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 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.
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.
Both for psychology and linguistics, emotion concepts are a continuing challenge for analysis in several respects. In this contribution, we take up the language of emotion as an object of study from several angles. First, we consider how frame semantic analyses of this domain by the FrameNet project have been developing over time, due to theory-internal as well as application-oriented goals, towards ever more fine-grained distinctions and greater within-frame consistency. Second, we compare how FrameNet’s linguistically oriented analysis of lexical items in the emotion domain compares to the analysis by domain experts of the experiences that give rise (directly or indirectly) to the lexical items. And finally, we consider to what extent frame semantic analysis can capture phenomena such as connotation and inference about attitudes, which are important in the field of sentiment analysis and opinion mining, even if they do not involve the direct evocation of emotion.
Content analysis provides a useful and multifaceted, methodological framework for Twitter analysis. CAQDAS tools support the structuring of textual data by enabling categorising and coding. Depending on the research objective, it may be appropriate to choose a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative and qualitative elements of analysis and plays out their respective advantages to the greatest possible extent while minimising their shortcomings. In this chapter, we will discuss CAQDAS speech act analysis of tweets as an example of software-assisted content analysis. We start with some elementary thoughts on the challenges of the collection and evaluation of Twitter data before we give a brief description of the potentials and limitations of using the software QDA Miner (as one typical example for possible analysis programmes). Our focus will lie on analytical features that can be particularly helpful in speech act analysis of tweets.
This paper aims at showing how quantitative corpus linguistic analysis can inform qualitative analysis of digital media discourse with respect to the mediality of language in use. Using the example of protest discourse in Twitter, in the field of anti-Islamic ‘Pegida’ demonstrations, a three-step method of collecting, reducing and interpreting salient data is proposed. Each step is aligned with operative medial features of the microblog: hashtags, retweets and @-interactions. The exemplary analysis reveals the importance of discussions of attendance numbers in protest discourse and the asymmetry between administrative (i.e. the police) and non-administrative discourse agents. Furthermore, it exemplifies how frequency analysis and sequence analysis can be combined for research in media linguistics.
This paper explores on the basis of empirical research, how patterns of interaction and argumentation in political discourse on Twitter evolve as translocal communities in the creative shape of “joint digital storytelling”. Joint storytelling embraces coordinated activities by multiple actors focusing on a shared topic. By adding personal information and evaluation, participants construct an open narrative format, which can be inviting and inspiring for others, who then join in with their own narratives. This model will be exemplified by analyzing a large amount of tweets (107,000) collected during a political conflict between proponents and adversaries of a local traffic project in Germany. Analysis is based on (1) the textual level, (2) the operative level (hashtags, @- and RT-Symbol, hyperlinks etc.) and (3) the visual level of storytelling (embedded photos, videos). Results show a new way of creating translocal online communities and political deliberation.
In this paper, we analyze a dramatically aggravated conflict interaction taking place in the course of an association’s meeting in an urban community center. The interaction can be seen as the culmination point of a social conflict developing and increasing over a period of years. In this conflict, one of the crucial points of the sociocultural development in the city under study is to be seen in an exemplary way. Our analysis started with the question, why this conflict is unsolvable although the interest divergences of the opposing parties are not irreconcilable. Our analysis shows that the protagonists practice different communicative social styles. These stylistic differences however, are not the cause for misunderstandings, but the protagonists use stylistic differences and different cultural orientations as a resource for political action. Thereby a process of increasing hardening of perspective divergence emerges together with an interaction modality of drama and of the fundamental grounding of divergent views. Theoretically we are concerned with the explication of a sociolinguistic theory which includes as constitutive components the concepts of communicative social style, of perspectivation and of interaction modality. We want to show, that the analyzed type of sociocultural conflict can be explained by virtue of considering the interplay of features on these three levels.
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.
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.
We present the annotation of information structure in the MULI project. To learn more about the information structuring means in prosody, syntax and discourse, theory- independent features were defined for each level. We describe the features and illustrate them on an example sentence. To investigate the interplay of features, the representation has to allow for inspecting all three layers at the same time. This is realised by a stand-off XML mark-up with the word as the basic unit. The theory-neutral XML stand-off annotation allows integrating this resource with other linguistic resources such as the Tiger Treebank for German or the Penn treebank for English.
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).
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.
While written corpora can be exploited without any linguistic annotations, speech corpora need at least a basic transcription to be of any use for linguistic research. The basic annotation of speech data usually consists of time-aligned orthographic transcriptions. To answer phonetic or phonological research questions, phonetic transcriptions are needed as well. However, manual annotation is very time-consuming and requires considerable skill and near-native competence. Therefore it can take years of speech corpus compilation and annotation before any analyses can be carried out. In this paper, approaches that address the transcription bottleneck of speech corpus exploitation are presented and discussed, including crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription, automatic phonetic alignment, and query-driven annotation. Currently, query-driven annotation and automatic phonetic alignment are being combined and applied in two speech research projects at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), whereas crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription still awaits implementation.
We present an XML-based metadata standard for the documentation of speech and multimedia corpora that was developed at the Institute for German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The IDS is one of the major institutions providing German speech and language corpora to researchers. These corpora stem from many different sources and were previously documented in a rather heterogeneous fashion using a variety of data models and formats. In order to unify the documentation for existing and future corpora, the IDS- internal Archive for Spoken German collaborated with several projects and developed a set of standardised XML metadata schemas. These XML schemas build on existing internal and external documentation schemas (such as IMDI) and take into account the workflow of speech corpus production. In order to minimise redundancy, separate schemas were designed for projects, speakers, recording sessions, and entire corpora. The resulting schemas are tested in ongoing speech and multi-media projects at the IDS and are regularly revised. They are accompanied by element definitions, guidelines, and examples. In addition, a mapping to IMDI will be provided.
The metadata management system for speech corpora “memasysco” has been developed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) and is applied for the first time to document the speech corpus “German Today”. memasysco is based on a data model for the documentation of speech corpora and contains two generic XML schemas that drive data capture, XML native database storage, dynamic publishing, and information retrieval. The development of memasysco’s information architecture was mainly based on the ISLE MetaData Initiative (IMDI) guidelines for publishing metadata of linguistic resources. However, since we also have to support the corpus management process in research projects at the IDS, we need a finer atomic granularity for some documentation components as well as more restrictive categories to ensure data integrity. The XML metadata of different speech corpus projects are centrally validated and natively stored in an Oracle XML database. The extension of the system to the management of annotations of audio and video signals (e.g. orthographic and phonetic transcriptions) is planned for the near future.
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.
In the context of the HyTex project, our goal is to convert a corpus into a hypertext, basing conversion strategies on annotations which explicitly mark up the text-grammatical structures and relations between text segments. Domain-specific knowledge is represented in the form of a knowledge net, using topic maps. We use XML as an interchange format. In this paper, we focus on a declarative rule language designed to express conversion strategies in terms of text-grammatical structures and hypertext results. The strategies can be formulated in a concise formal syntax which is independend of the markup, and which can be transformed automatically into executable program code.
Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and in particular, language acquisition in robots. Thus, we include research pertaining to developmental robotics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as practical computer science and engineering. The different studies are not at this stage all connected into a cohesive whole; rather, they are presented to illuminate the need for multiple different approaches that complement each other in the pursuit of understanding cognitive development in robots. Extensive experiments involving the humanoid robot iCub are reported, while human learning relevant to developmental robotics has also contributed useful results.
Disparate approaches are brought together via common underlying design principles. Without claiming to model human language acquisition directly, we are nonetheless inspired by analogous development in humans and consequently, our investigations include the parallel co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction. Though these different approaches need to ultimately be integrated into a coherent, unified body of knowledge, progress is currently also being made by pursuing individual methods.
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
This paper outlines the generation process of a specifi computational linguistic representation termed the Multilingual Time Map, conceptually a multi-tape finit state transducer encoding linguistic data at different levels of granularity. The fi st component acquires phonological data from syllable labeled speech data, the second component define feature profiles the third component generates feature hierarchies and augments the acquired data with the define feature profiles and the fourth component displays the Multilingual Time Map as a graph.
The current paper presents a corpus containing 35 dialogues of spontaneously spoken southern German, including half an hour of articulography for 13 of the speakers. Speakers were seated in separate recording chambers, mimicking a telephone call, and recorded on individual audio channels. The corpus provides manually corrected word boundaries and automatically aligned segment boundaries. Annotations are provided in the Praat format. In addition to audio recordings, speakers filled out a detailed questionnaire, assessing among others their audio-visual consumption habits.
The present study introduces articulography, the measurement of the position of tongue and lips during speech, as a promising method to the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation across dozens of speakers. Our results on the basis of Dutch dialect data show clear differences between the southern and the northern dialect with respect to tongue position, with a more frontal tongue position in the dialect from Ubbergen (in the southern half of the Netherlands) than in the dialect of Ter Apel (in the northern half of the Netherlands). Thus articulography appears to be a suitable tool to investigate structural differences in pronunciation at the dialect level.
As can be shown for English data, the assimilation of the alveolar stop can result from an increased gestural overlap of the following oral closure gesture. Our experiment with German synthetic speech showed similar results. Further, it suggests that it is neccessary to complete the gestural specification of the glottal state. A voiced stop should be represented not only by an oral gesture, but by a glottal one as well.
The aim of this paper is to highlight the actual need for corpora that have been annotated based on acoustic information. The acoustic information should be coded in features or properties and is needed to inform further processing systems, i.e. to present a basis for a speech recognition system using linguistic information. Feature annotation of existing corpora in combination with segmental annotation can provide a powerful training material for speech recognition systems, but will as well challenge the further processing of features to segments and syllables. We present here the theoretical preliminaries for our multilingual feature extraction system, that we are currently working on.
Following a welcome in Lithuanian and English to the guests and members on the occa- sion of the 10"’ anniversary of EFNIL, the history of this European language Organization is sketched. A brief survey of the sociolinguistic themes treated at previous Conferences and the state of the inajor projects is given, followed by an introduction (in German) to the general topic of the present Conference. The importance that translation and interpretation have for European language diversity and the individual national languages beside foreign language education of all Europeans is being stressed.
The 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).
In this paper, we present a GOLD standard of part-of-speech tagged transcripts of spoken German. The GOLD standard data consists of four annotation layers – transcription (modified orthography), normalization (standard orthography), lemmatization and POS tags – all of which have undergone careful manual quality control. It comes with guidelines for the manual POS annotation of transcripts of German spoken data and an extended version of the STTS (Stuttgart Tübingen Tagset) which accounts for phenomena typically found in spontaneous spoken German. The GOLD standard was developed on the basis of the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German, FOLK, and is, to our knowledge, the first such dataset based on a wide variety of spontaneous and authentic interaction types. It can be used as a basis for further development of language technology and corpus linguistic applications for German spoken language.
The following analysis explores the nature of everyday activities of people in economic leadership positions. It inquires as to the institutions and people they are in contact with, and the way they communicate with them. First, I will present existing studies in this field and the ethnographic procedure of this study. I will then describe the communicative activities of high-level personnel and their communication networks based on observations. These are then linked to their communicative tasks and types of interaction. Finally, I will discuss some characteristics of the communicative style.
The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-)standard German spoken by young and older educated adults and to identify and locate regional features. To this end, we compile an areally extensive corpus of read and spontaneous German speech. Secondary school students and 50-to-60-year-old locals are recorded in 160 cities throughout the German speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and a word list, name pictures, translate words and sentences from English, answer questions in a sociobiographic interview, and take part in a map task experiment. The resulting corpus comprises over 1000 hours of speech, which is transcribed orthographically. Automatically derived broad phonetic transcriptions, selective manual narrow phonetic transcriptions, and variationalist annotations are added. Focussing on phonetic variation we aim to show to what extent national or regional standards exist in spoken German. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus enables us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in spoken (near-)standard German.