Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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This paper is concerned with a novel methodology for generating phonetic questions used in tree-based state tying for speech recognition. In order to implement a speech recognition system, language-dependent knowledge which goes beyond annotated material is usually required. The approach presented here generates phonetic questions for decision trees are based on a feature table that summarizes the articulatory characteristics of each sound. On the one hand, this method allows better language-specific triphone models to be defined given only a feature-table as linguistic input. On the other hand, the feature-table approach facilitates efficient definition of triphone models for other languages since again only a feature table for this language is required. The approach is exemplified with speech recognition systems for English and Thai.
The transition between phases of activities is a practical problem which participants in an interaction have to deal with routinely. In meetings, the sequence of phases of activity is often outlined by a written agenda. However, transitions still have to be accomplished by local interactional work of the participants. In a detailed conversation analytic case study based on video-data, it is shown how participants collaboratively accomplish an emergent interactional state of affairs (a break-like activity) which differs widely from the state of affairs which was projected by awritten agenda (the next presentation), although in doing so, the participants still show their continuous orientation to the agenda. The paper argues that the reconstruction of emergent developments in interaction calls for a multimodal analysis of interaction, because the fine-grained multimodal co-ordination of bodily and verbal resources provides for opportunities of sequentially motivated, relevant next actions. These, however, can amount to emergent activity sequences, which may be at odds with the activity types which are projected by an interactional agenda or expected on behalf of some institutional routine.
Language attitudes may be differentiated into attitudes towards speakers and attitudes towards languages. However, to date, no systematic and differentiated instrument exists that measures attitudes towards language. Accordingly, we developed, validated, and applied the Attitudes Towards Languages (AToL) scale in four studies. In Study 1, we selected 15 items for the AToL scale, which represented the three dimensions of value, sound, and structure. The following studies replicated and validated the three-factor structure and differential mean profiles along the three dimensions for different languages (a) in a more diverse German sample (Study 2), (b) in different countries (Study 3), and (c) when participants based their evaluations on speech samples (Study 4). Moreover, we investigated the relation between the AToL dimensions and stereotypic speaker evaluations. Results confirm the reliability, validity, and generalizability of the AToL scale and its incremental value to mere speaker evaluations.
In this article, the language of advertising is considered as a set of persuasive strategies and corresponding communicative means which persuaders employ to communicate with the target audience and to promote the product, service, candidate, idea, etc. The arrangement of these strategies and means is determined by pragmatic and communicative goals of the advertising campaign.
We present evidence for the analysis of the vowels in English <say> and <so> as biphonemic diphthongs /ɛi/ and /əu/, based on neutralization patterns, regular alternations, and foot structure. /ɛi/ and /əu/ are hence structurally on a par with the so called “true diphthongs” /ɑi/, /ɐu/, /ɔi/, but also share prosodic organization with the monophthongs /i/ and /u/. The phonological evidence is supported by dynamic measurements based on the American English TIMIT database.
Calculations of F2-slopes proved to be especially suited to distinguish the relevant groups in accordance with their phonologically motivated prosodic organizations.
Europäische Hochsprachen in der Klemme. Zwischen globalem Englisch, Dialekten und Regionalsprachen
(2008)
Starting from declarations of the EU, the value of European languages and their diversity according to their different territorial, social, and legal extensions are discussed. The Standard varieties of the various languages are emphasized as being especially important for national and European language policies and for individual language cultivation. They contributed and may continue to contribute more than other language varieties to the cultural wealth of Europe. On the other hand, their development is especially impaired by the increasing use of ‘global' English. The increasing tendency toward a diaglossia (English plus one other language) and the use of languages within the institutions of the EU are discussed. In conclusion, it is argued that although tolerance is necessary, it is not sufficient for a thriving further development of the European linguistic diversity.
This article examines the contrasts and commonalities between languages for specific purposes (LSP) and their popularizations on the one hand and the frequency patterns of LSP register features in English and German on the other. For this purpose corpora of expertexpert and expert-lay communication are annotated for part-of-speech and phrase structure information. On this basis, the frequencies of pre- and post-modifications in complex noun phrases are statistically investigated and compared for English and German. Moreover, using parallel and comparable corpora it is tested whether English-German translations obey the register norms of the target language or whether the LSP frequency patterns of the source language Ñshine throughì. The results provide an empirical insight into language contact phenomena involving specialized communication.
In the present article I have decided to focus on the analysis of one of the most "traditional", but still fast-developing and ever-changing type of advertising – on the analysis of advertising in the press. The more my colleagues, students, and I try to analyse, scrutinise and describe particular aspects of advertising, the more obvious it is that to make this analysis authentic and reliable from the theoretical point of view and important from the practical point of view, it is necessary to suggest a universal approach to the study.
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.
In this paper, I argue that the main questions that arise in the process of making a dictionary of political metaphors - that of identifying live conceptual metaphors in a corpus of text - may be solved on the basis of a pragmatic approach, taking into account the reflections in a text of cognitive processes in the minds of its author and its reader. Certainly, this goal cannot be attained without a further fine-grained semantic analysis o f presumably metaphoric expressions in their linguistic and cultural context.
The paper argues that lexical-semantic representations within event semantics often suffer from a severe lack of empirical content. To demonstrate this, some main tenets of truth conditional semantics and its consequences for the lexical-semantic metalanguage are discussed. It will be shown that lexical semantic meaning postulates have to be improved in the following ways: i) the formulation of empirically verifiable definitions of the metalinguistic predicates, ii) the clarification of the logical type of these predicates, iii) the establishment of a procedure by which the predication can be verified, iv) the careful observation of the semantics of the logical operators, and v) the establishment of identity criteria for the basic ontological sorts. Furthermore, the strategies many lexical-semantic theories develop in order to immunize themselves against empirical falsification will be identified in several examples. Finally, it will be argued that an empircally sound lexical-semantic theory within truth-conditional event semantics has to be based on empirical research in cognitive science
Quality journalism offers its educated readers unsimplified linguistic usage which comprises standard collocations, phrases and utterances on the one hand, and occasional word-combinations, deformed idioms and quotations on the other. The former belong to the language system and reside in a variety of unilingual dictionaries, whereas the latter are confined to speech and have little chance of being registered by lexicographers.
This paper describes an approach to modelling a general-language wordnet, GermaNet, and a domain-specific wordnet, TermNet, in the web ontology language OWL. While the modelling process for GermaNet adopts relevant recommendations with respect to the English Princeton WordNet, for Term-Net an alternative modelling concept is developed that considers the special characteristics of domain-specific terminologies. We present a proposal for linking a general-language wordnet and a terminological wordnet within the framework of OWL and on this basis discuss problems and alternative modelling approaches.
The paper explores how verbs like helfen "help" should be treated within event semantics. These verbs allow both agentive NP-subjects and sentential CP-subjects. Their behavior with respect to adverbial modification reveals that in their agentive variant these verbs refer to events, while in their sentential variant they refer to states. The meaning that sentential helfen conveys is that the beneficiary is in a good disposition and that this state is brought about by what is expressed by the sentential subject. This involves a kind of subjective value statement about what is good for the beneficiary and what is not. The relation of "bringing about" involved here is not mainly one of causal dependence - lacking the typical denseness of causal chains - but one that involves supervenience. Supervenience, a notion widely used in moral theory and philosophy of the mind, allows accounting for the dependence of the rather subjective nature of the resultant state of helfen on particular events which occur in the world. The agentive variant of helfen is derived by embedding the meaning of sentential helfen into an event description.
Television news discourse
(2013)
In this paper, the author develops the narrative approach to TV news discourse as follows: with the categories of the narrator, the “voices” of the narrator, points of view, the composition of narrative, and the recipient's image. A brief review of the basic peculiarities of the Russian discourse is given as an illustration.
The "imperfective-paradox" paradox and other problems with the semantics of the progressive aspect
(2000)
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, of which it has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account. 1 A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive that integrates concepts of nonnality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 1 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. 2 In section 2 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 2.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 2.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 2.3, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
The term ‘marketing communications’ is used to denote communications by means of various persuasive messages about products, organizations, candidates and ideas that marketers send to audiences to build up knowledge of the mentioned objects, to evoke positive attitudes towards them, to stimulate the audience to act in a certain way (buy, use, vote, approve) and remain loyal to them. Possibly the most dominant type of marketing communications in our culture is advertising, but there are many other effective forms of marketing persuasion (public relations, sponsorship, point-of-sale communications, sales promotion, event marketing, product placement, etc.). Advertising uses mass media channels (traditional and new media) to contact and interact with the audiences, and thus the language of advertising has become a special form of mass media language.
Lexical-semantic theories often suffer from the imprecision of the concepts they employ in their representations. This leads to a considerable decrease in empirical strength by inviting circular argumentation. A demonstration of how to go about overcoming such shortcomings will be carried out, using the lexical semantic concept of "punctuality" as an example. Firstly, I will argue that the distinction between punctuality and durativity plays a crucial role for the explanation of a wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. Secondly, I will discuss methodological issues involved in arriving at a more precise definition of punctuality and, finally, the notion of "punctuality" will be given an interpretation on the basis of extensive consultation of research on cognitive time concepts.
The goal of the MULI (MUltiLingual Information structure) project is to empirically analyse information structure in German and English newspaper texts. In contrast to other projects in which information structure is annotated and investigated (e.g. in the Prague Dependency Treebank, which mirrors the basic information about the topic-focus articulation of the sentence), we do not annotate theory-biased categories like topic-focus or theme-rheme. Trying to be as theory-independent as possible, we annotate those features which are relevant to information structure and on the basis of which typical patterns, co-occurrences or correlations can be determined. We distinguish between three annotation levels: syntax, discourse and prosody. The data is based on the TIGER Corpus for German and the Penn Treebank for English, since the existing information on part-of-speech and syntactic structure can be re-used for our purposes. The actual annotation of an English example sequence illustrates our choice of categories on each level. Their combination offers the possibility to investigate how information structure is realised and can be interpreted.
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.
Thoughts on what kind of dictionaries and why they are necessary for journalists lead to the conclusion: first of all, dictionaries of pronunciation are interesting for them. Radio and television journalists need pronouncing dictionaries. In this regard, there are such modern dictionaries as “The Dictionary of Russian Pronunciation Difficulties” (Kalenchuk/Kasatkina 2006), “The Dictionary of Emphasis for Radio and TV announcers” (Vvedenskaja 2004) and “The Dictionary of Perfect Russian Emphasis” (Shtudiner 2007). Dictionary reference books that help to avoid some spelling mistakes are necessary in the newspaper practice. This type of publication includes “The Abridged Dictionary of Russian Language Difficulties for the Workers of the Press” (1968) that contains about 400 words, and reference books such as: “Word Usage Difficulties in TV and Broadcasting” (Gajmakova/Menkevich 1998) and “Russian Language Difficulties” by Rakhmanova (ed.) (1994).
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).
Whether verbs have to be marked as punctual vs. durative has been a controversial issue from the very beginnings of research on aktionsarten in the last century right on up to modern theories of aspectual classes and aspect composition. Debates about the linguistic necessity of this distinction have often been accompanied by the question of what it means for a verb to be temporally punctual. In this paper I will, firstly, sketch the history of research on the punctual-durative distinction and present several linguistic arguments in its favor. Secondly, I will show how this distinction is captured in an eventstructure- based approach to lexical semantics. Thirdly, I will discuss the extent to which a precise definition of the notions used in lexical
representations helps avoid circular argumentation in lexical semantics. Finally, I will demonstrate how this can be done for the notion of ‘punctuality’ by clarifying the logical type of this predicate and relating it to central cognitive time concepts.