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Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic and statistical cues are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language.
Latvia
(2019)
This chapter deals with current issues in bilingual education in the framework of language and educational policies in Latvia, and also outlines similarities or common tendencies in the two other Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania. As commonly understood in the 21st century, the term ‘bilingual education’ includes ‘multilingual education, as the umbrella term to cover a wide spectrum of practice and policy’ (García, 2009: 9).
Our paper discusses family language policies among multilingual families in Latvia with Russian as home language. The presentation is based on three case studies, i.e. interviews conducted with Russophones who have chosen to send their children to Latvian-medium pre-schools and schools. The main aim is to understand practices and regards among such families “from below,” i.e. which family-internal and family-external factors influenced the choice of Latvian-medium education and what impact this choice has on linguistic practices.
The paper shows that there have been critical events which both encouraged and discouraged the choice of Latvian-medium education. The wish to integrate into mainstream society has been met by obstacles both from ethnic Russians and Latvians. Yet, the three families consider their choices to be the right ones for the future development of their children in a multiethnic Latvia in which Latvian serves as the unifying language of society.
This article describes an English Zulu learners’ dictionary that is part of a larger set of information tools, namely an online Zulu course, an e-dictionary of possessives (which was implemented earlier) accompanied by training software offering translation tasks on several levels, and an ontology of morphemic items categorizing and describing all parts of speech of Zulu. The underlying lexicographic database contains the usual type of lexicographic data, such as translation equivalents and their respective morphosyntactic data, but its entries have been extended with data related to the lessons of the online course in order to enable the learner to link both tools autonomously. The ‘outer matter’ is integrated into the website in the form of several texts on additional web pages (how-to-use, typical outputs, grammar tables, information on morphosyntactic rules, etc.). The dictionary comprises a modular system, where each module fulfils one of the necessary functions.
In the context of a Nordic Conference on Bilingualism, it can be a rewarding task to look at issues such as language planning, policy and legislation from a perspective of the southern neighbours of the Nordic world. This paper therefore intends to point attention towards a case of societal multilingualism at the periphery of the Nordic world by dealing with recent developments in language policy and legislation with regard to the North Frisian speech community in the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein. As I will show, it is striking to what degree there are considerable differences in the discourse on minority protection and language legislation between the Nordic countries and a cultural area which may arguably be considered to be part of the Nordic fringe - and which itself occasionally takes Scandinavia as a reference point, e.g. in the recent adoption of a pan-Frisian flag modelled on the Nordic cross (Falkena 2006).
The main focus of the paper will be on the Frisian Act which was passed in the Parliament of Schleswig-Holstein in late 2004. It provides a certain legal basis for some political activities with regard to Frisian, but falls short of creating a true spirit of minority language protection and/or revitalisation. In contrast to the traditions of the German and Danish minorities along the German-Danish border and to minority protection in Northern Scandinavia (in particular to Sámi language rights), the approach chosen in the Frisian Act is extremely weak and has no connotation of long-term oriented language-planning, let alone a rights-based perspective.
The paper will then look at policy developments in the time since the Act was passed, e.g. in the Schleswig-Holstein election campaign in 2005, and on latest perceptions of the Frisian language situation in the discourse on North Frisian Policy in Schleswig-Holstein majority society. In the final part of the paper, I will discuss reasons for the differences in minority language policy discourse between Germany and the Nordic countries, and try to provide an outlook on how Frisian could benefit from its geographic proximity to the Nordic world.
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.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native–nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
Communication of stereotypes in the classroom: biased language use of German and Turkish adolescents
(2014)
Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon of describing stereotypes more abstractly. The LIB is the tendency to use language abstraction for in-group protective reasons. Results revealed an unmoderated LEB, whereas the LIB only occurred when foreigners were in the numerical majority, the classroom composition was perceived as a learning disadvantage, or the interethnic conflict frequency was high. These findings provide first evidence for the use of both LEB and LIB in an interethnic classroom setting.
This chapter will present results of a linguistic landscape (LL) project in the regional centre of Rēzekne in the region of Latgale in Eastern Latvia. Latvia was de facto a part of the Soviet Union until 1991, and this has given it a highly multilingual society. In the essentially post-colonial situation since 1991, strict language policies have been in place, which aim to reverse the language shift from Russian, the dominant language of Soviet times, back to Latvian. Thus, the main interests of the research were how the complex pattern of multilingualism in Latvia is reflected in the LL; how people relate to current language legislation; and what motivations, attitudes and emotions inform their behaviour.
Sexual harassment severely impacts the educational system in the West African country Benin and the progress of women in this society that is characterized by great gender inequality. Knowledge of the belief systems rooting in the sociocultural context is crucial to the understanding of sexual harassment. However, no study has yet investigated how sexual harassment is related to fundamental beliefs in Benin or West African countries. We conducted a field study on 265 female and male students from several high schools in Benin to investigate the link between sexual harassment and measures of ambivalent sexism, gender identity, and rape myth acceptance. Almost half of the sample reported having experienced sexual harassment personally or among peers. Levels of sexism and rape myth acceptance were very high compared to other studies. These attitudes appeared to converge in a sexist belief system that was linked to personal experiences, the perceived probability of experiencing and fear of sexual harassment. Results suggest that sexual harassment is a societal problem and that interventions need to address fundamental attitudes held in societies low in gender equality.
Nonnative-accented speakers face prevalent discrimination. The assumption that people freely express negative sentiments toward nonnative speakers has also guided common research methods. However, recent studies did not consistently find downgrading, so that prejudice against nonnative accents might even be questioned at first sight. The present theoretical article will bridge these contradictory findings in three ways: (a) We illustrate that nonnative speakers with foreign accents frequently may not be downgraded in commonly used first-impression and employment scenario paradigms. It appears that relatively controlled responding may be influenced by norms and motivations to respond without prejudice, whereas negative biases emerge in spontaneous responding. (b) We present an integrative view based on knowledge on modern forms of prejudice to develop modern notions of accent-ism, which allow for predictions when accent biases are (not) likely to surface. (c) We conclude with implications for interventions and a tailored research agenda.
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.
The establishment of Scottish Parliament: What difference does it make for the Gaelic language?
(2004)
After the Labour government takeover in Westminster in 1997, followed by the referendum on establishing a Scottish Parliament, hopes for more support for the Gaelic language in Scotland were nourished. In the election campaign to the Scottish Parliament in 1999, all parties which were elected to Parliament had mentioned Gaelic, and all parties except the Conservatives had promised an increase in support for Gaelic (cf. Scottish parties’ election manifestoes, obtainable from the parties or via their web sites). Now that the new Scottish Executive, formed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, has been in power for some time, it is interesting to see if these hopes have been fulfilled.
The two core questions of this paper will thus be:
1. What is the status of Scottish Gaelic after the devolution process?
2. What difference does the existence of the Scottish Parliament make for the status of Gaelic?
It is important to note that this paper refers to language status and Gaelic’s position from a mere language policy perspective. The results are mostly based on an analysis of Parliament documents, the method of investigation being strictly philological. Empirical research has not yet been undertaken. The reference time of my paper will be the first year of Scottish Parliament and the new executive. Even though this is an arbitrary time break, the first year is a symbolic point of time. As the first legislation period as a possibly more natural reference point is not over yet, this choice seems legitimate.
This chapter analyses the impact of political decentralization in a state on the position of ethnic and linguistic minorities, in particular with regard to the role of parliamentary assemblies in the political system. It relates a number of typical functions of parliaments to the specific needs of minorities and their languages. The most important of these functions are the representation of the minority and responsiveness to the minority’s needs. The chapter then discusses six examples from the European Union (and Norway) which prototypically represent different types of parliamentary decentralization: the ethnically defined Sameting in Norway and its importance for the Sámi population, the Scottish Parliament and its role for speakers of Scottish Gaelic, the German regional parliaments of the Länder of Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony and their impact on the Frisian and Sorbian minorities respectively, the autonomy of predominantly German-speaking South Tyrol within the Italian state, and finally the situation of the speakers of Latgalian in Latvia, where a decentralized parliament is missing. The chapter also makes suggestions on comparisons of these situations with minorities in Russia. It finally argues that political decentralization may indeed empower minorities to gain a greater voice in their states, even if much ultimately depends on individual factors in each situation and the attitudes by the majority population and the political center.
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.
This chapter introduces readers to the context and concept of this volume. It starts by providing an historical overview of languages and multilingualism in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, highlighting the 100th anniversary of statehood which the three Baltic states are celebrating in 2018. Then, the chapter briefly presents important strands of research on multilingualism in the region throughout the past decades; in particular, questions about language policies and the status of the national languages (Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian) and Russian. It also touches on debates about languages in education and the roles of other languages such as the regional languages of Latgalian and Võro and the changing roles of international languages such as English and German. The chapter concludes by providing short summaries of the contributions to this book.
Studies on the Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) investigate frequencies, functions, and power relations between languages and their speakers in public space. Research on the LL thereby aims to understand how the production and perception of signs reflect and simultaneously shape realities. In this sense, the LL is one of the most dynamic places where processes of minoritization take place: the (in)visibility of minority languages and the functional and symbolic relationships to majority languages are in direct relationship with negotiations of minorities’ place in society. This chapter looks at minority languages in the LL from two major perspectives. Firstly, it discusses language policies, focussing on which policy categories and which domains of language use are of particular relevance for understanding minority languages in the LL. Then, it turns to issues of conflict, contestation, and exclusion by providing examples from a range of geographically and typologically prototypical case studies, including Israel, Canada, Belgium, the Basque Country, and Friesland.
This paper investigates synchronic variation in the lexical and grammatical environments of the German lexical verb verdienen ‘earn’, ‘deserve’. In its lexical uses, verdienen co-occurs with an object noun phrase whose head is either concrete (e.g. Geld ‘money’) or, more commonly, abstract (e.g. Beachtung ‘attention’). When it is used more grammatically with deontic modal meaning, verdienen is followed by a passive or active infinitive. This paper uses collostructional analyses to contrast lexical and grammatical uses in terms of the most strongly attracted lexical items, which are grouped into semantic classes. The results reflect different degrees of host-class expansion (cf. Himmelmann 2004), whereby the collexemes of verdienen expand from concrete to abstract and their morpho-syntactic contexts from nominal to infinitival complement and subsequently from passive to active. Synchronic distribution can thus serve as a window on diachronic development (Kuteva 2001), in this case the rise of a deontic modality marker.
Automatic summarization systems usually are trained and evaluated in a particular domain with fixed data sets. When such a system is to be applied to slightly different input, labor- and cost-intensive annotations have to be created to retrain the system. We deal with this problem by providing users with a GUI which allows them to correct automatically produced imperfect summaries. The corrected summary in turn is added to the pool of training data. The performance of the system is expected to improve as it adapts to the new domain.
In this paper we present work in developing a computerized grammar for the Latin language. It demonstrates the principles and challenges in developing a grammar for a natural language in a modern grammar formalism. The grammar presented here provides a useful resource for natural language processing applications in different fields. It can be easily adopted for language learning and use in language technology for Cultural Heritage like translation applications or to support post-correction of document digitization.
Beyond the stars: exploiting free-text user reviews to improve the accuracy of movie recommendations
(2009)
In this paper we show that the extraction of opinions from free-text reviews can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations. We present three approaches to extract movie aspects as opinion targets and use them as features for the collaborative filtering. Each of these approaches requires different amounts of manual interaction. We collected a data set of reviews with corresponding ordinal (star) ratings of several thousand movies to evaluate the different features for the collaborative filtering. We employ a state-of-the-art collaborative filtering engine for the recommendations during our evaluation and compare the performance with and without using the features representing user preferences mined from the free-text reviews provided by the users. The opinion mining based features perform significantly better than the baseline, which is based on star ratings and genre information only.
We present a supervised machine learning AND system which tackles semantic similarity between publication titles by means of word embeddings. Word embeddings are integrated as external components, which keeps the model small and efficient, while allowing for easy extensibility and domain adaptation. Initial experiments show that word embeddings can improve the Recall and F score of the binary classification sub-task of AND. Results for the clustering sub-task are less clear, but also promising and overall show the feasibility of the approach.
The demo presents a minimalist, off-the-shelf AND tool which provides a fundamental AND operation, the comparison of two publications with ambiguous authors, as an easily accessible HTTP interface. The tool implements this operation using standard AND functionality, but puts particular emphasis on advanced methods from natural language processing (NLP) for comparing publication title semantics.
Lexical resources are often represented in table form, e. g., in relational databases, or represented in specially marked up texts, for example, in document based XML models. This paper describes how it is possible to model lexical structures as graphs and how this model can be used to exploit existing lexical resources and even how different types of lexical resources can be combined.
In this contribution we present some work of the R&D European project “LIRICS” and of the ISO/TC 37/SC 4 committee related to the topic of interoperability and re-use of language resources. We introduce some basic mechanisms of the standardization work in ISO and describe in more details the general approach on how to cope with the annotation of language data within ISO.
Drawing on naturalistic video and audio recordings of international meetings, and within the framework of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and interactional linguistics, this chapter studies how multilingual resources are mobilized in social interactions among professionals, how available linguistic and embodied resources are identified and used by the participants, which solutions are locally elaborated by them when they are confronted with various languages spoken but not shared among them, and which definition of multilingualism they adopt for all practical purposes. Focusing on the multilingual solutions emically elaborated in international professional meetings, we show that the participants orient to a double principle: on the one hand, they orient to the progressivity of the interaction, adopting all the possible resources that enable them to go on within the current activity; on the other hand, they orient to the intersubjectivity of the interaction, treating, preventing and repairing possible troubles and problems of understanding. Specific multilingual solutions can be adopted to keep this difficult balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity; they vary according to the settings, the competences at hand, the linguistic and embodied resources locally defined by the participants as publicly available, the multilingual resources treated as totally or partially shared, as transparent or opaque, and as needing repair or not. The paper begins by sketching the analytical framework, including the methodology and the data collected; it then presents some general findings, before offering an analysis of various ways in which participants keep the balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity in different multilingual interactional contexts.
Since Lerner coined the notion of delayed completion in 1989, this recurrent social practice of continuing one’s speaking turn while disregarding an intermediate co-participant’s utterance has not been investigated with regard to embodied displays and actions. A sequential approach to videotaped mundane conversations in German will explain the occurrence and use of delayed completions. First, especially in multi-party and multi-activity settings, delayed completions can result from reduced monitoring and coordinating activities. Second, recipients can use intra-turn response slots for more extended responsive actions than the current speaker initially projected, leading to delayed completion sequences. Finally, delayed completions are used for blocking possibly misaligned co-participant actions. The investigation of visible action illustrates that delayed completions are a basic practice for retrospectively managing co-participant response slots.
On the basis of a single case analysis of the emergence of an ethnic joke, this paper explores issues related to laughter in international business meetings. More particularly, it deals with ways in which a person's name is correctly pronounced. Speakers and co-participants seem to orient towards ‘proper’ ways of vocalizing names and to consequent ‘variations’ or ‘deviations’ from them, making different ways of pronunciation available as a laughable. In making such pronunciation variations available, accountable and recognizable, participants reflexively establish as relevant the multilingual character of the activity, of the participants’ competences and of the setting; conversely, they exploit these multilingual features within specific social practices, leading to laughter.
Our analysis focuses on the contexts of action, the sequential environments and the interactional practices by which the uttering of a name becomes a ‘laughable’ and then a resource for an ethnic joke. Moreover, it explores the implications of transforming the pronunciation into a laughable in terms of the organization of the ongoing activity, changing participation frameworks and membership categorizations. In this sense, it highlights the flexible structure of groups and the way in which laughter reconfigures them through local affiliating and disaffiliating moves, and by making various national categories available and relevant.
Dropping out of overlap is a frequent practice for overlap resolution (Schegloff, 2000, Jefferson, 2004) in interaction, as it re-establishes the “one-at-a-time” principle of the turn-taking system (Sacks et al., 1974). While it is appropriate to analyze the practice of dropping out of overlap as a verbal and thus audible phenomenon, a close look at video data reveals that withdrawing from an action trajectory is also an embodied practice. Based on a fine-grained multimodal analysis (C. Goodwin, 1981, Mondada, 2007a, Mondada, 2007b) of videotaped interactions in French, this paper illustrates how overlapped speakers organize the momentary suspension of their action trajectory in visible ways. Indeed, participants do not instantly withdraw from their action trajectory when they stop talking. By using bodily resources, they are able to display continuous monitoring of the availability of their co-participants and of the next possible slot for resuming their suspended action. I therefore suggest analyzing the drop out of overlap as the first step of withdrawal, as definitive, embodied withdrawal can occur later, or, in case of resumption, not at all. Consequently, my paper analyzes withdrawal as a good example of strengthening the analytic concept of embodiment with regard to turn-taking practices in interaction.
As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
The use of digital resources and tools across humanities disciplines is steadily increasing, giving rise to new research paradigms and associated methods that are commonly subsumed under the term digital humanities. Digital humanities does not constitute a new discipline in itself, but rather a new approach to humanities research that cuts across different existing humanities disciplines. While digital humanities extends well beyond language-based research, textual resources and spoken language materials play a central role in most humanities disciplines.
The ISOcat registry reloaded
(2012)
The linguistics community is building a metadata-based infrastructure for the description of its research data and tools. At its core is the ISOcat registry, a collaborative platform to hold a (to be standardized) set of data categories (i.e., field descriptors). Descriptors have definitions in natural language and little explicit interrelations. With the registry growing to many hundred entries, authored by many, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the rather informal definitions and their glossary-like design make it hard for users to grasp, exploit and manage the registry’s content. In this paper, we take a large subset of the ISOcat term set and reconstruct from it a tree structure following the footsteps of schema.org. Our ontological re-engineering yields a representation that gives users a hierarchical view of linguistic, metadata-related terminology. The new representation adds to the precision of all definitions by making explicit information which is only implicitly given in the ISOcat registry. It also helps uncovering and addressing potential inconsistencies in term definitions as well as gaps and redundancies in the overall ISOcat term set. The new representation can serve as a complement to the existing ISOcat model, providing additional support for authors and users in browsing, (re-)using, maintaining, and further extending the community’s terminological metadata repertoire.
The transfer of research data management from one institution to another infrastructural partner is all but trivial, but can be required, for instance, when an institution faces reorganization or closure. In a case study, we describe the migration of all research data, identify the challenges we encountered, and discuss how we addressed them. It shows that the moving of research data management to another institution is a feasible, but potentially costly enterprise. Being able to demonstrate the feasibility of research data migration supports the stance of data archives that users can expect high levels of trust and reliability when it comes to data safety and sustainability.
The chapter on formats and models for lexicons deals with different available data formats of lexical resources. It elaborates on their structure and possible uses. Motivated by the restrictions in merging different lexical resources based on widely spread formalisms and international standards, a formal lexicon model for lexical resources is developed which is related to graph structures in annotations. For lexicons this model is termed the Lexicon Graph. Within this model the concepts of lexicon entries and lexical structures frequently described in the literature are formally defined and examples are given. The article addresses the problem of ambiguity in those formal terms. An implementation based on XML and XML technology such as XQuery for the defined structures is given. The relation to international standards is included as well.
Although there is a growing interest of policy makers in higher education issues (especially on an international scale), there is still a lack of theoretically well-grounded comparative analyses of higher education policy. Even broadly discussed topics in higher education research like the potential convergence of European higher education systems in the course of the Bologna Process suffer from a thin empirical and comparative basis. This paper aims to deal with these problems by addressing theoretical questions concerning the domestic impact of the Bologna Process and the role national factors play in determining its effects on cross-national policy convergence. It develops a distinct theoretical approach for the systematic and comparative analysis of cross-national policy convergence. In doing so, it relies upon insights from related research areas — namely literature on Europeanization as well as studies dealing with cross-national policy convergence.
Several studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In this study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty. Consistent with previous results from Wotschack and Kliegl, the question difficulty manipulation influenced the probability of regressing from late in sentences and re-reading earlier regions; readers who expected difficult comprehension questions were more likely to re-read. However, this manipulation had no reliable influence on eye movements during first-pass reading of earlier sentence regions. Moreover, for the subset of sentences that contained a plausibility manipulation, the disruption induced by implausibility was not modulated by the question manipulation. We interpret these results as suggesting that comprehension demands influence reading behavior primarily by modulating a criterion for comprehension that readers apply after completing first-pass processing.
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.
Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related potential studies. However, previous research suggests that while frequency affects the N400 in single-word tasks, it may have little or no effect on the N400 when a word is presented with a preceding sentence context. The present study assessed this apparent dissociation between the results from the 2 methods using a coregistration paradigm in which the frequency and predictability of a target word were manipulated while readers’ eye movements and electroencephalograms were simultaneously recorded. We replicated the pattern of significant, and additive, effects of the 2 manipulations on eye fixation durations. We also replicated the predictability effect on the N400, time-locked to the onset of the reader’s first fixation on the target word. However, there was no indication of a frequency effect in the electroencephalogram record. We suggest that this pattern has implications both for the interpretation of the N400 and for the interpretation of frequency and predictability effects in language comprehension.
This study investigates the question of whether the processing of complex anaphors require more cognitive effort than the processing of NP-anaphors. Complex anaphors refer to abstract objects which are not introduced as a noun phrase and bring about the creation of a new discourse referent. This creation is called “complexation process”. We describe ERP findings which provide converging support for the assumption that the cognitive cost of this complexation process is higher than the cognitive cost of processing NP-anaphors.
Authors like Fillmore 1986 and Goldberg 2006 have made a strong case for regarding argument omission in English as a lexical and construction-based affordance rather than one based on general semantico-pragmatic constraints. They do not, however, address the question of how grammatical restrictions on null complementation might interact with broader narrative conventions, in particular those of genre. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this oversight by presenting a comprehensive overview of genre-based argument omissions and offering a construction-based analysis of genre-based omission conventions. We consider five genre-based omission types: instructional imperatives (Culy 1996, Bender 1999), labelese, diary style (Haegeman 1990), match reports (Ruppenhofer 2004) and quotative clauses. We show that these omission types share important traits; all, for example, have anaphoric rather than indefinite construals. We also show, however, that the omission types differ from each other in idiosyncratic ways. We then address several interrelated representational problems posed by the grammatical treatment of genre-based omissions. For example, the constructions that represent genre-based omission conventions must interact with the lexical entries of verbs, many of which do not generally permit omitted arguments. Accordingly, we offer constructional analyses of genre-based omissions that allow constructions to override lexical valence constraints.
Preface
(2010)
This paper deals with multiword lexemes (MWLs), focussing on two types of verbal MWLs: verbal idioms and support verb constructions. We discuss the characteristic properties of MWLs, namely nonstandard compositionality, restricted substitutability of components, and restricted morpho-syntactic flexibility, and we show how these properties may cause serious problems during the analysis, generation, and transfer steps of machine translation systems. In order to cope with these problems, MT lexicons need to provide detailed descriptions of MWL properties. We list the types of information which we consider the necessary minimum for a successful processing of MWLs, and report on some feasibility studies aimed at the automatic extraction of German verbal multiword lexemes from text corpora and machine-readable dictionaries.
This paper deals with different views of lexical semantics. The focus is on the relationship between lexical expressions and conceptual components. First the assumptions about lexicalization and decompositionality of concepts shared by the most semanticists are presented, followed by a discussion of the differences between two-level-semantics and one-level-semantics. The final part is concentrated on the interpretation of conceptual components in situations of communication.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in the perceptual quality of a text-to-speech system. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of a symbolic representation which was either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic representation is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, post-lexical segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to derive an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.