Kontrastive Linguistik
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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.
Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other.
The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar.
The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.
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.
Language resources are often compiled for the purpose of variational analysis, such as studying differences between genres, registers, and disciplines, regional and diachronic variation, influence of gender, cultural context, etc. Often the sheer number of potentially interesting contrastive pairs can get overwhelming due to the combinatorial explosion of possible combinations. In this paper, we present an approach that combines well understood techniques for visualization heatmaps and word clouds with intuitive paradigms for exploration drill down and side by side comparison to facilitate the analysis of language variation in such highly combinatorial situations. Heatmaps assist in analyzing the overall pattern of variation in a corpus, and word clouds allow for inspecting variation at the level of words.
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).
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.
The present thesis investigates the syntagmatic relations of certain Finnish emotion verbs that are formed by the derivational suffix -ua/-yä (e.g. suuttua ‘get angry’, pelästyä ‘get frightened’). Prototypically, the suffix expresses reflexivity, but in the case of the “inchoative” emotion verbs, it indicates a change of state on behalf of the experiencer, from a non-emotional state to an emotional state.
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 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.
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).