Open Access

The paper presents best practices and results from projects in four countries dedicated to the creation of corpora of computer-mediated communication and social media interactions (CMC). Even though there are still many open issues related to building and annotating corpora of that type, there already exists a range of accessible solutions which have been tested in projects and which may serve as a starting point for a more precise discussion of how future standards for CMC corpora may (and should) be shaped like.

The paper presents an XML schema for the representation of genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC) that is compliant with the encoding framework defined by the TEI. It was designed for the annotation of CMC documents in the project Deutsches Referenzkorpus zur internetbasierten Kommunikation (DeRiK), which aims at building a corpus on language use in the most popular CMC genres on the German-speaking Internet. The focus of the schema is on those CMC genres which are written and dialogic―such as forums, bulletin boards, chats, instant messaging, wiki and weblog discussions, microblogging on Twitter, and conversation on “social network” sites. The schema provides a representation format for the main structural features of CMC discourse as well as elements for the annotation of those units regarded as “typical” for language use on the Internet. The schema introduces an element <posting>, which describes stretches of text that are sent to the server by a user at a certain point in time. Postings are the main constituting elements of threads and logfiles, which, in our schema, are the two main types of CMC macrostructures. For the microlevel of CMC documents (that is, the structure of the <posting> content), the schema introduces elements for selected features of Internet jargon such as emoticons, interaction words and addressing terms. It allows for easy anonymization of CMC data for purposes in which the annotated data are made publicly available and includes metadata which are necessary for referencing random excerpts from the data as references in dictionary entries or as results of corpus queries. Documentation of the schema as well as encoding examples can be retrieved from the web at http://www.empirikom.net/bin/view/Themen/CmcTEI. The schema is meant to be a core model for representing CMC that can be modified and extended by others according to their own specific perspectives on CMC data. It could be a first step towards an integration of features for the representation of CMC genres into a future new version of the TEI Guidelines.

Der Artikel befasst sich mit der Beschreibung des deutschen Verbwortschatzes im Hinblick auf die Perspektivierungsmöglichkeiten, die mit verbalen Ausdrücken verbunden sind. Im Unterschied zu den meisten Nomina und Adjektiven eröffnen verbale Ausdrücke grundsätzlich Leerstellen, Valenzstellen oder Verbargumente genannt, mit denen die an der Situation beteiligten Entitäten in bestimmter Weise syntaktisch angeschlossen werden können. Verbale Ausdrücke, die sich prinzipiell zur Bezeichnung derselben Situation eignen, unterscheiden sich nun genau in der Anzahl ihrer Verbargumente und der Art des Beitrags der Argumente zur Verbbedeutung voneinander. Weiterhin gibt es im Deutschen wie in fast allen Sprachen systematische Perspektivierungszusammenhänge zwischen syntaktischen Konstruktionen, die mit demselben Verb oder derivationell verwandten Verben gebildet werden können. Im Vordergrund der folgenden Ausführungen steht die Frage, wie diese Perspektivierungsalternativen in einer onomasiologisch orientierten und auf Situationstypen bezogenen Beschreibung verbaler Ausdrücke berücksichtigt werden können.

In 1993, a research group at the Institut für deutsche Sprache (Mannheim) began to develop a Hypermedia grammar. It integrates components of the comprehensive Grammatik der Deutschen Sprache of the IdS into an interactive information system called GRAMMIS (»Grundlagen eines grammatischen Informationssystems«). After some background considerations, the design of the system is presented, and the functioning of some of the components is illustrated. Parts of its present version, Grammis-3, are also accessible via Internet. Practical experiences so far are very encouraging. The paper concludes with a discussion of future prospects.