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This paper presents a short insight into a new project at the "Institute for the German Language” (IDS) (Mannheim). It gives an insight into some basic ideas for a corpus-based dictionary of spoken German, which will be developed and compiled by the new project "The Lexicon of spoken German” (Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe). The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German” (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK), which is implemented in the "Database for Spoken German” (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch, DGD). Both resources, the database and the corpus, have been developed at the IDS.
This paper deals with the creation of the first morphological treebank for German by merging two pre-existing linguistic databases. The first of these is the linguistic database CELEX which is a standard resource for German morphology. We build on its refurbished and modernized version. The second resource is GermaNet, a lexical-semantic network which also provides partial markup for compounds. We describe the state of the art and the essential characteristics of both databases and our latest revisions. As the merging involves two data sources with distinct annotation schemes, the derivation of the morphological trees for the unified resource is not trivial. We discuss how we overcome problems with the data and format, in particular how we deal with overlaps and complementary scopes. The resulting database comprises about 100,000 trees whose format can be chosen according to the requirements of the application at hand. In our discussion, we show some future directions for morphological treebanks. The Perl script for the generation of the data from the sources will be made publicly available on our website.
This paper gives an insight into the basic concepts for a corpus-based lexical resource of spoken German, which is being developed by the project "The Lexicon of Spoken German"(Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe) at the "Institute for the German Language" (Institut für Deutsche Sprache, IDS) in Mannheim. The focus of the paper is on initial ideas of semi-automatic and automatic resources that assist the quantitative analysis of the corpus data for the creation of dictionary content. The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German" (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK).
This paper discusses changes of lexicographic traditions with respect to approaches to meaning descriptions towards more cognitive perspectives. I will uncover how cognitive aspects can be incorporated into meaning descriptions based on corpus-driven analysis. The new German Online dictionary “Paronyme − Dynamisch im Kontrast” (Storjohann 2014; 2016) is concerned with easily confused words such as effektiv/effizient, sensibel/sensitiv. It is currently in the process of being developed and it aims at adopting a more conceptual and encyclopaedic approach to meaning by incorporating cognitive features. As a corpus-guided reference work it strives to adequately reflect ideas such as conceptual structure, categorisation and knowledge. Contrastive entries emphasise aspects of usage, comparing conceptual categories and indicate the (metonymic) mapping of knowledge. Adaptable access to lexicographic details and variable search options offer different foci and perspectives on linguistic information, and authentic examples reflect prototypical structures. Some of the cognitive features are demonstrated with the help of examples. Firstly, I will outline how patterns of usage imply conceptual categories as central ideas instead of sufficiently logical criteria of semantic distinction. In this way, linguistic findings correlate better with how users conceptualise language. Secondly, it is pointed out how collocates are treated as family members and fillers in contexts. Thirdly, I will demonstrate how contextual structure and functions are included summarising referential information. Details are drawn from corpus data, they are usage-based linguistic patterns illustrating conversational interaction and semantic negotiations in contemporary public discourse. Finally, I will outline consultation routines which activate different facets of structural knowledge, e.g. through changes of the ordering of information or through the visualisation of semantic networks.
In this paper, we will present a first attempt to classify commonly confused words in German by consulting their communicative functions in corpora. Although the use of so-called paronyms causes frequent uncertainties due to similarities in spelling, sound and semantics, up until now the phenomenon has attracted little attention either from the perspective of corpus linguistics or from cognitive linguistics. Existing investigations rely on structuralist models, which do not account for empirical evidence. Still, they have developed an elaborate model based on formal criteria, primarily on word formation (cf. Lăzărescu 1999). Looking from a corpus perspective, such classifications are incompatible with language in use and cognitive elements of misuse.
This article sketches first lexicological insights into a classification model as derived from semantic analyses of written communication. Firstly, a brief description of the project will be provided. Secondly, corpus-assisted paronym detection will be focused. Thirdly, in the main section the paper concerns the description of the datasets for paronym classification and the classification procedures. As a work in progress, new insights will continually be extended once spoken and CMC data are added to the investigations.
Modeling the properties of German phrasal compounds within a usage-based constructional approach
(2017)
This paper discusses phrasal compounds in German (e.g.“Man-muss-doch-überalles-reden-können”-Credo, ‘one-should-be-able-to-talk-about-everything motto’). It provides the first empirically based investigation and description of this wordformation type within the theoretical framework of construction grammar. While phrasal compounds pose a problem for “traditional” generative approaches, I argue that a usage-based constructional model (e.g. Langacker 1987; Goldberg 2006) which takes into consideration aspects of frequency provides a suitable approach to modeling and explaining their properties. For this purpose, a large inventory of phrasal compounds was extracted from the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and modeled as pairings of form and meaning at different levels of specificity and abstractness within a bottom-up process.
Overall, this paper not only presents a new and original approach to phrasal compounds, but also offers interesting perspectives for dealing with composition in general.
In the lexicon of pidgin and creole languages we can see an important part of these languages’ history of origin and of language contact. The current paper deals with the lexical sources of Tok Pisin and, more specifically, with words of German origin found in this language. During the period of German colonial domination of New Guinea and a number of insular territories in the Pacific (ca. 1885–1915), German words entered the emerging Tok Pisin lexicon. Based on a broad range of lexical and lexicographic data from the early 20th century up until today, we investigate the actual or presumed German origin of a number of Tok Pisin words and trace different lexical processes of integration that are linked to various, often though not always colonially determined, contact settings and sociocultural interactions.
CoMParS is a resource under construction in the context of the long-term project German Grammar in European Comparison (GDE) at the IDS Mannheim. The principal goal of GDE is to create a novel contrastive grammar of German against the background of other European languages. Alongside German, which is the central focus, the core languages for comparison are English, French, Hungarian and Polish, representing different typological classes. Unlike traditional contrastive grammars available for German, which usually cover language pairs and are based on formal grammatical categories, the new GDE grammar is developed in the spirit of functionalist typology. This implies that, instead of formal criteria, cognitively motivated functional domains in terms of Givón (1984) are used as tertia comparationis. The purpose of CoMParS is to document the empirical basis of the theoretical assumptions of GDE-V and to illustrate the otherwise rather abstract content of grammar books by as many as possible naturally occurring and adequately presented multilingual examples, including information on their use in specific contexts and registers. These examples come from existing parallel corpora, and our presentation will focus on the legal aspects and consequences of this choice of language data.
CMC Corpora in DeReKo
(2017)
We introduce three types of corpora of computer-mediated communication that have recently been compiled at the Institute for the German Language or curated from an external project and included in DeReKo, the German Reference Corpus, namely Wikipedia (discussion) corpora, the Usenet news corpus, and the Dortmund Chat Corpus. The data and corpora have been converted to I5, the TEI customization to represent texts in DeReKo, and are researchable via the web-based IDS corpus research interfaces and in the case of Wikipedia and chat also downloadable from the IDS repository and download server, respectively.
"What makes this so complicated?" On the value of disorienting dilemmas in language instruction
(2017)
We propose a new type of subword embedding designed to provide more information about unknown compounds, a major source for OOV words in German. We present an extrinsic evaluation where we use the compound embeddings as input to a neural dependency parser and compare the results to the ones obtained with other types of embeddings. Our evaluation shows that adding compound embeddings yields a significant improvement of 2% LAS over using word embeddings when no POS information is available. When adding POS embeddings to the input, however, the effect levels out. This suggests that it is not the missing information about the semantics of the unknown words that causes problems for parsing German, but the lack of morphological information for unknown words. To augment our evaluation, we also test the new embeddings in a language modelling task that requires both syntactic and semantic information.
We present a method to identify and document a phenomenon on which there is very little empirical data: German phrasal compounds occurring in the form of as a single token (without punctuation between their components). Relying on linguistic criteria, our approach implies to have an operational notion of compounds which can be systematically applied as well as (web) corpora which are large and diverse enough to contain rarely seen phenomena. The method is based on word segmentation and morphological analysis, it takes advantage of a data-driven learning process. Our results show that coarse-grained identification of phrasal compounds is best performed with empirical data, whereas fine-grained detection could be improved with a combination of rule-based and frequency-based word lists. Along with the characteristics of web texts, the orthographic realizations seem to be linked to the degree of expressivity.
This chapter investigates policies which shape the role of the German language in contemporary Estonia. Whereas German played for many centuries an important role as the language of the economic and cultural elite in Estonia, it severely declined in importance throughout the twentieth century. Mirrored on this historical background, the paper provides an overview of the current functions of German and attitudes towards it and it discusses how these functions and attitudes are influenced by policies of various actors from inside and outside Estonia. The paper argues that German continues to play a significant role: while German is no longer a lingua franca, it still enjoys a number of functions and prestige in clearly defined niches involving communication within German-speaking circles or between Estonians and Germans. The interplay of language policies of the Estonian and the German-speaking states as well as by semi-state and private institutions succeed in maintaining German as an additional language in contemporary Estonia.
To improve grammatical function labelling for German, we augment the labelling component of a neural dependency parser with a decision history. We present different ways to encode the history, using different LSTM architectures, and show that our models yield significant improvements, resulting in a LAS for German that is close to the best result from the SPMRL 2014 shared task (without the reranker).
In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes from systematic variation in the design of imperative turns, relative to the fittedness of the imperatively mandated action to the addressee’s ongoing trajectory of actions, what we call the “dine of commitment”. We present four points on this dine: Responsive imperatives perform an operation on the deontic dimension of what the addressee has announced or already begun to do (in particular its permissibility); local-project imperatives formulate a new action advancing a course of action in which the addressee is already actively engaged; global-project-imperatives target a next task for which the addressee is available on the grounds of their participation in the overall event, and in the absence of any competing work; and competitive imperatives draw on a presently otherwise engaged addressee on the grounds of their social commitment to the relevant course of actions. These four turn shapes are increasingly complex, reflecting the interactional work required to bridge the increasing distance between what the addressee is currently doing, and what the imperative mandates. We present data from German and Polish informal and institutional settings.
Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.
Basic grammatical categories may carry social meanings irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs—a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages—are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension of social perception. In an archival analysis of actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and older people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not with communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and an integral part of social perception.
The present paper examines the rise and fall of Modern High German loanwords in English from 1600 until 2000, principally making use of the record of borrowing documented by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in its Third Edition (online version, in revision 2000-). Groups of loanwords are analysed by century, with reference to the changing social and cultural landscape characterising relationships between the relevant nations over this period. This is not a simple picture: each language grows over the period in different ways, and the speakers of English look to German at different times for different types of borrowing, as the political and intellectual balance alters.