Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (31) (remove)
Language
- English (31) (remove)
Keywords
- Deutsch (23)
- Konversationsanalyse (9)
- Interaktion (6)
- Englisch (5)
- Korpus <Linguistik> (4)
- German (3)
- Verb (3)
- conversation analysis (3)
- Bedeutung (2)
- Epistemics (2)
Publicationstate
- Postprint (6)
- Veröffentlichungsversion (6)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (3)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (13)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (1)
- Peer-reviewed (1)
Publisher
Semantic theories based on predicate-argument structures have always acknowledged that lexical information associated with verbs is the basic source for the rudimentary semantic structure of sentences. The central role of verbs in sentence structure has become a major insight of modern syntactic theories since the lexical turn in linguistics, too. As a result of this development there has been an increasing interest in theories on the lexical representation of verbs. This paper will briefly review prevailing theories on verb semantics (section 1), showing that they can capture only a part of the wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena dependent on verb meaning. For several of these phenomena (section 2) it will turn out that a theory based on highly structured events is more suitable for representing verb meaning. This theory is based on the idea that verbs refer to events that consist of several subevents which are temporally related, classified according to their duration, and whose event participants are connected to some but not necessarily all subevents by semantic relations (section 3).
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
This paper presents the concept of the "participant perspective" as an approach to the study of spoken language. It discusses three aspects of this concept and shows that they can offer helpful tools in spoken language research. Employing the participant perspective provides us with an alternative to many of the approaches currently in use in the study of spoken language in that it favours small-scale, qualitative research that aims to uncover categories relevant for the participants. Its results can usefully complement large-scale studies of phenomena on all linguistic dimensions of talk.
This paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge on current listeners' responses in talk-in-interaction. In particular, it complements earlier findings on double sayings of German JA by describing some additional prosodic-phonetic parameters and a visual feature of its realization in institutional and semi-private interaction (doctor-patient interaction, Big Brother, TV talk shows). These include pitch contour, pitch range and phonetic ending, on the one hand, and nodding on the other. The paper shows that JAJA is a truly multimodal phenomenon, with the individual features accomplishing interactional functions across sequence-organizational habitats, including re)claiming epistemic priority in an aside, making continuation relevant, agreeing/ acknowledging with reservation and aligning with the continuation of a sequence. Lack of nodding is suggested to have situational as well as misalignment reasons. On the basis of its observations, the paper also raises the question whether it is the applicability of response token variants across action and sequence types which makes them memorizable despite their variability.
This paper is concerned with relative constructions in non-standard varieties of European languages, which will be analyzed on the basis of three typological parameters (word order, relative element, syntactic role of the relativized item). The validity of claims raised in studies on the areal distribution of relative constructions in Europe will be checked against the results of the analysis, so as to ascertain whether they still hold when non-standard varieties are examined.
Rejecting the validity of inferred attributions of incompetence in German talk-in-interaction
(2024)
This paper deals with pragmatic inference from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. In particular, we examine a specific variety of inferences - the attribution of incompetence which Self constructs on the basis of Other's prior action, hearable as positioning Self as incompetent (e.g., instructions, offers of assistance, advice); this attribution of incompetence concerns Self's execution of some practical task. This inference is indexed in Self's response, which highlights Self's expertise, or competence concerning the task at hand. We focus on two recurrent types of such responses in our data: (i) accounting for competence through formulations of prior experience with carrying out a practical action and (ii) explicit claims of competence for accomplishing this action. We analyze the interactional environments in which these responses occur, the ways in which the two practices index Self's understanding of being positioned as incompetent and the interactional work they do. Finally, we discuss how through rejecting and inferred attribution of incompetence, Self implicitly seeks to restore their face and defend their autonomy as an agent, yet, without entering an explicit identity-negotiation. Findings rest on the analysis of 20 cases found in video-recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in German from the corpus FOLK.
High word frequency and neighborhood density contribute to the accuracy and speed of word production in English adults (e.g., Vitevitch & Sommers 2003), and characterize early words in child English (e.g., Storkel 2004). The present study investigated a speech corpus of child German (ages 2;00-3;00) to further the understanding of the influence of frequency and density on production. Results for four children suggest that, contrary to English, words produced early are not from denser neighborhoods in an adult lexicon than later words. As in English, frequent words are produced before less frequent words. Implications on theory and methodology are discussed.
This special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics has its origins in the International Conference on Conversation Analysis 10 (ICCA10), which took place in Mannheim (Germany) in July 2010. More than 650 scholars attended the conference, whose theme was ‘‘multimodal interaction’’. This volume includes papers based on the four plenary talks given at ICCA10 and four additional contributions related to the conference theme.