Quantitative Linguistik
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According to a widespread conception, quantitative linguistics will eventually be able to explain empirical quantitative findings (such as Zipf’s Law) by deriving them from highly general stochastic linguistic ‘laws’ that are assumed to be part of a general theory of human language (cf. Best (1999) for a summary of possible theoretical positions). Due to their formal proximity to methods used in the so-called exact sciences, theoretical explanations of this kind are assumed to be superior to the supposedly descriptive-only approaches of linguistic structuralism and its successors. In this paper I shall try to argue that on close inspection such claims turn out to be highly problematic, both on linguistic and on science-theoretical grounds.
We compare the use of überhaupt and sowieso in Dutch and German. We use the world-wide web as the main resource and pursue a zigzag strategy, trying to find usages going back and forth between dictionaries, intuitions and real data obtained through web search. To our surprise, the results more or less confirm the decision of Dutch dictionaries to consider überhaupt and sowieso synonymous. In German, we find no synonymy, but only a great overlap of usage conditions in declarative sentences.
We present a technique called event mapping that allows to project text representations into event lists, produce an event table, and derive quantitative conclusions to compare the text representations. The main application of the technique is the case where two classes of text representations have been collected in two different settings (e.g., as annotations in two different formal frameworks) and we can compare the two classes with respect to their systematic differences in the event table. We illustrate how the technique works by applying it to data collected in two experiments (one using annotations in Vladimir Propp’s framework, the other using natural language summaries).
The article investigates the conditions under which the w-relativizer was appears instead of the d-relativzer das in German relative clauses. Building on Wiese 2013, we argue that was constitutes the elsewhere case that applies when identification with the antecedent cannot be established by syntactic means via upward agreement with respect to phi-features. Corpuslinguistic results point to the conclusion that this is the case whenever there is no lexical nominal in the antecedent that, following Geach 1962 and Baker 2003, supplies a criterion of identity needed to establish sameness of reference between the antecedent and the relativizer.
In dem Beitrag wird der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern die Frequenz eines Wortes mit seiner orthographischen Richtigschreibung zusammenhangt. Werden häufige Wörter öfter und früher richtig geschrieben? Und welche Rolle spielt dabei die orthographische Regelhaftigkeit der Wortstrukturen? Unter Zuhilfenahme maschineller Analyseverfahren aus der Großstudie "Automatisierte Rechtschreibdiagnostik" (Fay/Berkling/Stüker 2012) werden diesbezuglich über 1000 Schülertexte von Klasse 2 bis 8 untersucht. Im Ergebnis werden zum einen einige Annahmen, die bislang vor allem auf Erfahrungswerten aus der sprachdidaktischen Arbeit fußten, empirisch bestätigt, zum anderen werden sie hinsichtlich spezifischer Rechtschreibphänomene differenziert und erweitert.
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. Or put differently, if less information is carried within the word, more information has to be spread among words in order to communicate successfully. In addition, we find that–despite differences in the way information is expressed–there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways.
In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/ cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005. 1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing.
Sound units play a pivotal role in cognitive models of auditory comprehension. The general consensus is that during perception listeners break down speech into auditory words and subsequently phones. Indeed, cognitive speech recognition is typically taken to be computationally intractable without phones. Here we present a computational model trained on 20 hours of conversational speech that recognizes word meanings within the range of human performance (model 25%, native speakers 20–44%), without making use of phone or word form representations. Our model also generates successfully predictions about the speed and accuracy of human auditory comprehension. At the heart of the model is a ‘wide’ yet sparse two-layer artificial neural network with some hundred thousand input units representing summaries of changes in acoustic frequency bands, and proxies for lexical meanings as output units. We believe that our model holds promise for resolving longstanding theoretical problems surrounding the notion of the phone in linguistic theory.
Seit 2017 wird im deutschen Mikrozensus eine Frage zur Sprache der Bevölkerung gestellt. Die letzte Spracherhebung in einem deutschen Zensus datiert aus dem Jahr 1939; entsprechend gibt es aktuell keine aussagekräftigen Sprachstatistiken in Deutschland. Die neue Sprachfrage des Mikrozensus weist jedoch erhebliche Mängel auf; offensichtlich wurde sie als Stellvertreterfrage zur Messung kultureller Integration konzipiert. Im vorliegenden Text werden die Fragen diskutiert und ihre ersten Ergebnisse analysiert. Daran anschließend werden andere Varianten von Sprachfragen dargestellt, dabei wird insbesondere auf die vorbildlichen Sprachfragen im kanadischen Zensus eingegangen. Abschließend wird die Sprachfrage der Deutschland-Erhebung 2018 des IDS inklusive ihrer Ergebnisse vorgestellt; die Deutschland-Erhebung 2018 stellt neben dem Mikrozensus bislang die einzige repräsentative Spracherhebung in Deutschland dar.