Kontrastive Linguistik
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Interactants who encounter co-participant conduct which they find to be socio-normatively problematic or troublesome are faced with a range of choices. First and foremost, this includes the issue of whether to directly address it, or to simply ‘let it pass’ (at least for now) (Emerson/Messinger 1977). In the case of the former, the issue then becomes how to address it. Across the various ways in which participants can pragmatically engage with what they perceive to be transgressive or untoward behavior (e.g., Pomerantz 1978; Schegloff 1988b; Dersley/Wootton 2000; Günthner 2000; Bolden/Robinson 2011; Potter/Hepburn 2020; see also Rodriguez 2022), they sometimes meta-pragmatically formulate the co-participant’s doings in terms of specific actions. Such action descriptions are necessarily selective (Sacks 1963; Schegloff 1972, 1988a; Sidnell/Barnes 2013): They foreground certain aspects of the co-participant’s conduct, while backgrounding others, and thus contribute to publically construeing the formulated conduct in particular ways (Jayyusi 1993), viz. as socio-normatively problematic, transgressive or untoward, and interactionally accountable (Robinson 2016; Sidnell 2017).
Any bilingual dictionary is contrastive by nature, as it documents linguistic information between language pairs. However, the design and compilation of most bilingual dictionaries is often no more than mere lists of lexical or semantic equivalents. In internet forums, one can observe a huge interest in acquiring relevant knowledge about specific lexical items or pairs that are prone to comparison in a more comprehensive manner as they may pose lexical semantic challenges. In particular, these often concern easily confused pairs (e.g. false friends or paronyms) and new terms increasingly travelling between languages in news and social media (Šetka-Čilić/Ilić Plauc 2021). With regard to English and German, the fundamental comparative principles upon which contrastive guides should be build are either absent, or specialised contrastive dictionaries simply do not exist, e.g. comprehensive descriptive resources for false friends, paronyms, protologisms or neologisms (see Gouws/Prinsloo/de Schryver 2004). As a result, users turn to electronic resources such as Google translate, blogs and language forums for help. For example, it is English words such as muscular which have two German translations options.
These are two confusables muskulär and muskulös both of which exhibit a different semantic profile. German sensitiv/sensibel and their English formal counterparts sensitive/sensible are false friends. However, these terms are highly polysemous in both languages and have semantic features in common. Their full meaning spectrum is hardly captured in bilingual dictionaries to allow for a full comparison. Translating protologisms such as German Doppelwumms as well as more established new words is one of the most challenging problems. Currently, German neologisms such as Klimakleber are translated as climate glue (instead of climate activist glueing him-/herself onto objects) by online tools, simply causing mistakes and contextual distortion. Most challenges users face today are well-known (e.g. Rets 2016). New terms are often unregistered in dictionaries and it is often impossible to make appropriate choices between two or more (commonly misused) words between two languages (e.g. Benzehra 2007). These are all relevant problems to translators and language learners alike (e.g González Ribao 2019).
This paper calls for the implication of insights from contrastive lexicology into modern bilingual lexicography. To turn dictionaries into valuable resources and in order to create productive strategies in a learning environment, the practice of writing dictionaries requires a critical re-assessment. Furthermore, the full potential of electronic contrastive resources needs to be recognised and put into practice. After all, monolingual German lexicography has started to reflect on how users’ needs can be accounted for in specific comparative linguistic situations. Some of these ideas can be comfortably extended to bilingual reference guides. On the one hand, this paper will deliver a critical account of some English-German/German-English dictionaries and touch on the shortcomings of contemporary bilingual lexicography. On the other hand, with the help of fictitious resources I will demonstrate contrastive structures as focal points of consultations which answer some of the more frequent language questions more reliably. Among others, I will explain how we need to build user-friendly dictionaries to allow for translating false friends or easily confusable words from the source language into its target language efficiently. With regard to neologisms, I will show how discursive descriptions and definitions that are more elaborate can support language learners to learn about necessary extra-linguistic knowledge. Overall, this could improve the role of specialised dictionaries in the teaching or translating process (cf. Miliç/Sadri/Glušac 2019).
The International Comparable Corpus (ICC) (Kirk/Čermáková 2017; Čermáková et al. 2021) is an open initiative which aims to improve the empirical basis for contrastive linguistics by compiling comparable corpora for many languages and making them as freely available as possible as well as providing tools with which they can easily be queried and analysed. In this contribution we present the first release of written language parts of the ICC which includes corpora for Chinese, Czech, English, German, Irish (partly), and Norwegian. Each of the released corpora contains 400k words distributed over 14 different text categories according to the ICC specifications. Our poster covers the design basics of the ICC, its TEI encoding, a demonstration of using the ICC via different query tools, and an outlook on future plans.
Similar to the European Reference Corpus EuReCo (Kupietz et al. 2020), ICC follows the approach of reusing existing linguistic resources wherever possible in order to cover as many languages as possible with realistic effort in as short a time as possible. In contrast to EuReCo, however, comparable corpus pairs are not defined dynamically in the usage phase, but the compositions of the corpora are fixed in the ICC design. The approaches are thus complementary in this respect. The design principles and composition of the ICC are based on those of the International Corpus of English (ICE) (Greenbaum (ed.) 1996), with the deviation that the ICC includes the additional text category blog post and excludes spoken legal texts (see Čermáková et al. 2021 for details). ICC’s fixed-design approach has the advantage that all single-language corpora in the ICC have the same composition with respect to the selected text types and that this guarantees that the selected broad spectrum of potential influencing variables for linguistic variation is always represented. The disadvantage, however, is that this can only be achieved for quite small corpora and that the generalisability of comparative findings based on the ICC corpora will often need to be checked on larger monolingual corpora or translation corpora (Čermáková/Ebeling/Oksefjell Ebeling forthcoming). Arguing that such issues with comparability and representativeness are inevitable, in one way or the other, and need to be dealt with, our poster will discuss and exemplify the text selections in more detail.
In this presentation I show first results from an ongoing study about syntactic complexity of sanctioning turns in spoken language. This study is part of a larger project on sanctioning of misconduct in social interaction in different European languages (English, German, Italian and Polish). For the study I use video recordings of different everyday settings (family breakfasts, board game interactions and car rides) with three or four participants. These data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. submitted). I focus on sanctioning turns with more than one turn-constructional unit (see among others for TCUs: Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974; Clayman 2013). The study asks how often TCUs are linked to each other in the different languages, for what function, and how language diversity enters into this. Note that complex sanctioning turns do not always come as complex sentences.
In many European languages, propositional arguments (PAs) can be realized as different types of structures. Cross-linguistically, complex structures with PAs show a systematic correlation between the strength of the semantic bond and the syntactic union (cf. Givón 2001; Wurmbrand/Lohninger 2023). Also, different languages show similarities with respect to the (lexical) licensing of different PAs (cf. Noonan 1985; Givón 2001; Cristofaro 2003 on different predicate types). However, on a more fine-grained level, a variation across languages can be observed both with respect to the syntactic-semantic properties of PAs as well as to their licensing and usage. This presentation takes a multi-contrastive view of different types of PAs as syntactic subjects and objects by looking at five European languages: EN, DE, IT, PL and HU. Our goal is to identify the parameters of variation in the clausal domain with PAs and by this to contribute to a better understanding of the individual language systems on the one hand and the nature of the linguistic variation in the clausal domain on the other hand. Phenomena and Methodology: We investigate the following types of PAs: direct object (DO) clauses (1), prepositional object (PO) clauses (2), subject clauses (3), and nominalizations (4, 5). Additionally, we discuss clause union phenomena (6, 7). The analyzed parameters include among others finiteness, linear position of the PA, (non) presence of a correlative element, (non) presence of a complementizer, lexical-semantic class of the embedding verb. The phenomena are analyzed based on corpus data (using mono- and multilingual corpora), experimental data (acceptability judgement surveys) or introspective data.
This conference booklet provides information about 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10) that took place in Mannheim, Germany, from 18 to 21 July 2023. It contains
– a description of the conference aims,
– details on the conference venue,
– information on committees,
– the conference program,
– the abstracts of the keynotes, oral and poster presentations, and
– an author index.
The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann & Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).
We present zu-excessive structures like Otto ist zu schwer ‘Otto is too heavy’ as instantiations of comparatives that have been reflexivized. Comparatives express asymmetric relations between distinguished referents, but reflexivization identifies argument places (or reduces two argument places to one), leading to a Symmetrie relation. Reflexivization is thus in conflict with the asymmetry property of comparatives and leads to an intermediate semantic representation that is con- tradictory. Two experiments substantiate that zu-excessives share this property with privative adjective and animal-for-statue constructions that similarly give rise to contradictory semantics. The processing of any of the constructions mentioned yields a positivity in the event-related-potential signature characteristic of concep- tual reorganization; however, the observed positivity occurs earlier in the case of zu-excessives than in the other cases. We propose this difference is due to zu signalling the mandatory preparation for an ensuing repair rather than reflecting the repair Operation itself that involves manipulating the Standard of comparison, coded elsewhere in the String (if at all).
In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.
Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions.