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This study explores how ‘gatherings’ turn into ‘encounters’ in a virtual world (VW) context. Most communication technologies enable only focused encounters between distributed participants, but in VWs both gatherings and encounters can occur. We present close sequential analysis of moments when after a silent gathering, interaction among participants in a VW is gradually resumed, and also investigate the social actions in the verbal (re-)opening turns. Our findings show that like in face-to-face situations, also in VWs participants often use different types of embodied resources to achieve the transition, rather than rely on verbal means only. However, the transition process in VWs has distinctive characteristics compared to the one in face-to-face situations. We discuss how participants in a VW use virtually embodied pre-beginnings to display what we call encounter-readiness, instead of displaying lack of presence by avatar stillness. The data comprise 40 episodes of video-recorded team interactions in a VW.
This report presents a corpus of articulations recorded with Schlieren photography, a recording technique to visualize aeroflow dynamics for two purposes. First, as a means to investigate aerodynamic processes during speech production without any obstruction of the lips and the nose. Second, to provide material for lecturers of phonetics to illustrates these aerodynamic processes. Speech production was recorded with 10 kHz frame rate for statistical video analyses. Downsampled videos (500 Hz) were uplodad to a youtube channel for illustrative purposes. Preliminary analyses demonstrate potential in applying Schlieren photography in research.
We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.
Travel guides and travel reports constitute an important source for the generation and spread of popular geopolitical epistemes and assumptions. With regard to colonial attitudes and their possible perpetuation, it is therefore of great interest what kind of information such texts convey regarding (post)colonial places, and how they contextualize it. The paper compares descriptions of Qingdao (Tsingtau), a German colonized territory between 1897 and 1914, in travel guides and related material from colonial and postcolonial times and in different European languages. It investigates what differences can be found between these descriptions in relation to time, language, and medium (print or online) of publication. Of particular interest is the question whether, and in what ways, colonial perspectives are perpetuated in present-day (especially German) travel literature.
In this paper we present an experimental semantic search function, based on word embeddings, for an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWPD). The LWPD synthesizes an increasing number of lexicographical resources and provides basic cross-resource search options. Onomasiological access to the lexical units of the portal is a highly desirable feature for many research questions, such as the likelihood of borrowing lexical units with a given meaning (Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009; Zeller, 2015). The search technology is based on multilingual pre-trained word embeddings, and individual word senses in the portal are associated with word vectors. Users may select one or more among a very large number of search terms, and the database returns lexical items with word sense vectors similar to these terms. We give a preliminary assessment of the feasibility, usability and efficacy of our approach, in particular in comparison to search options based on semantic domains or fields.
In this paper, we present an overview of freely available web applications providing online access to spoken language corpora. We explore and discuss various solutions with which the corpus providers and corpus platform developers address the needs of researchers who are working with spoken language. The paper aims to contribute to the long-overdue exchange and discussion of methods and best practices in the design of online access to spoken language corpora.
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
Alleviating pain is good and abandoning hope is bad. We instinctively understand how words like alleviate and abandon affect the polarity of a phrase, inverting or weakening it. When these words are content words, such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives, we refer to them as polarity shifters. Shifters are a frequent occurrence in human language and an important part of successfully modeling negation in sentiment analysis; yet research on negation modeling has focused almost exclusively on a small handful of closed-class negation words, such as not, no, and without. A major reason for this is that shifters are far more lexically diverse than negation words, but no resources exist to help identify them. We seek to remedy this lack of shifter resources by introducing a large lexicon of polarity shifters that covers English verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Creating the lexicon entirely by hand would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, we develop a bootstrapping approach that combines automatic classification with human verification to ensure the high quality of our lexicon while reducing annotation costs by over 70%. Our approach leverages a number of linguistic insights; while some features are based on textual patterns, others use semantic resources or syntactic relatedness. The created lexicon is evaluated both on a polarity shifter gold standard and on a polarity classification task.
This study builds on a large body of work on the use of linguistic forms for requests in social interaction. Using Conversation Analysis / Interactional Linguistics, this study explores the use of two recurrent linguistic formats for requesting in spoken German – simple interrogatives ('do you do ..?') and kannst du VP? ('can you do..?') interrogatives. Based on a corpus of video-recorded, naturally occurring data of mundane data, this study demonstrates one of the interactional factors that is relevant for the choice between alternative interrogative request formats in spoken German – recipient's embodied availability before and during the request initiation. It is shown that simple interrogatives are used to request an action from a recipient who is either available or involved in their own project, which, however, does not have to be suspended or interrupted for the compliance with the request. In contrast, kannst du VP? interrogatives occur in environments in which the recipient is already engaged in a project that must be suspended in order to grant the request.
This paper reports on an ongoing international project of compiling a freely accessible online Dictionary of German Loans in Polish Dialects. The dictionary will be the first comprehensive lexicographic compendium of its kind, serving as a complement to existing resources on German lexical loans in the literary or standard language. The empirical results obtained in the project will shed new light on the distribution of German loanwords among different dialects, also in comparison to the well-documented situation in written Polish. The dictionary will have a strong focus on the dialectal distribution of Polish dialectal variants for a given German etymon, accessible through interactive cartographic representations and corresponding search options. The editorial process is realized with dedicated collaborative web tools. The new resource will be published as an integrated part of an online information system for German lexical borrowings in other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, and is therefore highly cross-linked with other loanword dictionaries on Polish as well as Slavic and further European languages.
CLARIAH-DE cross-service search - prospects and benefits of merging subject-specific services
(2021)
CLARIAH-DE combines services and offerings of CLARIN-D and DARIAH-DE. This includes various search applications which are made directly available to researchers. These search applications are presented in this working paper based on their main characteristics and compared with a focus on possible harmonizations. Opportunities and risks of different forms of technical integration are highlighted. Identified challenges can be explained in particular considering the background of different organizational and technical frameworks as well as highly specific and discipline-dependent requirements. The integration work that has already been carried out and the experiences gained with regard to future work and possible integration of further applications are also discussed. The experiences made in CLARIAH-DE can especially be of interest for other projects in the field of digital research infrastructures.
This poster summarizes the results of the CLARIAH-DE Work Package 3: Skills Training and Promotion of Junior Researchers.
For a research field that is characterised by rapid technical development, CLARIAH-DE has to include the promotion of data literacy necessary for the efficient use of this digital research infrastructure as part of its objective. To develop, consolidate and refine a common programme in this area, work package 3 set itself the following sub goals:
- Consolidation of the activities from the previous projects into a joint service
- Cataloguing and reflecting on the methods and tools used in the research field, with the aim of identifying remaining gaps
- Skills training of, individual support for and the promotion of junior researchers
This poster summarizes the results of the CLARIAH-DE Work Package 5 - Community Engagement: Outreach/Dissemination and Liaison.
Work package 5 engages with the community through dissemination activities, outreach and liaison. The work package set itself the following sub goals:
- Combining the existing dissemination and outreach activities of CLARIN-D and DARIAH-DE in a meaningful way and elaborating on them. In some cases this meant continuity, in other cases a new appearance for resources.
- Providing a web portal as a gateway to the CLARIAH-DE project.
- Creating a common identity and corporate identity and maintaining the established level of trust users already put into CLARIN-D and DARIAH-DE.
- Providing a social media presence as well as a physical presence at workshops, conferences and other meetings in the Digital Humanities.
CMDI Explorer
(2021)
We present CMDI Explorer, a tool that empowers users to easily explore the contents of complex CMDI records and to process selected parts of them with little effort. The tool allows users, for instance, to analyse virtual collections represented by CMDI records, and to send collection items to other CLARIN services such as the Switchboard for subsequent processing. CMDI Explorer hence adds functionality that many users felt was lacking from the CLARIN tool space.
Playing videogames is a popular social activity; people play videogames in different places, on different media, in different situations, alone or with partners, online or offline. Unsurprisingly, they thereby share space (physically or virtually) with other playing or non-playing people. The special issue investigates through different contexts and settings how non-players become participants of the gaming interaction and how players and non-players co-construct presence. The introduction provides a problem-related context for the individual contributions and then briefly presents them.
Communicative deviations of respondents in political video interviews in Ukrainian and German
(2021)
The research has the objective to establish the peculiarities of communicative deviations as a cognitive and at the same time discursive phenomenon in Ukrainian- and German-language video interviews from the viewpoint of respondents. The procedure of the research involves the integrated application of methods and techniques of pragmatics, deviatology and communicative linguistics. A new methodological basis has been developed for the reconstruction of communicative deviations using discourse analysis, namely for the reconstruction of a single event in two discursive environments, determining the communicative context and communication of interview in compared languages. The results of the research allow us to identify the features of communicative deviations in political interviews at the external, internal structural levels and at the situational level. The conclusions of the research indicate that the types of communicative deviations in political video interviews are universal in Ukrainian and German, but reflect national and cultural specifics given the peculiarities of both languages and each linguoculture, as well as existing realias, norms, conventions, maxims and rules of communication.
This study analyzes how participants playing VR games construct co-presence and shared gameplay. The analysis focuses on instances of play where one person is wearing the VR equipment, and other participants are located nearby without the ability to directly interact with the game. We first show how the active player using the VR equipment draws on talk and embodied activity to signal their presence in the shared physical environment, while simultaneously conducting actions in the virtual space, and thus creates spaces for the other participants to take part in gameplay. Second, we describe how other participants draw on the contextual configurations of the moment in displaying co-presence and position themselves as active and consequential co-players. The analysis demonstrates how gameplay can be communicatively constructed even in situations where the participants have differential rights and possibilities to act and influence the game.
This introduction summarizes general issues combining lexicography and neology in the context of the Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neology series. We present each of the six papers composing this Special Issue, featuring two Slavic languages (Czech and Slovak) and two Romance ones (Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish in its European and Latin American varieties) and their diverse lexicographic research and representation, in specialized dictionaries of neologisms or general language ones, in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexical resources, and in print and digital dictionaries.
We reflect on the affordances and challenges of interactional data in the analysis of long-term institutional change. To this end we draw on our studies of direct encounters between journalists and politicians in news interviews and presidential news conferences and in particular the use of question design as a window into the evolution of journalistic norms and press-state relations over time and the causal antecedents of such change. All analyses that incorporate a concern with environing contexts of interactional change impose certain burdens of empirical demonstration on the researcher. Here we consider three analytic issues that arise in the kind of historical-institutional analysis we have been pursuing: (a) controlling for the situational context, (b) pinpointing the locus of change, and (c) validating indicators of change. Data are in English.
Our paper examines how bodily behavior contributes to the local meaning of OKAY. We explore the interplay between OKAY as response to informings and narratives and accompanying multimodal resources in German multi-party interaction. Based on informal and institutional conversations, we describe three different uses of OKAY with falling intonation and the recurrent multimodal patterns that are associated with them and that can be characterized as ‘multimodal gestalts’. We show that: 1. OKAY as a claim to sufficient understanding is typically accompanied by upward nodding; 2. OKAY after change-of-state tokens exhibits a recurrent pattern of up- and downward nodding with distinctive timing; and 3. OKAY closing larger activities is associated with gaze-aversion from the prior speaker.
Making research data publicly available for evaluation or reuse is a fundamental part of good scientific practice. However, regulations such as copyright law can prevent this practice and thereby hamper scientific progress. In Germany, text-based research disciplines have for a long time been mostly unable to publish corpora made from material outside of the public domain, effectively excluding contemporary works. While there are approaches to obfuscate text material in a way that it is no longer covered by the original copyright, many use cases still require the raw textual context for evaluation or follow-up research. Recent changes in copyright now permit text and data mining on copyrighted works. However, questions regarding reusability and sharing of such corpora at a later time are still not answered to a satisfying degree. We propose a workflow that allows interested third parties to access customized excerpts of protected corpora in accordance with current German copyright law and the soon to be implemented guidelines of the Digital Single Market directive. Our prototype is a very lightweight web interface that builds on commonly used repository software and web standards.
The human ability to anticipate upcoming behavior not only enables smooth turn transitions but also makes early responses possible, as respondents use a variety of cues that provide for early projection of the type of action that is being performed. This article examines resources for projection in interaction in three unrelated languages—Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin—in sequences where speakers make evaluative assertions on a topic. The focus is on independently agreeing responses initiated in early overlap. Our cross-linguistic analysis reveals that while projection based on the ongoing turn-constructional unit relies on language-specific grammatical constructions, projection based on the larger context seems to be less language-dependent. A crucial finding is that in the target sequences, stances taken toward the topic already during earlier talk, as well as other structural patterns, are among the resources that recipients use for projecting how and when the ongoing turn will end.
In this chapter, we overview the specificity of comparisons made within the perspective of Conversation Analysis (CA), and we position them in relation to other fields. We introduce the analytical mentality, methodology, and procedures of CA, and we show how we used it for the analysis of OKAY in this volume.
The automatic recognition of idioms poses a challenging problem for NLP applications. Whereas native speakers can intuitively handle multiword expressions whose compositional meanings are hard to trace back to individual word semantics, there is still ample scope for improvement regarding computational approaches. We assume that idiomatic constructions can be characterized by gradual intensities of semantic non-compositionality, formal fixedness, and unusual usage context, and introduce a number of measures for these characteristics, comprising count-based and predictive collocation measures together with measures of context (un)similarity. We evaluate our approach on a manually labelled gold standard, derived from a corpus of German pop lyrics. To this end, we apply a Random Forest classifier to analyze the individual contribution of features for automatically detecting idioms, and study the trade-off between recall and precision. Finally, we evaluate the classifier on an independent dataset of idioms extracted from a list of Wikipedia idioms, achieving state-of-the art accuracy.
We discuss the modal uses of the Hausa exclusive particle sai (≈ only). We argue that the distribution of sai in modal environments provides evidence for the following claims on the composition of modal meaning that have been independently made in the literature: i) Future-oriented modality involves a prospective aspect operator that can be realized covertly in some languages (e.g. English, Kratzer 2012b) and overtly in others (e.g. Gitksan, Matthewson 2012, 2013). ii) Necessity interpretations arise from exhaustifying possibilities, i.e. an exhaustivity operator applying to existential modality (e.g. Kaufmann 2012 for the case of imperatives and Leffel 2012 for a relevant analysis of necessity meaning in Masalit). We show that future-oriented necessity in Hausa decomposes into EXH((PROSP)), with sai contributing exhaustivity.
Digital humanities research under United States and European copyright laws. Evolving frameworks
(2021)
This chapter summarizes the current state of copyright laws in the United States and European Union that most affect Digital Humanities research, namely the fair use doctrine in the US and research exceptions in Europe, including the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which has been finally adopted in 2019. This summary begins with a description of recent copyright advances most relevant to DH research, and finishes with an analysis of a significant remaining legal hurdle which DH researchers face: how do fair use and research exceptions deal with the critical issue of circumventing technological protection measures (TPM, a.k.a. DRM). Our discussion of the lawful means of obtaining TPM-protected material may contribute to both current DH research and planning decisions and inform future stakeholders and lawmakers of the need to allow TPM circumvention for academic research.
Digital research infrastructures can be divided into four categories: large equipment, IT infrastructure, social infrastructure, and information infrastructure. Modern research institutions often employ both IT infrastructure and information infrastructure, such as databases or large-scale research data. In addition, information infrastructure depends to some extent on IT infrastructure. In this paper, we discuss the IT, information, and legal infrastructure issues that research institutions face.
Directing, negotiating and planning: 'Aus Spiel' ('for play') in children's pretend joint play
(2021)
We are interested in how children organize joint pretend play. In this kind of play, children create an invented world by transforming matters of the real world into matters of a fictional world (e.g., pretending to be a 'giant' or treating a particular spatial area as a 'witch's kitchen'). Since there are no rules and no script, every next step in the game is an improvisation designed here and now. Children engaged in free play have equal rights to determine what should happen next. For that reason, they have to negotiate next steps. We are interested in a particular expression that children often use in joint play: aus Spaß/Spiel ('for fun' or 'for play', similar to 'let's pretend'). Based on a corpus of five hours of video recordings of two pairs of twins (the younger children are between 3 and 5 years old, the older ones are 8 years old), we show that children regularly use aus Spiel while playing as a method for shaping the activity. Inventing new events, children try to get their co-players to accept them and act accordingly. In that context, issues of (dis-)alignment and deontic rights become relevant. Here, we are interested in the interactional work that aus Spiel-('let's pretend')-turns do and how co-players respond.
This special issue investigates early responses—responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early responses possible? What do such responses tell us about the complex interplay between syntax, prosody, and embodied conduct? And what sorts of actions do participants accomplish by means of such early responses? By addressing these questions, the special issue seeks to offer new advances in the systematic analysis of temporal organization in interaction, contributing to broader discussions in the language and cognitive sciences as to the social coordination of human conduct.
This special issue investigates early responses—responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early responses possible? What do such responses tell us about the complex interplay between syntax, prosody, and embodied conduct? And what sorts of actions do participants accomplish by means of such early responses? By addressing these questions, the special issue seeks to offer new advances in the systematic analysis of temporal organization in interaction, contributing to broader discussions in the language and cognitive sciences as to the social coordination of human conduct. In this introductory article, we discuss the role of temporality and sequentiality in social interaction, specifically focusing on projective and anticipatory mechanisms and the interplay between multiple semiotic resources, which are crucial for making early responses possible.
There has been a long-standing interest in projection and the resources on which participants rely to produce and recognize the import and organization of turns at talk. Less attention has been paid to the character of the activity in which utterances form part and the ways in which embodied action enables the intelligibility, coordination, and in some cases, coproduction, of particular actions. In this article, we focus on specialized forms of embodied, institutional activity and focus in particular on simultaneity and the ways in which bodily action enables the progressive formation and reformation of an activity in the light of the (co)participants’ emerging contributions. We address how the routine structure of particular tasks enables participants to anticipate, prepare for, and even initiate actions in advance of the relevant activity and in turn, how participants may seek to ameliorate the interactional import of potentially premature action. The articles explores the interplay of technical practice and interactional organization and points to the distinctive character of embodied action in understanding anticipation and coordination in complex forms of institutional interaction.
This study examines head nods produced as embodied and silent answers to polar questions before a transition relevance place has been reached. It discusses the notion of “response” and the ways in which the literature conceptualizes head nods. The analysis of video recordings of ordinary and institutional multiparty interactions shows that answer-nods rely on mutual gaze and that affirmative head nods may co-occur with other facial expressions (e.g., eye blinks). By replying with a silent head nod, respondents may complete an unfolding adjacency pair without claiming speakership, thereby enabling the questioner to extend their turn-in-progress. Alternatively, respondents may expand their answer-nod with talk, in which case silent nodding may contribute to organizing the smooth transition of turns-at-talk. Head nods produced while a question is unfolding are described as a microsequential phenomenon that may affect the questioner’s turn-in-progress. Data are in French and Italian.
This paper presents the QUEST project and describes concepts and tools that are being developed within its framework. The goal of the project is to establish quality criteria and curation criteria for annotated audiovisual language data. Building on existing resources developed by the participating institutions earlier, QUEST also develops tools that could be used to facilitate and verify adherence to these criteria. An important focus of the project is making these tools accessible for researchers without substantial technical background and helping them produce high-quality data. The main tools we intend to provide are a questionnaire and automatic quality assurance for depositors of language resources, both developed as web applications. They are accompanied by a knowledge base, which will contain recommendations and descriptions of best practices established in the course of the project. Conceptually, we consider three main data maturity levels in order to decide on a suitable level of strictness of the quality assurance. This division has been introduced to avoid that a set of ideal quality criteria prevent researchers from depositing or even assessing their (legacy) data. The tools described in the paper are work in progress and are expected to be released by the end of the QUEST project in 2022.
We propose to use abusive emojis, such as the “middle finger” or “face vomiting”, as a proxy for learning a lexicon of abusive words. Since it represents extralinguistic information, a single emoji can co-occur with different forms of explicitly abusive utterances. We show that our approach generates a lexicon that offers the same performance in cross-domain classification of abusive microposts as the most advanced lexicon induction method. Such an approach, in contrast, is dependent on manually annotated seed words and expensive lexical resources for bootstrapping (e.g. WordNet). We demonstrate that the same emojis can also be effectively used in languages other than English. Finally, we also show that emojis can be exploited for classifying mentions of ambiguous words, such as “fuck” and “bitch”, into generally abusive and just profane usages.
We are witnessing an emerging digital revolution. For the past 25–30 years, at an increasing pace, digital technologies—especially the internet, mobile phones and smartphones—have transformed the everyday lives of human beings. The pace of change will increase, and new digital technologies will become even more tightly entangled in human everyday lives. Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), 6G wireless solutions, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (XR), robots and various platforms for remote and hybrid communication will become embedded in our lives at home, work and school.
Digitalisation has been identified as a megatrend, for example, by the OECD (2016; 2019). While digitalisation processes permeate all aspects of life, special attention has been paid to its impact on the ageing population, everyday communication practices, education and learning and working life. For example, it has been argued that digital solutions and technologies have the potential to improve quality of life, speed up processes and increase efficiency. At the same time, digitalisation is likely to bring with it unexpected trends and challenges. For example, AI and robots will doubtlessly speed up or take over many routine-based work tasks from humans, leading to the disappearance of certain occupations and the need for re-education. This, in turn, will lead to an increased demand for skills that are unique to humans and that technologies are not able to master. Thus, developing human competences in the emerging digital era will require not only the mastering of new technical skills, but also the advancement of interpersonal, emotional, literacy and problem-solving skills.
It is important to identify and describe the digitalisation phenomena—pertaining to individuals and societies—and seek human-centric answers and solutions that advance the benefits of and mitigate the possible adverse effects of digitalisation (e.g. inequality, divisions, vulnerability and unemployment). This requires directing the focus on strengthening the human skills and competences that will be needed for a sustainable digital future. Digital technologies should be seen as possibilities, not as necessities.
There is a need to call attention to the co-evolutionary processes between humans and emerging digital technologies—that is, the ways in which humans grow up with and live their lives alongside digital technologies. It is imperative to gain in-depth knowledge about the natural ways in which digital technologies are embedded in human everyday lives—for example, how people learn, interact and communicate in remote and hybrid settings or with artificial intelligence; how new digital technologies could be used to support continuous learning and understand learning processes better and how health and well-being can be promoted with the help of new digital solutions.
Another significant consideration revolves around the co-creation of our digital futures. Important questions to be asked are as follows: Who are the ones to co-create digital solutions for the future? How can humans and human sciences better contribute to digitalisation and define how emerging technologies shape society and the future? Although academic and business actors have recently fostered inclusion and diversity in their co-creation processes, more must be done. The empowerment of ordinary people to start acting as active makers and shapers of our digital futures is required, as is giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalised in the development of digital technology. In the emerging co-creation processes, emphasis should be placed on social sustainability and contextual sensitivity. Such processes are always value-laden and political and intimately intertwined with ethical issues.
Constant and accelerating change characterises contemporary human systems, our everyday lives and the environment. Resilience thinking has become one of the major conceptual tools for understanding and dealing with change. It is a multi-scalar idea referring to the capacity of individuals and human systems to absorb disturbances and reorganise their functionality while undergoing a change. Based on the evolving new digital technologies, there is a pressing need to understand how these technologies could be utilised for human well-being, sustainable lifestyles and a better environment. This calls for analysing different scales and types of resilience in order to develop better technology-based solutions for human-centred development in the new digital era.
This white paper is a collaborative effort by researchers from six faculties and groups working on questions related to digitalisation at the University of Oulu, Finland. We have identified questions and challenges related to the emerging digital era and suggest directions that will make possible a human-centric digital future and strengthen the competences of humans and humanity in this era.
Between January 2020 and summer 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary in order to enable communication under the new conditions during the corona pandemic. This rapid expansion of vocabulary has most notably affected lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics. General language dictionaries or terminological dictionaries have quickly reflected on how the German lexicon evolved during the corona pandemic: new entries were added, others were revised. This paper, however, focuses on the ways in which a German (specialized) neologism dictionary project, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" at the "Leibniz Institute for the German Language, Mannheim" published (online, see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/start.jsp) has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Neologisms are (following the definition applied here) lexical units or senses/meanings which emerge in a language community over a specific period of time of language development, which diffuse, are generally accepted as language norms, and which the majority of speakers perceive as new for some time. Thus, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" used to record neologisms only retrospectively, that is after their lexicalization. As a consequence, users of the dictionary were often not able to obtain details on words that were particularly conspicuous at a particular time in a specific discourse, thus raising questions concerning their meaning, correct spelling, etc. This, however, did not imply that the lexicographers of the project had not already collected these words with some preliminary information in a list of candidates for inclusion in an internal database. Therefore, the project started to publish online an index of monitored words including lexical units that had emerged since 2011, for which only time will tell whether they will diffuse and manifest as language norms. This list format was used since April 2020 to also issue a compilation of corona-related neologisms as part of the "Neologismenwörterbuch". In October 2021, this inventory included more than 1.800 Corona-related neologisms, and still, more than 700 candidates in an internal database awaited lexicographic description and inclusion into the online index (see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/listen/corona.jsp). In this paper many examples are presented to illustrate how new words, new senses and new uses in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic are reflected in the dictionary.
The European language world is characterized by an ideology of monolingualism and national languages. This language-related world view interacts with social debates and definitions about linguistic autonomy, diversity, and variation. For the description of border minorities and their sociolinguistic situation, however, this view reaches its limits. In this article, the conceptual difficulties with a language area that crosses national borders are examined. It deals with the minority in East Lorraine (France) in particular. On the language-historical level, this minority is closely related to the language of its (big) neighbor Germany. At the same time, it looks back on a conflictive history with this country, has never filled a (subordinated) political–administrative unit, and has experienced very little public support. We want to address the questions of how speakers themselves reflect on their linguistic situation and what concepts and argumentative figures they bring up in relation to what (Germanic) variety. To this end, we look at statements from guideline-based interviews. In the paper, we present first observations gained through qualitative content analysis.
This article sketches the development of paronym dictionaries in German. These dictionaries document and describe commonly confused words which cause uncertainties because they are similar in sound, spelling and/or meaning (e.g. effektiv/effizient, sportlich/sportiv). First, an overview of existing reference guides is provided, covering different traditions. Numerous lemma lists have been collected for pedagogical purposes and there has always been an interest in the lexicological treatment of paronyms. However, only a handful of dictionaries covering commonly confused pairs and a small number of genuine paronym dictionaries have ever been compiled. I will focus on lexicographic endeavours, including Wustmann (1891), Müller (1973) and Pollmann and Wolk (2001). Secondly, I will shed light on the differences in descriptions in these dictionaries. This includes how prescriptive approaches have been replaced over time by empirical descriptive accounts and how dictionaries have moved away from restricted, static hardback editions towards dynamic e-dictionaries. Finally, an e-dictionary, “Paronyme — Dynamisch im Kontrast”, is presented with contrastive and flexible two-level consultation views. Its three key elements are its corpus-based foundation, the implementation of meta-lexicographic requirements and a consideration of users’ interests. This dictionary has implemented a user-friendly and dynamic interface and it records conventionalized patterns and preferences in authentic communication.
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.
Privacy in its many aspects is protected by various legal texts (e.g. the Basic Law, Civil Code, Criminal Code, or even the Law on Copyright in artistic and photographic works (KunstUrhG), which protects image rights). Data protection law, which governs the processing of information about individuals (personal data), also serves to protect their privacy. However, some information referring to the public sphere of an individual’s life (e.g. the fact that X is a mayor of Smallville) may still be considered personal data (see below), and as such fall within the scope of data protection rules. In this sense, data protection laws concern information that is not private.
Therefore, privacy and data protection, although closely related, are distinct notions: one can violate someone else’s privacy without processing his or her personal data (e.g. simply by knocking at one’s door at night, uninvited), and vice versa: one can violate data protection rules without violating privacy.
The following handouts focus exclusively on data protection rules, and specifically on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, please keep in mind that compliance with the GDPR is not the only aspect of protecting privacy of individuals in research projects. Other rules, such as academic ethics and community standards (such as CARE) also need to be observed.
Focusing on request sequences, this article explores dynamics of projection and anticipation, enabling participants to produce early responses to requests. In particular, the analyses highlight the importance of multimodal formatting and the specific temporalities of multiple multimodal resources for the emergence of projections and the possibility to anticipate an ongoing action. Moreover, the analyses pinpoint the relevance of the local ecology and the praxeological context for the participants, enabling them to anticipate the next relevant action. These features characterizing the temporality of multimodal Gestalts, the relevance of the local ecology, and the details of the praxeological context make it possible for participants to produce very early responses and also to accomplish an action even before it has been actually requested.
Taking the use of the esthetic term wabi sabi (Japanese compound noun) in a series of German- and English-language theater rehearsals as an example, this article studies the emergence of shared meanings and uses of an expression over an interactional history. We track how shared understandings and uses of wabi sabi develop over the course of a series of theater rehearsals. We focus on the practices by which understandings of wabi sabi are displayed, adopted, and negotiated. We discuss complexities and intransparencies of the manifestation of common ground in multiparty interactions and its relationship to the emergence of routine uses of the expression. Data are in English and German with English translation.
This study investigates how driving school instructors adapt their instructions to constraints and affordances of different activity types. Adopting a Conversation Analytic approach and building on a comparative corpus of theoretical and practical driving lessons in German, it compares sequences of instructions of the execution of the “shoulder check” (i.e., checking the blind spot) in stationary theoretical versus mobile practical driving lessons. In theoretical lessons, the instructor uses vivid and humorous embodied instructions. In practical driving lessons, the instructor orients to the complex multi‐activity and delivers instructions in a succinct manner, considering the students’ previous knowledge and the embeddedness into the global tasks. The paper shows how instructional practices are sensitive to contextual contingencies which they reflect and treat by their situated design.
We examine the task of detecting implicitly abusive comparisons (e.g. “Your hair looks like you have been electrocuted”). Implicitly abusive comparisons are abusive comparisons in which abusive words (e.g. “dumbass” or “scum”) are absent. We detail the process of creating a novel dataset for this task via crowdsourcing that includes several measures to obtain a sufficiently representative and unbiased set of comparisons. We also present classification experiments that include a range of linguistic features that help us better understand the mechanisms underlying abusive comparisons.
Implicitly abusive language – What does it actually look like and why are we not getting there?
(2021)
Abusive language detection is an emerging field in natural language processing which has received a large amount of attention recently. Still the success of automatic detection is limited. Particularly, the detection of implicitly abusive language, i.e. abusive language that is not conveyed by abusive words (e.g. dumbass or scum), is not working well. In this position paper, we explain why existing datasets make learning implicit abuse difficult and what needs to be changed in the design of such datasets. Arguing for a divide-and-conquer strategy, we present a list of subtypes of implicitly abusive language and formulate research tasks and questions for future research.
This study documents change over time and across proficiency levels in French second-language (L2) speakers’ practices for initiating complaints. Prior research has shown that speakers typically initiate complaints in a stepwise manner that indexes the contingent, moral, and delicate nature of the activity. Although elementary speakers in my data often launch complaint sequences in a straightforward way, they sometimes embodiedly foreshadow verbal expressions of negative stance or delay negative talk through brief positively valenced prefaces. More advanced speakers in part rely on the same initiation practices as elementary speakers. In addition, they recurrently use extensive prefatory work that accounts for and legitimizes the upcoming complaint, and they regularly initiate complaints jointly with coparticipants through a progressive escalation of negative stance expressions. I document interactional resources involved in this change and discuss the findings in terms of speakers’ development of L2 interactional competence. Data are in French with English translations.
Over the past decade, conducting empirical research in linguistics has become increasingly popular. The first of its kind, this book provides an engaging and practical introduction to this exciting versatile field, providing a comprehensive overview of research aspects in general, and covering a broad range of subdiscipline-specific methodological approaches. Subfields covered include language documentation and descriptive linguistics, language typology, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The book reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of each single approach and on how they interact with one-another across the study of language in its many diverse facets. It also includes exercises, example student projects and recommendations for further reading, along with additional online teaching materials. Providing hands-on experience, and written in an engaging and accessible style, this unique and comprehensive guide will give students the inspiration they need to develop their own research projects in empirical linguistics.
This paper explores how attitudes affect the seemingly objective process of counting speakers of varieties using the example of Low German, Germany’s sole regional language. The initial focus is on the basic taxonomy of classifying a variety as a language or a dialect. Three representative surveys then provide data for the analysis: the Germany Survey 2008, the Northern Germany Survey 2016, and the Germany Survey 2017. The results of these surveys indicate that there is no consensus concerning the evaluation of Low German’s status and that attitudes towards Low German are related to, for example, proficiency in the language. These attitudes are shown to matter when counting speakers of Low German and investigating the status it has been accorded.
Twitter data is used in a wide variety of research disciplines in Social Sciences and Humanities. Although most Twitter data is publicly available, its re-use and sharing raise many legal questions related to intellectual property and personal data protection. Moreover, the use of Twitter and its content is subject to the Terms of Service, which also regulate re-use and sharing. This extended abstract provides a brief analysis of these issues and introduces the new Academic Research product track, which enables authorized researchers to access Twitter API on a preferential basis.
We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of conventionalization, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and diversification, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexical-semantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.