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Lebenslauf bis 2019
(2019)
Ulrich Engel schildert die einzelnen Stationen seines Lebens: als Kind im Vorkriegsdeutschland und als junger Soldat, anschließend seine Lehrertätigkeit und wissenschaftliche Laufbahn, insbesondere seine Funktion als Direktor des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Er hebt seine Tätigkeit als Leiter von mehreren Projekten von kontrastiven zweisprachigen Grammatiken sowie Valenzwörterbüchern hervor. Dabei schildert er seinen familiären Hintergrund als Spiegel des gesellschaftlich‑politischen Wandels im Vor‑ und Nachkriegsdeutschland.
Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit dem Gebrauch von konnektintegrierbaren Konnektoren im gesprochenen Deutsch. Die Analyse wird am Beispiel der Adverbkonnektoren deshalb und deswegen als Korrelate zum Subjunktor weil und ausgehend von theoretischen Prämissen aus der traditionellen Grammatik und aus der Gesprächsforschung durchgeführt. Der Gebrauch der genannten Konnektoren wird innerhalb einer Auswahl von Korpusdaten gesprochener Sprache beobachtet, die mehrere verschiedene Gattungen der alltäglichen bzw. der institutionellen Kommunikation umfasst.
Common Crawl is a considerably large, heterogeneous multilingual corpus comprised of crawled documents from the internet, surpassing 20TB of data and distributed as a set of more than 50 thousand plain text files where each contains many documents written in a wide variety of languages. Even though each document has a metadata block associated to it, this data lacks any information about the language in which each document is written, making it extremely difficult to use Common Crawl for monolingual applications. We propose a general, highly parallel, multithreaded pipeline to clean and classify Common Crawl by language; we specifically design it so that it runs efficiently on medium to low resource infrastructures where I/O speeds are the main constraint. We develop the pipeline so that it can be easily reapplied to any kind of heterogeneous corpus and so that it can be parameterised to a wide range of infrastructures. We also distribute a 6.3TB version of Common Crawl, filtered, classified by language, shuffled at line level in order to avoid copyright issues, and ready to be used for NLP applications.
Text corpora come in many different shapes and sizes and carry heterogeneous annotations, depending on their purpose and design. The true benefit of corpora is rooted in their annotation and the method by which this data is encoded is an important factor in their interoperability. We have accumulated a large collection of multilingual and parallel corpora and encoded it in a unified format which is compatible with a broad range of NLP tools and corpus linguistic applications. In this paper, we present our corpus collection and describe a data model and the extensions to the popular CoNLL-U format that enable us to encode it.
As the Web ought to be considered as a series of sources rather than as a source in itself, a problem facing corpus construction resides in meta-information and categorization. In addition, we need focused data to shed light on particular subfields of the digital public sphere. Blogs are relevant to that end, especially if the resulting web texts can be extracted along with metadata and made available in coherent and clearly describable collections.
Nearly all of the very large corpora of English are “static”, which allows a wide range of one-time, pre-processed data, such as collocates. The challenge comes with large “dynamic” corpora, which are updated regularly, and where preprocessing is much more difficult. This paper provides an overview of the NOW corpus (News on the Web), which is currently 8.2 billion words in size, and which grows by about 170 million words each month. We discuss the architecture of NOW, and provide many examples that show how data from NOW can (uniquely) be extracted to look at a wide range of ongoing changes in English.
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.
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.
Central complements: good arguments are self-explanatory.
Together with its central complements, verbs model basic patterns of interaction. The constellations of these complements in turn correspond to central patterns of the argument structure. Nominative and accusative complements formally occupy the first and second positions (subject and object), but they also have certain semantic preferences. The formal function of the dative is less pronounced, where it occurs (ditransitive verbs) the semantic imprint of the frame („transfer“) is very strong. This corresponds to the meaning of a core group of corresponding verbs. Other verbs that allow this pattern are used more often in other valence structures and the ditransitive use appears as a systematic way of personal extension of object‑related activities. This will be discussed with reference to the verbs zeigen and (in a different way) lehren.
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
We report on a new project building a Natural Language Processing resource for Zulu by making use of resources already available. Combining tagging results with the results of morphological analysis semi-automatically, we expect to reduce the amount of manual work when generating a finely-grained gold standard corpus usable for training a tagger. From the tagged corpus, we plan to extract verb-argument pairs with the aim of compiling a verb valency lexicon for Zulu.
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.
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 analyzes the LL in the city of Bautzen / Budyšin in Germany, a town which is frequently considered the “capital” of the Slavonic minority of the Sorbs. It focuses on the societal role of Sorbian in relation to practices and ideologies of mainstream German society. The vast majority of signs in Bautzen / Budyšin are in German only. Sorbian is essentially restricted to explicitly Sorbian institutions and to local and regional administration. Interviews conducted in shops and on the streets reveal that paternalistic attitudes common to perceptions of language policies and minority languages in Germany dominate; practices maintain the common monolingual habitus in German society. Members of the majority population show little awareness of Sorbian issues, and Sorbian signage is seen as a generous gesture but considered essentially unnecessary. Only in most recent times, a reaction by the Sorbian community has challenged these practices and attitudes.
Mehrsprachigkeitsdiskurse im Bildungskontext in Lettland zwischen Populismus und Weltoffenheit
(2019)
Unser Aufsatz diskutiert aktuelle Debatten zu Sprachen und Mehrsprachigkeit im Bildungssystem in Lettland. Theoretischer Hintergrund sind Debatten zur Mehrsprachigkeit, zu Spracheinstellungen und zur heteroglossischen Ideologie. Nach einer kurzen historischen Einführung in Fragen des sprachlichen Ökosystems Lettlands stellen wir Beispiele aus der aktuellen Reform der Schulcurricula vor, die Mehrsprachigkeitsansätze aufgreifen. Diese Reformversuche werden allerdings durch weit verbreitete Diskurse in der lettischen Gesellschaft abgelehnt. Anhand von Reaktionen von Bildungspolitikern und in journalistischen Texten zeigen wir, wie einflussreich traditionelle Vorstellungen vom Sprachlernen nach wie vor sind und wie eine Modernisierung des Lettischunterrichts mit Fragen von nationaler Identität verbunden wird, in denen bisweilen sogar offen xenophobisch argumentiert wird. Gleichzeitig wird deutlich, wie im Diskurs im Interesse der „Rettung der lettischen Sprache“ mit Mythen und Halbwahrheiten operiert wird. Der dritte Teil des Aufsatzes stellt in diesem Kontext zwei Studien unter Lehrern in Lettland vor, in denen explizit nach Einstellungen und Praktiken zu Code-Switching, Translanguaging und ähnlichen Phänomenen gefragt wurde. In den Antworten zeigt sich die Spaltung der Gesellschaft; jedoch zeigen die Ergebnisse auch, dass Perspektiven für einen modernen und mehrsprachigen Sprachunterricht in Lettland durchaus vorhanden sind.
Wird aus Sprache Gewalt?
(2019)
Nach dem Mord am Kasseler Regierungspräsidenten Walter Lübcke und weiteren Mordanschlägen in der jüngsten Vergangenheit wurde in Kommentaren und Stellungnahmen immer wieder behauptet, dass hier Sprache in Gewalt umgeschlagen sei. Dies ist einerseits naheliegend vor dem Hintergrund dessen, was wir über die Täter und ihre Äußerungen wissen. Was aber sagt die Wissenschaft dazu? Wie ist aus sprach- und kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Sicht dieser angenommene Zusammenhang zu bewerten?
Nach dem Mord am Kasseler Regierungspräsidenten Walter Lübcke und weiteren Mordanschlägen in der jüngsten Vergangenheit wurde in Kommentaren und Stellungnahmen immer wieder behauptet, dass hier Sprache in Gewalt umgeschlagen sei. Dies ist einerseits naheliegend vor dem Hintergrund dessen, was wir über die Täter und ihre Äußerungen wissen. Was aber sagt die Wissenschaft dazu?
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.
We discuss the impact of data bias on abusive language detection. We show that classification scores on popular datasets reported in previous work are much lower under realistic settings in which this bias is reduced. Such biases are most notably observed on datasets that are created by focused sampling instead of random sampling. Datasets with a higher proportion of implicit abuse are more affected than datasets with a lower proportion.
We examine the new task of detecting derogatory compounds (e.g. curry muncher). Derogatory compounds are much more difficult to detect than derogatory unigrams (e.g. idiot) since they are more sparsely represented in lexical resources previously found effective for this task (e.g. Wiktionary). We propose an unsupervised classification approach that incorporates linguistic properties of compounds. It mostly depends on a simple distributional representation. We compare our approach against previously established methods proposed for extracting derogatory unigrams.
This paper reports on the latest developments of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo and the German Reference Corpus in relation to three of the most important CMLC topics: interoperability, collaboration on corpus infrastructure building, and legal issues. Concerning interoperability, we present new ways to access DeReKo via KorAP on the API and on the plugin level. In addition we report about advancements in the EuReCo- and ICC-initiatives with the provision of comparable corpora, and about recent problems with license acquisitions and our solution approaches using an indemnification clause and model licenses that include scientific exploitation.
Distributional models of word use constitute an indispensable tool in corpus based lexicological research for discovering paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic patterns (Belica et al. 2010). Recently, word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013) have revived the field by allowing to construct and analyze distributional models on very large corpora. This is accomplished by reducing the very high dimensionality of word cooccurrence contexts, the size of the vocabulary, to few dimensions, such as 100-200. However, word use and meaning can vary widely along dimensions such as domain, register, and time, and word embeddings tend to represent only the most prevalent meaning. In this paper we thus construct domain specific word embeddings to allow for systematically analyzing variations in word use. Moreover, we also demonstrate how to reconstruct domain specific co-occurrence contexts from the dense word embeddings.
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.
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.
In this paper, we present WebAnno-MM, an extension of the popular web-based annotation tool WebAnno, which is designed for the linguistic annotation of transcribed spoken data with time aligned media files. Several new features have been implemented for our current use case: a novel teaching method based on pair-wise manual annotation of transcribed video data and systematic comparison of agreement between students. To enable the annotation of transcribed spoken language data, apart from technical and data model related challenges, WebAnno-MM offers an additional view to data: a (musical) score view for the inspection of parallel utterances, which is relevant for various methodological research questions regarding the analysis of interactions of spoken content.
In this paper, we describe a data processing pipeline used for annotated spoken corpora of Uralic languages created in the INEL (Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages) project. With this processing pipeline we convert the data into a loss-less standard format (ISO/TEI) for long-term preservation while simultaneously enabling a powerful search in this version of the data. For each corpus, the input we are working with is a set of files in EXMARaLDA XML format, which contain transcriptions, multimedia alignment, morpheme segmentation and other kinds of annotation. The first step of processing is the conversion of the data into a certain subset of TEI following the ISO standard ’Transcription of spoken language’ with the help of an XSL transformation. The primary purpose of this step is to obtain a representation of our data in a standard format, which will ensure its long-term accessibility. The second step is the conversion of the ISO/TEI files to a JSON format used by the “Tsakorpus” search platform. This step allows us to make the corpora available through a web-based search interface. As an addition, the existence of such a converter allows other spoken corpora with ISO/TEI annotation to be made accessible online in the future.
The Lehnwortportal Deutsch (2012 seqq.) serves as an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, synthesizing an increasing number of lexicographical dictionaries and providing basic cross-resource search options. The paper discusses the far-reaching revision of the system’s conceptual, lexicographical and technological underpinnings currently under way, focussing on their relevance for multilingual loanword lexicography.
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.
In diesem Beitrag wird das Redewiedergabe-Korpus (RW-Korpus) vorgestellt, ein historisches Korpus fiktionaler und nicht-fiktionaler Texte, das eine detaillierte manuelle Annotation mit Redewiedergabeformen enthält. Das Korpus entsteht im Rahmen eines laufenden DFG-Projekts und ist noch nicht endgültig abgeschlossen, jedoch ist für Frühjahr 2019 ein Beta-Release geplant, welches der Forschungsgemeinschaft zur Verfügung gestellt wird. Das endgültige Release soll im Frühjahr 2020 erfolgen. Das RW-Korpus stellt eine neuartige Ressource für die Redewiedergabe-Forschung dar, die in dieser Detailliertheit für das Deutsche bisher nicht verfügbar ist, und kann sowohl für quantitative linguistische und literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen als auch als Trainingsmaterial für maschinelles Lernen dienen.
This paper describes a rule-based approach to detect direct speech without the help of any quotation markers. As datasets fictional and non-fictional texts were used. Our evaluation shows that the results appear stable throughout different datasets in the fictional domain and are comparable to the results achieved in related work.
Graphenbasierte Ansätze spielen in der digitalen Lexikografie eine immer stärkere Rolle. Essentiell für die Erstellung, Verwaltung und Nutzung graphenbasierter lexikografischer Ressourcen ist jedoch eine leistungsfähige und zugleich einfach zu handhabende Zugriffsstruktur, die Suchen nach komplexen Konstellationen in solchen Graphen ermöglicht. Für heutige Graphendatenbanken stehen zahlreiche Abfragesprachen zur Verfügung, deren Verwendung jedoch verhältnismäßig voraussetzungsreich ist.
Das Poster stellt einen webbasierten, frei konfigurierbaren Query Builder vor, der die Formulierung semantisch sehr komplexer Suchabfragen an eine (mit dem Tinkerpop-Standard kompatible) Property-Graphendatenbank ermöglicht. Die Abfrage erfolgt durch einfaches visuell-interaktives Zusammenstellen hierarchisch angeordneter Abfrageelemente und liefert Antworten in Echtzeit. Dabei wird von den Komplexitäten der verwendeten Low-level-Abfragesprache Gremlin abstrahiert. Der Query Builder ist ein zentrales Modul eines derzeit entwickelten Open-Source-Softwaresystems zur Verwaltung und Online-Publikation graph-erweiterter lexikografischer Ressourcen.
This paper presents types and annotation layers of reply relations in computer- mediated communication (CMC). Reply relations hold between post units in CMC interactions and describe references from one given post to a previous post. We classify three types of reply relations in CMC interactions: first, technical replies, i. e. the possibility to reply directly to a previous post by clicking a ‘reply’ button; second, indentations, e. g. in wiki talk pages in which users insert their contributions in the existing talk page by indenting them and third, interpretative reply relations, i. e. the reply action is not realised formally but signalled by other structural or linguistics means such as address markers ‘@’, greetings, citations and/or Q-A structures. We take a look at existing practices in the description and representation of such relations in corpora and examples of chat, Wikipedia talk pages, Twitter and blogs. We then provide an annotation proposal that combines the different levels of description and representation of reply relations and which adheres to the schemas and practices for encoding CMC corpus documents within the TEI framework as defined by the TEI CMC SIG. It constitutes a prerequisite for correctly identifying higher levels of interactional relations such as dialogue acts or discussion trees.
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.
Lexikographische und lexikalische Ressourcen zum Deutschen werden an vielen unterschiedlichen Institutionen erarbeitet. Zum einen im Dudenverlag, der mit den gedruckten Wörterbüchern der Duden-Reihe und mit „Duden online“ die meistkonsultierten gegenwartssprachlichen Wörterbücher zum Deutschen erstellt, dann die Union deutscher Akademien, unter deren Dach an verschiedenen einzelnen Akademien zahlreiche historische wie auch synchrone Wörterbücher zum Deutschen erstellt werden (z. B. das „Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache“, das „Wörterbuchnetz“ sowie das geplante Informationssystem des neuen „Zentrums für digitale Lexikographie der deutschen Sprache“). Auch am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim werden wissenschaftliche wortschatzbezogene Ressourcen zum Deutschen erarbeitet und der (Fach-)Öffentlichkeit unter dem Dach von OWID, dem „Online-Wortschatz-Informationssystem Deutsch“, präsentiert. Obwohl wir uns in OWID auf Ressourcen zu spezialisierten Wortschatzbereichen konzentriert haben, erreichen wir Nutzerinnen und Nutzer in verschiedensten Ländern der Welt. Wir wollen hier die Gelegenheit wahrnehmen, den ZGL-Leserinnen und -Lesern unsere Ressourcen in OWID und OWIDplus näher vorzustellen.
This paper discusses German neologisms in the so-called “new-media” and presents a German corpus-based online dictionary of neologisms. Several neological morphemes and lexemes, as well as their meaning will be presented, showing that these new modes of communication are an important source of enrichment of German lexicon.
Am 7. und 8. September fand an der Universität Basel die 4. Sektionentagung der Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik (GAL) statt. Eine der 15 hier vertretenen Sektionen war die Migrationslinguistik, die von Peter Rosenberg (Frankfurt (Oder)) und Christoph Schroeder (Potsdam) geleitet wurde. Die sechs Vorträge dieser Sektion thematisierten laufende Projekte zur Spracharbeit mit Geflüchteten und ihre ersten Ergebnisse, die Gegenstand dieses Berichts sind.
Seit 2017 wird im deutschen Mikrozensus eine Frage zur Sprache der Bevölkerung gestellt. Die letzte Spracherhebung in einem deutschen Zensus datiert aus dem Jahr 1939; entsprechend gibt es aktuell keine aussagekräftigen Sprachstatistiken in Deutschland. Die neue Sprachfrage des Mikrozensus weist jedoch erhebliche Mängel auf; offensichtlich wurde sie als Stellvertreterfrage zur Messung kultureller Integration konzipiert. Im vorliegenden Text werden die Fragen diskutiert und ihre ersten Ergebnisse analysiert. Daran anschließend werden andere Varianten von Sprachfragen dargestellt, dabei wird insbesondere auf die vorbildlichen Sprachfragen im kanadischen Zensus eingegangen. Abschließend wird die Sprachfrage der Deutschland-Erhebung 2018 des IDS inklusive ihrer Ergebnisse vorgestellt; die Deutschland-Erhebung 2018 stellt neben dem Mikrozensus bislang die einzige repräsentative Spracherhebung in Deutschland dar.
In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view//cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005.1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing.
The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.
Little strokes fell great oaks. Creating CoRoLa, the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian
(2019)
The paper presents the quite long-standing tradition of Romanian corpus acquisition and processing, which reaches its peak with the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian language (CoRoLa). The paper describes decisions behind the kinds of texts collected, as well as processing and annotation steps, highlighting the structure and importance of metadata to the corpus. The reader is also introduced to the three ways in which (s)he can plunge into the rich linguistic data of the corpus, waiting to be discovered. Besides querying the corpus, word embeddings extracted from it are useful to various natural language processing applications and for linguists, when user-friendly interfaces offer them the possibility to exploit the data.
Plädoyer für die Entwicklung einer digital-lexikografischen Kompetenz im Fremdsprachenunterricht
(2019)
The aim of this paper is to promote an explicit and active development of digital-lexicographical competence in foreign language teaching. The results of two online surveys conducted as part of the research project DICONALE-COMBIDIGILEX in connection with the teaching and learning process of German as a foreign language (= DaF) provide a comparative insight into the behaviour and attitude of both teachers and learners of DaF on the topic “Use of lexicographical resources in the process of DaF-acquisition”. The evaluation of the surveys shows, that the digitallexicographical competences in the process of DaF-acquisition must be promoted more intensively, since the existing lexicographic offer is not optimally used for teaching purposes both on the part of the teachers and on the part of the learners. To this end, the following three main lexicographical competences will be examined from a methodological-didactic and application-oriented perspective: (i) Adequate selection of the electronic resource regarding the communicative situation, (ii) development of disambiguation strategies for reception in L2 or translation from L2 and (iii) development of strategies for production and translation into L2. This research will ultimately lead to a debate on the use of the dictionary in the digital environment in the DaF-teaching and discuss its actual influence on the learning process.
This article investigates the use of überhaupt and sowieso in German and Dutch. These two words are frequently classified as particles, if only because of their pragmatic functions. The frequent use of particles is considered a specific trait common to German and Dutch, and the description of their semantics and pragmatics is notoriously difficult. It is unclear whether both particles have the same meaning in Dutch (where they are loanwords) and German, whether they can fulfil the same syntactic functions and to what extent the (semantic and pragmatic) functions of überhaupt und sowieso overlap. There has already been linguistic research on überhaupt and sowieso by Fisseni (2009) using the world-wide web and by Bruijnen and Sudhoff (2013) using the EUROPARL corpus. In the present study we critically evaluated the corpus study, integrating information on original utterance language and discussing the adequacy of this corpus. Moreover, we conducted an experimental survey collecting subjective-intuitive judgements in three dimensions, thus gathering more data on sparse and informal constructions.
By using these complementary methods, we obtain a more nuanced picture of the use of überhaupt and sowieso in both languages: On the one hand, the data show where the use of both words is more similar and on the other hand, differences between the languages can also be discerned.
Canadian heritage German across three generations: A diary-based study of language shift in action
(2019)
It is well known that migration has an effect on language use and language choice. If the language of origin is maintained after migration, it tends to change in the new contact setting. Often, migrants shift to the new majority language within few generations. The current paper examines a diary corpus containing data from three generations of one German-Canadian family, ranging from 1867 to 1909, and covering the second to fourth generation after immigration. The paper analyzes changes that can be observed between the generations, with respect to the language system as well as to the individuals’ decision on language choice. The data not only offer insight into the dynamics of acquiring a written register of a heritage language, and the eventual shift to the majority language. They also allow us to identify different linguistic profiles of heritage speakers within one community. It is discussed how these profiles can be linked to the individuals’ family backgrounds and how the combination of these backgrounds may have contributed to giving up the heritage language in favor of the majority language.
Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
Kertész, András (2017): The historiography of generative linguistics. Tübingen: Narr. [Rezension]
(2019)
The present paper examines a variety of ways in which the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa) can be used. A multitude of examples intends to highlight a wide range of interrogation possibilities that CoRoLa opens for different types of users. The querying of CoRoLa displayed here is supported by the KorAP frontend, through the querying language Poliqarp. Interrogations address annotation layers, such as the lexical, morphological and, in the near future, the syntactical layer, as well as the metadata. Other issues discussed are how to build a virtual corpus, how to deal with errors, how to find expressions and how to identify expressions.
Novel formats of construction-based description hold great potential for phenomena that fall through the cracks in traditional kinds of linguistic reference works. On the example of German verb argument structure constructions with a prepositional object, we demonstrate that a construction-based description of such phenomena is superior to existing lexicographic and grammaticographic treatments, but that it also poses a number of new problems. The most fundamental of these relates to the fact that construction-based analyses can be proposed on different levels of abstraction. We illustrate pertinent problems relating to the precise identification of constructional form and meaning and suggest a multi-layered descriptive format for web-based electronic reference constructica that can accommodate these challenges. Semantically, the proposed solution integrates both lumping and splitting perspectives on constructional grain size and permits users to flexibly zoom in and out on individual elements in the resource. Formally, it can capture variation in the number and marking of realised arguments as found in e.g. passives and transitivity alternations. Aspects of the theoretical controversy between Construction Grammar and Valency Theory are addressed where relevant, but our focus is on questions of description and the practical implementation of construction-based analyses in a suitable type of linguistic reference work.
In diesem Artikel wird der Tempus-Modus-Gebrauch in indirekter Redewiedergabe im Niederdeutschen im Vergleich mit dem Hochdeutschen, Englischen und Norwegischen untersucht. Die hochdeutsche Standardsprache verfügt über eine voll ausgebaute Indikativ-Konjunktiv-Unterscheidung, wobei eine der Funktionen des Konjunktivs in der Markierung indirekter Rede besteht. Viele andere germanische Sprachen, hier vertreten durch das Englische und Norwegische, kennen keine vergleichbare Konjunktivkategorie (mehr). Indirekte Rede steht dort im Indikativ, wobei häufig das Phänomen der Tempusverschiebung zu beobachten ist. Das nördliche Niederdeutsche kennt ebenfalls keine distinkten Konjunktivformen, womit sich die Frage stellt, ob auch die Redewiedergabe wie in den anderen konjunktivlosen Sprachen funktioniert. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht dieser Frage im Rahmen einer empirischen Untersuchung nach. Als Datengrundlage dienen nordniederdeutsche Radionachrichten. Es zeigt sich, dass die Verteilung von Präsens und Präteritum in den niederdeutschen Radiodaten weiter ausfällt als in den konjunktivlosen Vergleichssprachen: Das Präsens tritt, wie im Hochdeutschen, auch dort auf, wo im Englischen und Norwegischen mit einer Verschiebung zum Präteritum zu rechnen wäre. Und für das Präteritum ergibt sich eine reportiv-konjunktivische Verwendung, die keine Entsprechung im Englischen oder Norwegischen hat.
This article examines a recurrent format that speakers use for defining ordinary expressions or technical terms. Drawing on data from four different languages - Flemish, French, German, and Italian - it focuses on definitions in which a definiendum is first followed by a negative definitional component (‘definiendum is not X’), and then by a positive definitional component (‘definiendum is Y’). The analysis shows that by employing this format, speakers display sensitivity towards a potential meaning of the definiendum that recipients could have taken to be valid. By negating this meaning, speakers discard this possible, yet unintended understanding. The format serves three distinct interactional purposes: (a) it is used for argumentation, e.g. in discussions and political debates, (b) it works as a resource for imparting knowledge, e.g. in expert talk and instructions, and (c) it is employed, in ordinary conversation, for securing the addressee's correct understanding of a possibly problematic expression. The findings contribute to our understanding of how epistemic claims and displays relate to the turn-constructional and sequential organization of talk. They also show that the much quoted ‘problem of meaning’ is, first and foremost, a participant's problem.
This paper focuses on easily confused items (so-called paronyms) in German in terms of their general, technical or academic contextual uses. It outlines the semantic discrepancies between contextual usages of pairs such as Methode/Methodologie/Methodik and unehelich/nichtehelich/außerehelich depending on their linguistic registers and varieties. While previous studies lack empirical evidence and primarily operate with morphological criteria (cf. Lăzărescu 1999) the descriptions here derive from corpus-based examinations of general written and of technical discourse. It is shown that causes of lexical confusion arise from formal, phonetic resemblances or semantic similarities, regular co-occurrence, incorrect morphological analogies and political governance of language. Context, knowledge, associations and experience determine the choice of lexical terms. Speakers need to apply linguistic and extra-linguistic principles in order to create adequate contexts. With the help of paronym examples and corpus data, these will be elucidated in more detail.
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 paper investigates emergent pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus-based study, seven verbs in the first conjunct are analyzed regarding the degree of semantic bleaching and the development of subjective or aspectual meaning components. Moreover, it is shown that each verb shows distinct tendencies for co-ocurrences, especially with deictic adverbs in the first conjunct and with specific verbs and verb classes in the second conjunct. It is argued that pseudo-coordination is originally motivated by the need for ‘chunking’ in unplanned speech and that it is still prominently used in this function in German, in contrast to languages in which pseudo-coordination is grammaticalized further.
The user interfaces for corpus analysis platforms must provide a high degree of accessibility for ordinary users and at the same time provide the possibility to answer complex research questions. In this paper, we present the design concepts behind the user interface of KorAP, a corpus analysis platform that has evolved into the main gateway to CoRoLa, the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language. Based on established principles of user interface design, we show how KorAP addresses the challenge of providing a user-friendly interface for heterogeneous corpus data to a wide range of users with different research questions.
This paper asks whether and in which ways managing coordination tasks in traffic involve the accomplishment of intersubjectivity. Taking instances of coordinating passing an obstacle with oncoming traffic as the empirical case, four different practices were found.
1. Intersubjectivity can be presupposed by expecting others to stick to the traffic code and other mutually shared expectations.
2. Intersubjective solutions emerge step by step by mutual responsive-anticipatory adaptation of driving decisions.
3. Intersubjectivity can be accomplished by explicit interactive negotiation of passages.
4. Coordination problems can be solved without relying on intersubjectivity by unilateral, responsive-anticipatory adaptation to others’ behaviors.
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.
Der Beitrag führt in das Sonderheft „Paronymie im deutschen Sprachgebrauch“ ein und bündelt gewonnene Einblicke in die lexikologische, korpusanalytische sowie lexikografische Arbeit des Projektes „Paronymwörterbuch“. Er stellt wichtige Erkenntnisse zu Paronymen, ihrem Vorkommen, ihrer Ermittlung und Darstellung, aber auch zu den Methoden der Bedeutungsanalyse, ihren diskursiven Funktionen und dem Umgang mit Verwechslungspotenzial zusammenfassend dar. Vorgestellt werden Forschungsergebnisse, die sich vor allem auf die Verwendung von Paronymen in der öffentlichen Gebrauchssprache beziehen. Aber auch explorative Korpusverfahren werden erläutert sowie innovative, dynamische e-lexikografische Darstellungen präsentiert. Ausgewählte Probleme, die sowohl im Kontext der theoretischen Auseinandersetzung als auch mit der redaktionellen Erfassung von Paronymen auftreten, werden hier diskutiert. Das Sonderheft verbindet dabei theoretische und praktische lexikografische Herangehensweisen an ein bisher linguistisch wenig dokumentiertes Phänomen, das Muttersprachler/innen und Fremdsprachenlernende gleichermaßen verunsichert. Neben den Rückblicken werden ebenso die Ausblicke auf die kommenden Jahre und die damit verbundenen Fragestellungen des Projektes skizziert.
Im Rahmen der korpusgestützten Lexikografie stellt die Kookkurrenzanalyse ein bewährtes Verfahren dar, um Massendaten aus Korpora im Corpus-driven-Ansatz zu einem Einzelstichwort vorzustrukturieren. Wie diese Daten im redaktionellen lexikografischen Prozess in die Wortartikelproduktion einfließen können, wurde beispielsweise beim allgemeinen einsprachigen Online-Wörterbuch elexiko erprobt, dokumentiert und umgesetzt. Für das Wörterbuch „Paronyme - Dynamisch im Kontrast“ bildet die Kookkurrenzanalyse gleichfalls einen Ausgangspunkt für die Arbeit an Wortartikeln, allerdings unter anderen Voraussetzungen: Der folgenreichste Unterschied in methodischer Hinsicht ist, dass im Paronymwörterbuch mindestens zwei Stichwörter vergleichend gegenübergestellt werden, um so semantische Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede explizit zu machen. Im Beitrag wird diskutiert, wie die Verfahren der Kookkurrenzanalyse und des nachfolgenden Vergleichs für die praktische Artikelarbeit beim Paronymwörterbuch variiert, spezifiziert und nutzbar gemacht wurden.
Dieser Beitrag zeigt, inwieweit im Projekt „Paronymwörterbuch“ korpuslinguistische und kognitiv-semantische Elemente bei der Entwicklung einer neuen Online-Ressource berücksichtigt wurden. Damit sollen lexikologische und lexikografische Aspekte miteinander erfolgreich verbunden und die Kluft zwischen linguistischer Theorie und redaktioneller Praxis etwas geschlossen werden. Konzeptuell ausgerichtete Angaben, die linguistische und enzyklopädische Informationen eng miteinander verknüpfen, werden in Korpusdaten ermittelt, interpretiert und z. T. abstrahiert. Sprachliches und außersprachliches Wissen lassen sich gemeinsam abspeichern. Dadurch ist es möglich, kontextuell abhängige sprachliche Informationen mit konzeptuellen Realisierungen und mit diskursiv-thematischen Besonderheiten zusammen nachzuschlagen. Darüber hinaus werden in diesem Beitrag anhand eines Beispiels wichtige dynamische Funktionalitäten des neuen Nachschlagewerkes „Paronyme – Dynamisch im Kontrast“ vorgestellt. So wird gezeigt, wie Artikelanordnungen variieren und verschiedene Perspektiven auf linguistische Phänomene eingenommen werden können. Um Informationen bedarfsgerecht und interessenspezifisch abrufen zu können, wurde eine multifunktionale Ressource geschaffen, die sehr flexibel auf verschiedene Nachschlagesituationen reagieren kann und den Bedürfnissen der Nutzer/innen gerechter wird.
Ein sehr mächtiges Instrument für die Untersuchung von Wörtern und Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen ihnen ist die Analyse typischer Verwendungskontexte - unabhängig davon, ob die Evidenzen auf Bedeutungskonstitution, ihre Veränderung oder Verwechslung hinweisen, drei Aspekte, die alle bei der Charakterisierung von Paronymie eine Rolle spielen. Auch wenn für die Ermittlung typischer Verwendungsmuster ausgereifte Methoden zur Verfügung stehen, so sollte beim Vergleich der Analysen doch beachtet werden, dass sie diversen Einflussgrößen unterliegen. Neben der Datengrundlage und der Definition und Handhabung des relevanten Kontextes wird im Folgenden besonders darauf eingegangen, welche Rolle verschiedene Teilmengen eines Flexionsparadigmas spielen können, wenn ein Lemma als dessen Gesamtmenge als sprachliche Bezugseinheit einer Untersuchung gewählt wurde. Veranschaulicht wird die Gedankenführung an der beispielhaften Betrachtung von Paronymkandidaten.
In this paper, we investigate the temporal interpretation of propositional attitude complement clauses in four typologically unrelated languages: Washo (language isolate), Medumba (Niger-Congo), Hausa (Afro-Asiatic), and Samoan (Austronesian). Of these languages, Washo and Medumba are optional-tense languages, while Hausa and Samoan are tenseless. Just like in obligatory-tense languages, we observe variation among these languages when it comes to the availability of so-called simultaneous and backward-shifted readings of complement clauses. For our optional-tense languages, we argue that a Sequence of Tense parameter is active in these languages, just as in obligatory-tense languages. However, for completely tenseless clauses, we need something more. We argue that there is variation in the degree to which languages make recourse to res-movement, or a similar mechanism that manipulates LF structures to derive backward-shifted readings in tenseless complement clauses. We additionally appeal to cross-linguistic variation in the lexical semantics of perfective aspect to derive or block certain readings. The result is that the typological classification of a language as tensed, optionally tensed, or tenseless, does not alone determine the temporal interpretation possibilities for complement clauses. Rather, structural parameters of variation cross-cut these broad classes of languages to deliver the observed cross-linguistic picture.
Das Phänomen der Paronymie hat bisher weder aus Sicht der Korpuslinguistik noch aus Sicht der kognitiven Linguistik große Beachtung gefunden. Bisherige Untersuchungen und erste Definitionsversuche stützten sich nicht auf empirische Analysen, sondern auf ein differenziertes strukturalistisches Modell, das, wenn nicht ausschließlich so doch primär, mit morphologischen Kriterien operiert (vgl. Läzärescu 1999). Sprachgebrauchsbasierte Befunde blieben bislang hingegen unberücksichtigt. Hier setzt dieser Artikel an: Er skizziert aus korpusbasierter und sprachgebrauchsorientierter Perspektive erste Ergebnisse zur Bestimmung und Unterscheidung von Arten der Paronymie hinsichtlich ihrer kommunikativen Funktion, ihrer Diskurszugehörigkeit sowie ihrer semantischen Eigenschaften. Ausgangspunkt ist eine kurze Darstellung des einzigen bisher vorliegenden Klassifikationsmodells von Läzärescu. Anschließend werden unterschiedliche Typen von Paronymen vorgestellt, die im Zuge der empirischen Analysen herausgearbeitet werden konnten. Der Beitrag plädiert für eine differenzierte Betrachtung des komplexen Phänomens, denn die eindimensionale, morphologisch motivierte Klassifikation wird dem Untersuchungsgegenstand nicht gerecht, da zudem sprachgebrauchs- sowie kognitiv-orientierte Parameter für eine Definition bzw. Typologisierung herangezogen werden müssen.
It is commonly agreed that the plural -s has become a part of Standard German inflection, yet in dialects such as Alemannic it is often seen as an intruder. We challenge this view based on data from a written survey amongst speakers of Swiss German dialects. Our analysis of pluralised loanwords (e.g. Mango) and abbreviations (e.g. WG ‘flat share’) shows a strong effect of both speakers’ age and grammatical gender that points towards a progressive integration of the plural -s into the dialectal system.While masculine and neuter nouns can express number syntagmatically (using articles that differ in singular and plural), feminine nouns rely heavily on suffixes (as the definite article is d’in both cases). A comparison of the -s plural with traditional dialectal plurals shows clear advantages for -s plurals in both cue strength (output) and scope (input) of the plural schema. We argue that it is due to this that feminine nouns show a significantly higher percentage of -s plurals compared with masculine and neuter nouns in speakers aged 25 and above. The difference disappears for younger speakers while the overall number of -s plurals increases drastically. Combined, we have an apparent time scenario that shows how the -s plural is first borrowed with nouns that rely on overt plural markers, and later spreads to most loans and other words with non-native structure.
Der Beitrag ist die Verschriftlichung der Laudatio, die die Autorin anlässlich des Festaktes zum 90. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Ulrich Engel am Leibniz‑Institut für Deutsche Sprache (=IDS) gehalten hat. Es handelt sich um eine persönliche Sicht auf fast drei Dekaden Forschungsarbeit, in denen zwischen Engel und der Germanistischen Abteilung der Universität Santiago de Compostela eine sehr enge Forschungskooperation bestand.
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.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden auf der Grundlage authentischer Alltagsinteraktionen die Funktionsspektren der Modalpartikeln 'eben' und 'halt' beschrieben. Es wird dargelegt, dass die Partikeln keinesfalls synonym verwendet werden, sondern distinktive Verwendungen aufweisen. Für 'halt' zeigen sich die drei prominenten Verwendungsweisen i) der Kohärenzherstellung, ii) der Verweis auf gemeinsames Wissen und iii) der Einsatz zur informationsstrukturellen (Beitrags-)Gliederung. 'Eben' wird ebenfalls häufig zur Kohärenzherstellung eingesetzt, und trägt darüber hinaus besonders häufig als strategische Ressource zur rhetorischen Verstärkung einer Argumentation oder Schlussfolgerung bei. Abschließend werden die in der Literatur oft behauptete Ersetzbarkeit von 'halt' durch 'eben' und umgekehrt sowie die häufig zugeschriebene Konnotation von Unabänderlichkeit und Sprecherresignation diskutiert.
We propose a Cross-lingual Encoder-Decoder model that simultaneously translates and generates sentences with Semantic Role Labeling annotations in a resource-poor target language. Unlike annotation projection techniques, our model does not need parallel data during inference time. Our approach can be applied in monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual settings and is able to produce dependencybased and span-based SRL annotations. We benchmark the labeling performance of our model in different monolingual and multilingual settings using well-known SRL datasets. We then train our model in a cross-lingual setting to generate new SRL labeled data. Finally, we measure the effectiveness of our method by using the generated data to augment the training basis for resource-poor languages and perform manual evaluation to show that it produces high-quality sentences and assigns accurate semantic role annotations. Our proposed architecture offers a flexible method for leveraging SRL data in multiple languages.
Naming and titling have been discussed in sociolinguistics as markers of status or solidarity. However, these functions have not been studied on a larger scale or for social media data. We collect a corpus of tweets mentioning presidents of six G20 countries by various naming forms. We show that naming variation relates to stance towards the president in a way that is suggestive of a framing effect mediated by respectfulness. This confirms sociolinguistic theory of naming and titling as markers of status.
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.
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.
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/
Der Beitrag beschreibt ein mehrfach annotiertes Korpus deutschsprachiger Songtexte als Datenbasis für interdisziplinäre Untersuchungsszenarien. Die Ressource erlaubt empirisch begründete Analysen sprachlicher Phänomene, systemischstruktureller Wechselbeziehungen und Tendenzen in den Texten moderner Popmusik. Vorgestellt werden Design und Annotationen des in thematische und autorenspezifische Archive stratifizierten Korpus sowie deskriptive Statistiken am Beispiel des Udo-Lindenberg-Archivs.
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.
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.
In the project LeGeDe („Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch”), we are developing a corpus-based lexicographical resource focusing on features of the lexicon of spoken German. To investigate the expectations of future users, two studies were conducted: interviews with a smaller group of experts and a large-scale online survey. We report on selected results, mainly from the online survey and with a focus on the learning perspective. We want to show if and to which extent the L2-learners’
expectations differ from those of native speakers and in which aspects the two groups agree. We also want to give an outlook on the possibilities that will be available to learners in the planned lexicographical resource.
In the past two decades, more and more dictionary usage studies have been published, but most of them deal with the question what users appreciate about dictionaries, which dictionaries they use and which information they need in specific situations. These studies presuppose that users indeed consult lexicographic resources. However, language teachers and lecturers of linguistics often have the impression that students use too few high-quality dictionaries in their every-day work. Against this background, we started an international cooperation project to collect empirical data evaluating that impression. Our aim was to evaluate what students (here from the Romance language area) actually do when they correct language problems. We used a new methodological setting to do this (screen recording with a thinking-aloud task). The empirical data we gained offers a broad insight into what language users really do when solving language-related tasks today.
The article shows how the topic of dictionaries can be dealt with in German language teaching and how this subject has the potential to acquaint learners with a descriptive and data-driven perspective on language. The project Denkwerk, realized as cooperation among the Institute for German Language, the University of Mannheim and two regional secondary schools, fostered the students’ intellectual
curiosity and their interest in discovering linguistic details. Using empirical methods like corpus analysis, pupils learned both how to write wiki-based dictionary articles on their own and how to publish them in the Denktionary, the dictionary of the project. Our contribution describes the didactic and organisational framework of the project, its aims and contents, its schedule of events, as well as the structure of dictionary articles in the Denktionary, and the observed advantages of such a wikibased system.
Die 21. Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung mit dem Rahmenthema „Vergleichende Gesprächsforschung“ fand vom 21.–23. März 2018 am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim statt. Das Ziel der Tagung war es, Forscherinnen und Forscher zusammenzubringen, die authentische Interaktionsdaten aus vergleichender Perspektive untersuchen. Das Rahmenthema der Tagung ergab sich aus dem steigenden Interesse an vergleichenden Fragestellungen innerhalb konversations- und gesprächsanalytischer Untersuchungen. Die Tagung nahm gezielt Vorgehensweisen und Methoden bei der Durchführung vergleichender Untersuchungen in den Blick. Die Vorträge, Projektpräsentationen und Datensitzungen erörterten 1. das Vergleichen als analytische Grundoperation der Konversations- und Gesprächsanalyse, 2. Vergleiche alternativer Ressourcen und Praktiken für spezifische Handlungen und Aktivitäten in der Interaktion sowie 3. methodologische Herausforderungen einer vergleichenden Gesprächsforschung.
Introduction
(2019)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This investigation targets a syntactic phenomenon of German which is commonly referred to as the absentive construction. The absentive is considered a universal grammatical category denoting absence. Its syntax is characterised by the occurrence of an auxiliary or copula verb accompanied by a non‐finite VP containing a main verb. The expression of absence, predicated over the clausal subject, is assumed to be based on a constructional meaning. Reviewing a wide range of syntactic and interpretive properties of this structure in German, we will demonstrate that certain empirical claims about the construction are not well founded and that its seemingly idiosyncratic properties are indeed available for compositional analyses. We will propose a structural analysis of its core syntactic and interpretive properties: The predication expresses the localisation of the subject at the location of the event, denoted by the infinitival verb. The interpretation of absence, then, can be explained by an implicature.