, we refer to the ideas of architecture-forinteraction and social topography. Empirically, we look towards the entire range of visually perceptible physical expressions of the Communion participants. We also focus on the spatial prerequisites and the space-related knowledge of the visitors, which becomes evident in their situational behaviour. From our point of view, Communion is not only a ritual in worship but also a task of coordination and positioning. We analyse video excerpts of two Communions in Lutheran-Protestant worship. The central question is: How do the people who hand out the sacrament to the participants take part in the procedure themselves (self-supply)? The video excerpts are from Germany(Rimbach and Zotzenbach, South Hesse). We see self-supply as a situational reproduction of institutional structures and relevancies. Methodologically, we first analyse an example in detail, in which we elaborate constitutive aspects of self-supply and the associated implications in the sense of an arising communitisation of the faithful. The subsequent analysis is carried out from a comparative perspective with reference to the results already obtained. The analyses lead to two basic models. Firstly, we identified a two-phase model in which first the churchgoers and then separately the institution’s representatives celebrate Communion. Structurally linked to this model is the is the diverging presence of those who have already completed the ritual, divergence resulting in two ensembles with their respective interaction space. The churchgoers watch the pastor and his assistants perform the ritual themselves. Secondly, we were able to formulate an integrative model in which the pastor celebrates Communion as one of the community. This preserves cohesion among all churchgoers and there is no ritual display of the institution’s representatives as in the two-phase model. As for model-shaping factors, two aspects become particularly clear: The first are the opportunities which the architecture-forinteraction, i.e. the concrete space for the Communion, provides. The second is the number of participants who perform the ceremony under these spatial conditions. Both aspects have a direct impact on the organisation of Communion, the movement within the church space and, indirectly, on the structure and implications of self-supply.
Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size
(2019)
Recently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences where α is a free parameter. Varying this parameter makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting, because textual data are characterized by Zipf’s law, i.e., there are very few word types that occur very often (e.g., function words expressing grammatical relationships) and many word types with a very low frequency (e.g., content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel (consisting of approximately 365,000 articles and 237,000,000 words that were published between 1947 and 2017). We show that, analogous to most other measures in quantitative linguistics, similarity measures based on generalized entropies depend heavily on the sample size (i.e., text length). We argue that this makes it difficult to quantify lexical dynamics and language change and show that standard sampling approaches do not solve this problem. We discuss the consequences of the results for the statistical analysis of languages.
How do people communicate in mobile settings of interaction? How does mobility affect the way we speak? How does mobility exert influence on the manner in which talk itself is consequential for how we move in space? Recently, questions of this sort have attracted increasing attention in the human and social sciences. This Special Issue contributes to the emerging body of studies on mobility and talk by inspecting an ordinary and ubiquitous phenomenon in which communication among mobile participants is paramount: participation in traffic. This editorial presents previous work on mobility in natural settings, as carried out by interactionally oriented researchers. It also shows how the investigation into traffic participation adds new perspectives to research on language and communication.
This contribution presents a quantitative approach to speech, thought and writing representation (ST&WR) and steps towards its automatic detection. Automatic detection is necessary for studying ST&WR in a large number of texts and thus identifying developments in form and usage over time and in different types of texts. The contribution summarizes results of a pilot study: First, it describes the manual annotation of a corpus of short narrative texts in relation to linguistic descriptions of ST&WR. Then, two different techniques of automatic detection – a rule-based and a machine learning approach – are described and compared. Evaluation of the results shows success with automatic detection, especially for direct and indirect ST&WR.
Im vorliegenden Artikel werden einleitend Gegenstand, Fragestellung und Ziele einer Studie zu „absoluten“ Verwendungen von Modalverben in verbaler Interaktion vorgestellt, gefolgt von Bemerkungen zu Forschungskontext, Theorie, Methodik und Datengrundlage. Ergebnisse der Untersuchung werden unter drei Perspektiven präsentiert: Erstens geht es um Modalverbverwendungen, die sich in der Forschung zwischen Vollverbund Ellipsenerklärungen verorten, zweitens um Strukturen mit (grammatischen) Kontextbezügen, drittens um Konstruktionen und usuelle Handlungsformate. Den Abschluss bilden eine Diskussion der Befunde und ein Ausblick auf Vermittlungspotenziale interaktionslinguistischer Befunde im Bereich Deutsch als Fremdsprache.
Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed.