Open Access

Häufig wird angenommen, dass Sprachveränderungen in mündlichen, informellen Alltagsinteraktionen mit nur geringem normativem Druck beginnen. Der Beitrag untersucht vor diesem Hintergrund, welchen Aufschluss speziell mündliche Daten über derzeit stattfindende Grammatikalisierungsprozesse geben können. Als Fallstudie dient der sog. am-Progressiv, dessen mündlichen und schriftlichen Gebrauch wir in Bezug auf den jeweils erreichten Grammatikalisierungsgrad der Konstruktion vergleichen. Zweitens betrachten wir semantisch-pragmatische Aspekte der untersuchten Entwicklung, die in der Literatur häufig als zunehmende Sprecher- bzw. Sprechereignisorientierung („Subjektivierung“) betroffener Konstruktionen beschrieben werden. Wir zeigen, dass in diesem Sinne subjektive (z. B. intensivierende oder bewertende) Verwendungen auch für den deutschen am-Progressiv charakteristisch sind. Drittens schließlich überprüfen wir einen möglichen Zusammenhang von Grammatikalisierung(sgrad) und Subjektivität in (sowohl medialer als auch konzeptioneller) Mündlichkeit einerseits und Schriftlichkeit andererseits.

Our paper deals with the metonymic use of artists' proper names to refer to works of art in German, i.e. in constructions such as Im Museum hängt ein echter Picasso ['a real Picasso hangs in the museum']. Our analyses focus on the grammatical gender used in thc constructions where reference is made to works of art by female artists. We address the issue using a variety of methods. Firstly, we present the results of a corpus study that demonstrates the use of the construction. Secondly, we present an experimental online study that analyzes the acceptance of the construction when using different grammatical genders as a function of various factors – primarily, the congrucnce between the gender identity of the artist and the grammatical gender in the construction. We discuss the results and outline the necessary next steps to gain an even more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

Before modification of their GOAL prepositional phrase by a directional adverb makes them so, prepositional particle verb structures in German like UMschreiben ‘rewrite’ or DURCHweben ‘weave through’ serve to derive in an applicative diathesis prepositional prefix verb structures like umSCHREIBen ‘circumscribe’ or durchWEBen ‘interweave’ (where capitals signal word accent). The diathesis creates an extra inner predication structure (Basilico 1998), introducing a GOTH subject of predication and grammatical object that binds in a reflexive-like (lambda-)relation the original GOAL and THEME. The predication counters an offending asymmetry in the coupling of semantic roles and grammatical functions. In the particle verb case, the offense is redressed externally, via upcycling of a feature that remains locally uninterpretable due to the violation of harmonic linking.

We present LatinlSE, a Latin corpus for the Sketch Engine. LatinlSE consists of Latin works comprising a total of 13 million words, covering the time span from the 2nd Century BC to the 21st century AD. LatinlSE is provided with rich metadata mark-up, including author, title, genre, era, date and century, as well as book, section, paragraph and line of verses. We have automatically annotated LatinlSE with lemma and part-of-speech information, enabling users to search the corpus with a number of criteria, ranging from lemma, part-of speech, context, to subcorpora defined chronologically or by genre. We also illustrate word sketches, one-page summaries of a word’s corpus based collocational behaviour. Our future plan is to produce word sketches for Latin words by adding richer morphological and syntactic annotation to the corpus.

Numerous high-quality primary textual resources - in the context of this paper, this means fulltext transcriptions (and corresponding image scans) of German texts originating from the 15th to the 19th century - are scattered among the web or stored remotely on institutional or private servers. They are often filed on degrading recording media and are encoded in out-of-date or inflexible storage formats. Often, textual resources are accompanied by scarce, insufficient or inaccurate bibliographic information, which is only one further reason why valuable resources, even if available on the web, remain undiscovered. Additionally, idiosyncratic, project-specific markup conventions often hinder further usage and analysis of the data. Because of these and other problems, a great amount of the abovementioned transcriptions of historical sources can hardly be found, let alone accessed by third parties, and are of little use to the wider research community. This situation is unsatisfying from the perspective of a (corpus-)linguistic project like the one described here, but also from the perspective of any text-based research in the humanities and social sciences. The integration of as many of these ‘dispersed’ high-quality primary textual resources as possible into an encompassing repository like the sustainable, web and centres-based research infrastructure of CLARIN-D1 2 is an important step and at least a necessary prerequisite to solve this problem. This paper summarizes the work of an 18-month project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) which dealt with the curation and integration of historical text resources of the 15th-19th century into the CLARIN-D infrastructure.