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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.
Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
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.
Just like most varieties of West Germanic, virtually all varieties of German use a construction in which a cognate of the English verb 'do' (standard German 'tun') functions as an auxiliary and selects another verb in the bare infinitive, a construction known as 'do'-periphrasis or 'do'-support. The present paper provides an Optimality Theoretic (OT) analysis of this phenomenon. It builds on a previous analysis by Bader and Schmid (An OT-analysis of 'do'-support in Modern German, 2006) but (i) extends it from root clauses to subordinate clauses and (ii) aims to capture all of the major distributional patterns found across (mostly non-standard) varieties of German. In so doing, the data are used as a testing ground for different models of German clause structure. At first sight, the occurrence of 'do' in subordinate clauses, as found in many varieties, appears to support the standard CP-IP-VP analysis of German. In actual fact, however, the full range of data turn out to challenge, rather than support, this model. Instead, I propose an analysis within the IP-less model by Haider (Deutsche Syntax - generativ. Vorstudien zur Theorie einer projektiven Grammatik, Narr, Tübingen, 1993 et seq.). In sum, the 'do'-support data will be shown to have implications not only for the analysis of clause structure but also for the OT constraints commonly assumed to govern the distribution of 'do', for the theory of non-projecting words (Toivonen in Non-projecting words, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2003) as well as research on grammaticalization.
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.
We continue the study of the reproducibility of Propp’s annotations from Bod et al. (2012). We present four experiments in which test subjects were taught Propp’s annotation system; we conclude that Propp’s system needs a significant amount of training, but that with sufficient time investment, it can be reliably trained for simple tales.
Automatic recognition of speech, thought, and writing representation in German narrative texts
(2013)
This article presents the main results of a project, which explored ways to recognize and classify a narrative feature—speech, thought, and writing representation (ST&WR)—automatically, using surface information and methods of computational linguistics. The task was to detect and distinguish four types—direct, free indirect, indirect, and reported ST&WR—in a corpus of manually annotated German narrative texts. Rule-based as well as machine-learning methods were tested and compared. The results were best for recognizing direct ST&WR (best F1 score: 0.87), followed by indirect (0.71), reported (0.58), and finally free indirect ST&WR (0.40). The rule-based approach worked best for ST&WR types with clear patterns, like indirect and marked direct ST&WR, and often gave the most accurate results. Machine learning was most successful for types without clear indicators, like free indirect ST&WR, and proved more stable. When looking at the percentage of ST&WR in a text, the results of machine-learning methods always correlated best with the results of manual annotation. Creating a union or intersection of the results of the two approaches did not lead to striking improvements. A stricter definition of ST&WR, which excluded borderline cases, made the task harder and led to worse results for both approaches.
Feminine forms of job titles raise great interest in many countries. However, it is still unknown how they shape stereotypical impressions on warmth and competence dimensions among female and male listeners. In an experiment with fictitious job titles men perceived women described with feminine job titles as significantly less warm and marginally less competent than women with masculine job titles, which led to lower willingness to employ them. No such effects were observed among women.
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be derived from this more general semantic contribution. In addition we discuss some cross linguistic consequences of our analysis.
In this article, we examine the effectiveness of bootstrapping supervised machine-learning polarity classifiers with the help of a domain-independent rule-based classifier that relies on a lexical resource, i.e., a polarity lexicon and a set of linguistic rules. The benefit of this method is that though no labeled training data are required, it allows a classifier to capture in-domain knowledge by training a supervised classifier with in-domain features, such as bag of words, on instances labeled by a rule-based classifier. Thus, this approach can be considered as a simple and effective method for domain adaptation. Among the list of components of this approach, we investigate how important the quality of the rule-based classifier is and what features are useful for the supervised classifier. In particular, the former addresses the issue in how far linguistic modeling is relevant for this task. We not only examine how this method performs under more difficult settings in which classes are not balanced and mixed reviews are included in the data set but also compare how this linguistically-driven method relates to state-of-the-art statistical domain adaptation.
Complex common names such as Indian elephant or green tea denote a certain type of entity, viz. kinds. Moreover, those kinds are always subkinds of the kind denoted by their head noun. Establishing such subkinds is essentially the task of classifying modifiers that are a defining trait of endocentrically structured complex common names. Examining complex common names of different lexico-syntactic types(NN compounds, N+N syntagmas, NP/PP syntagmas, A+N syntagmas) and from different languages (particularly English, German and French) it can be shown that complex common names are subject to language- independent formal and semantic constraints. In particular, complex common names qualify as name-like expressions in that they tend to be deficient in terms of formal complexity and semantic compositionality.
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
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.
Most research on ethnicity has focused on visual cues. However, accents are strong social cues that can match or contradict visual cues. We examined understudied reactions to people whose one cue suggests one ethnicity, whereas the other cue contradicts it. In an experiment conducted in Germany, job candidates spoke with an accent either congruent or incongruent with their (German or Turkish) appearance. Based on ethnolinguistic identity theory, we predicted that accents would be strong cues for categorization and evaluation. Based on expectancy violations theory we expected that incongruent targets would be evaluated more extremely than congruent targets. Both predictions were confirmed: accents strongly influenced perceptions and Turkish-looking German-accented targets were perceived as most competent of all targets (and additionally most warm). The findings show that bringing together visual and auditory information yields a more complete picture of the processes underlying impression formation.
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.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DEREKO and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
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.
Coronaparty, Jo-jo-Lockdown und Mask-have – Wortschatzerweiterung während des Corona-Stillstands
(2021)
In this article, we explore the feasibility of extracting suitable and unsuitable food items for particular health conditions from natural language text. We refer to this task as conditional healthiness classification. For that purpose, we annotate a corpus extracted from forum entries of a food-related website. We identify different relation types that hold between food items and health conditions going beyond a binary distinction of suitability and unsuitability and devise various supervised classifiers using different types of features. We examine the impact of different task-specific resources, such as a healthiness lexicon that lists the healthiness status of a food item and a sentiment lexicon. Moreover, we also consider task-specific linguistic features that disambiguate a context in which mentions of a food item and a health condition co-occur and compare them with standard features using bag of words, part-of-speech information and syntactic parses. We also investigate in how far individual food items and health conditions correlate with specific relation types and try to harness this information for classification.
When collecting linguistic data using translation tasks, stimuli can be presented in written or in oral form. In doing so, there is a possibility that a systematic source of error can occur that can be traced back to the selected survey method and which can influence the results of the translation tasks. This contribution investigates whether and to what extent both of the aforementioned survey methods result in divergent results when using translation tasks. For this investigation, 128 informants provided linguistic data; each informant had to translate 25 Wenker sentences from Standard German into either East Swabian, Lechrain or West Central Bavarian dialect, as the case may be. The results show two tendencies. First, written stimuli lead to a slightly higher number of dialectal translation in segmental variables. Second, when oral stimuli are used, syntactic and lexical variables are translated significantly more often in such a manner that they diverge from the template. The results can be explained in terms of varying cognitive processing operations and the constraints of human working memory. When collecting data in the future, these tendencies should be taken into account.
Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der Analyse des Zusammenspiels sprachlich-hörbarer und sichtbar-kinesischer Praktiken, die beim alltäglichen Erzählen eingesetzt werden. Im Rahmen einer konversationsanalytisch basierten Untersuchung von Videoaufnahmen deutscher Alltagsgespräche wird die Bandbreite alltäglicher narrativer Praktiken in der face-to-face-Kommunikation aufgezeigt. Dies erfolgt exemplarisch anhand zweier Beispiele, in denen Einstieg, Ausgestaltung sowie Beendigung der Erzählung unter unterschiedlichen sequentiellen und multimodalen Bedingungen vollzogen werden. Die Untersuchung unterstreicht einerseits die Indexikalität alltäglicher narrativer Praktiken, andererseits die Notwendigkeit einer interaktionalen Narratologie, die diese Praktiken als Produkt sprachlicher, verkörperter und räumlicher Ressourcen sowie der Zusammenarbeit mehrerer Teilnehmer analysiert und konzeptualisiert.
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.
Einigendes Band zerfasert?
(1991)
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.
This paper deals with the constructional variation of emotion predicates in Estonian. It gives an overview on the constructional types, including information of their quantitative distribution. It is shown that one characteristic of Estonian is the formation of pairs of converses, i.e. pairs of emotion verbs, which have the same emotion semantics but different argument realisation patterns. These converses are based on derivational morphology such as the causative morphem –ta ‘CAUS’. Causative derivation has been adduced in the theoretical literature as support for the assumption that the cross-linguistically wide-spread constructional variation in emotion predicates has its origin in a difference of the causal structure in the verbal semantics. This paper shows that the data of Estonian contradicts this assumption.
We present a technique called event mapping that allows to project text representations into event lists, produce an event table, and derive quantitative conclusions to compare the text representations. The main application of the technique is the case where two classes of text representations have been collected in two different settings (e.g., as annotations in two different formal frameworks) and we can compare the two classes with respect to their systematic differences in the event table. We illustrate how the technique works by applying it to data collected in two experiments (one using annotations in Vladimir Propp’s framework, the other using natural language summaries).
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.
This article deals with three interrelated phenoma in the information structure of German sentences: the focusing of negative markers, of finite verb forms and of the particles ja, doch, wohl and schon. Focusing of the finite verb is the most important marker of verum focus, as described by Höhle (1988). Focusing of particles can be an alternative means for similar purposes, while focusing of negation seems to be the contradictory opposite of verum focus. It is shown that negation- independently of its information structural status - can be interpreted on three distinct levels of sentence meaning: as an indicator of the non-facticity of a state of affairs, the non-truth of a proposition, or the non-desirability of a speech act. Focusing of the negative marker puts contrastive emphasis on the negative value assigned to sentence meaning on one of these levels. Ve rum focus can be interpreted on the same three levels: as a marker of contrastive emphasis on a positive value of facticity, truth or desirability. The particles ja, doch, wohl and schon refer to sufficient epistemic or interactional conditions for the assignment of a positive or negative value. By focusing such a particle, the speaker indicates that (s)he believes the assigned value to be well justified and insists on establishing it as common ground for further interaction.
Psychological research has neglected people whose accent does not match their appearance. Most research on person perception has focused on appearance, overlooking accents that are equally important social cues. If accents were studied, it was often done in isolation (i.e., detached from appearance). We examine how varying accent and appearance information about people affects evaluations. We show that evaluations of expectancy-violating people shift in the direction of the added information. When a job candidate looked foreign, but later spoke with a native accent, his evaluations rose and he was evaluated best of all candidates (Experiment 1a). However, the sequence in which information was presented mattered: When heard first and then seen, his evaluations dropped (Experiment 1b). Findings demonstrate the importance of studying the combination and sequence of different types of information in impression formation. They also allow predicting reactions to ethnically mixed people, who are increasingly present in modern societies.
A polarity-sensitive item (PSI), as traditionally defined, is an expression that is restricted to either an affirmative or negative context. PSIs like ‘lift a finger’ and ‘all the time in the world’ sub-serve discourse routines like understatement and emphasis. Lexical–semantic classes are increasingly invoked in descriptions of the properties of PSIs. Here, we use English corpus data and the tools of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982, 1985) to explore Israel’s (2011) observation that the semantic role of a PSI determines how the expression fits into a contextually constructed scalar model. We focus on a class of exceptions implied by Israel’s model: cases in which a given PSI displays two countervailing patterns of polarity sensitivity, with attendant differences in scalar entailments. We offer a set of case studies of polaritysensitive expressions – including verbs of attraction and aversion like ‘can live without’, monetary units like ‘a red cent’, comparative adjectives and time-span adverbials – that demonstrate that the interpretation of a given PSI in a given polar context is based on multiple factors. These factors include the speaker’s perspective on and affective stance towards the described event, available inferences about causality and, perhaps most critically, particulars of the predication, including the verb or adjective’s frame membership, the presence or absence of an ability modal like can, the grammatical construction used and the range of contingencies evoked by the utterance.
Durch den Dezentralisierungsprozess in Großbritannien gibt es seit etwa einem Jahr neue Hoffnung für ein dauerhaftes Überleben der gälischen Sprache in Schottland. Mit der Einrichtung eines schottischen Parlaments, das seit Mai 1999 für innere Belange Schottlands verantwortlich ist, ist die gälischsprachige Bevölkerung viel näher an das Machtzentrum heran gerückt.
This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analysis. An interactional episode involving mock stories to reveal and reproach an inadequate identity-claim of a co-participant is analysed both in terms of practices of membership categorization and positioning. It is concluded that membership categorization is a core element of positioning. Still, positioning goes beyond membership categorization in a) revealing biographical dimensions accomplished by narration and b) by uncovering implicit performative claims of identity, which are not established by categorization or description.
How to propose an action as an objective necessity. The case of Polish trzeba x (‘one needs to x’)
(2011)
The present study demonstrates that language-specific grammatical resources can afford speakers language-specific ways of organizing cooperative practical action. On the basis of video recordings of Polish families in their homes, we describe action affordances of the Polish impersonal modal declarative construction trzeba x (“one needs to x”) in the accomplishment of everyday domestic activities, such as cutting bread, bringing recalcitrant children back to the dinner table, or making phone calls. Trzeba-x turns in first position are regularly chosen by speakers to point to a possible action as an evident necessity for the furthering of some broader ongoing activity. Such turns in first position provide an environment in which recipients can enact shared responsibility by actively involving themselves in the relevant action. Treating the necessity as not restricted to any particular subject, aligning responsive actions are oriented to when the relevant action will be done, not whether it will be done. We show that such sequences are absent from English interactions by analyzing (a) grammatically similar turn formats in English interaction (“we need to x,” “the x needs to y”), and (b) similar interactive environments in English interactions. We discuss the potential of this research to point to a new avenue for researchers interested in the relationship between language diversity and diversity in human action and cognition.
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.
Social perception studies have revealed that smiling individuals are perceived more favourably on many communion dimensions in comparison to nonsmiling individuals. Research on gender differences in smiling habits showed that women smile more than men. In our study, we investigated this phenomena further and hypothesised that women perceive smiling individuals as more honest than men. An experiment conducted in seven countries (China, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Republic of South Africa and USA) revealed that gender may influence the perception of honesty in smiling individuals. We compared ratings of honesty made by male and female participants who viewed photos of smiling and nonsmiling people. While men and women did not differ on ratings of honesty in nonsmiling individuals, women assessed smiling individuals as more honest than men did. We discuss these results from a social norms perspective.
The paper investigates the evolution of document grammars from a linguistic point of view. Document grammars have been developed in the past decades in order to formalize knowledge on the structure of textual information. A well-known instance of a document grammar is the »Document Type Definition« (DTD) as part of the Extensible Markup Language (XML). DTDs allow to define so-called tree grammars that constrain the application of tag-sets in the process of annotation of a document. In an XML-based document workflow, DTDs play a crucial role for validation and transforming huge amounts of texts in standardized data formats. An interesting point in the development of XML DTDs is the fact that the restriction of the formal expressiveness paved the way to understand the formal properties of document grammars better and to develop more a powerful version like XML Schema recently. In this sense, the simplicity of the original approach, resulting from the necessary restriction of previous approaches, yielded new complexity on formally understood grounds.
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.
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.
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.
Der vorliegende, in das Themenheft einführende Text will einen Überblick über die Ursprünge, die wesentlichen Entwicklungen und die Perspektiven dieses jungen Forschungsgebietes geben. Er ist zunächst wissenschaftshistorisch angelegt, wird also zu Beginn auf einige Vorläuferstudien verweisen und dann versuchen, die Entwicklung der Auseinandersetzung mit den LL in ihren Grundlinien darzustellen und zentrale Themen und Anwendungsfelder, Methoden sowie Begriffe und Termini vorstellen. Im letzten Teil wird auf Forschungsdesiderate bzw. -perspektiven verwiesen. Dabei wird auch immer wieder die Relevanz dieses Ansatzes für den Deutschunterricht und andere Lehrsituationen angesprochen.
Mangelhafter Adressatenzuschnitt in ukrainischen und deutschen politischen Youtube-Interviews
(2019)
The article investigates Ukrainian and German YouTube interviews from the point of view of contrastive linguistics. The purpose of this paper is to separate out the interview as a communicative genre and to determine the main aspects of research on discrepancies in expectations among interview participants, in particular to clarify the role of poor recipient design as the cause of communication failures. Results indicate that poor recipient design is the most common source of communication failures in both languages.
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.
This article introduces the topic of ‘‘Multilingual language resources and interoperability’’. We start with a taxonomy and parameters for classifying language resources. Later we provide examples and issues of interoperatability, and resource architectures to solve such issues. Finally we discuss aspects of linguistic formalisms and interoperability.