Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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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.
This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas:
1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation.
2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language.
3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis.
By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing.
This is a revised and translated version of my article "Die doppelte Wende - Zur Verbindung von Sprache, Sprachwissenschaft und zeitgebundener politischer Bewertung am Beispiel deutsch-deutscher Sprachdifferenzierung" which appeared in Politische Semantik - Bedeutungsanalytische und sprachkritische Beiträge zur politischen Sprachverwendung, ed. Josef Klein (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989), pp. 297-326. I am indepted to Colin Good, Norwich, England, for having translated the text into English.
This paper investigates emergent pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus-based study, seven verbs in the first conjunct are analyzed regarding the degree of semantic bleaching and the development of subjective or aspectual meaning components. Moreover, it is shown that each verb shows distinct tendencies for co-ocurrences, especially with deictic adverbs in the first conjunct and with specific verbs and verb classes in the second conjunct. It is argued that pseudo-coordination is originally motivated by the need for ‘chunking’ in unplanned speech and that it is still prominently used in this function in German, in contrast to languages in which pseudo-coordination is grammaticalized further.
This paper deals with the creation of the first morphological treebank for German by merging two pre-existing linguistic databases. The first of these is the linguistic database CELEX which is a standard resource for German morphology. We build on its refurbished and modernized version. The second resource is GermaNet, a lexical-semantic network which also provides partial markup for compounds. We describe the state of the art and the essential characteristics of both databases and our latest revisions. As the merging involves two data sources with distinct annotation schemes, the derivation of the morphological trees for the unified resource is not trivial. We discuss how we overcome problems with the data and format, in particular how we deal with overlaps and complementary scopes. The resulting database comprises about 100,000 trees whose format can be chosen according to the requirements of the application at hand. In our discussion, we show some future directions for morphological treebanks. The Perl script for the generation of the data from the sources will be made publicly available on our website.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in listeners' preferences. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of symbolic strings which were either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic string is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, "post-lexical" segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to calculate an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.
In this study we investigate the intonational characteristics of the four utterance types statement, wh-question, yes/no-question and declarative question. Readings of two German scripted dialogues were examined to ascertain characteristic features of the F0 contour for each utterance type. Final boundary tone, nuclear pitch accent, F0 offset, F0 onset, F0 range, and the slopes of a topline and a bottomline were determined for each utterance and compared for the four utterance types. Results show that for an average speaker, the final boundary tone, the F0 range, and the slope of the topline can be used to distinguish between the four utterance types. However, speakers may deviate from this pattern and exploit other intonational means to distinguish certain utterance types or choose not to mark a syntactic difference at all.
The naturalness of synthetic speech depends strongly on the prediction of appropriate prosody. For the present study the original annotation of the German speech database “Kiel Corpus of Read Speech” was extended automatically with syntactic features, word frequency, and syllable boundaries. Several classification and regression trees for predicting symbolic prosody features, postlexical phonological processes, duration, and F0 were trained on this database. The perceptual evaluation showed that the overall perceptual quality of the German text-to-speech system MARY can be significantly improved by training all models that contribute to prosody prediction on the same database. Furthermore, it showed that the error introduced by symbolic prosody prediction perceptually equals the error produced by a direct method that does not exploit any symbolic prosody features.
Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).