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Oralität ist gegenüber Literalität historisch primär, und der Übergang hin zur Literalität ist sprach- wie kulturwissenschaftlich einschneidend. Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German), eine erst knapp über 100 Jahre junge, originär ausschließlich mündlich verwendete Kreolsprache, befindet sich gegenwärtig an der Schwelle hin zur Verschriftung. Eine Sammlung von rund 180 spontan schriftlich produzierten Äußerungen dieser noch auf allen Ebenen unnormierten Sprache zeigt von den Unserdeutsch-SchreiberInnen intuitiv zugrunde gelegte Graphem-Phonem-Korrespondenzen. Die Schriftbelege lassen dabei Rückschlüsse zu auf graphematische Kontakteinflüsse sowie auf die mentale Repräsentation von Wörtern bei den SprecherInnen. Diese Erkenntnisse sind, neben ihrer sprachtheoretischen Relevanz, vor allem auch für die noch ausstehende Erarbeitung einer Orthographie von Unserdeutsch von Bedeutung.
Early New High German N+N compounds are notoriously difficult to identify. This is mostly due to formally similar or identical pronominal genitive constructions. Furthermore, what looks like a noun at first glance might sometimes be an affixoid, an adjective or a verb stem. The precise identification of compounds is not only relevant for researchers concerned with word-formation. It has consequences for corpus lemmatisation, lexicography and our understanding of the noun phrase, to name just a few areas. Compound identification has been tackled before (mostly by Pavlov [1983] and NITTA [1987]), but modern corpus linguistics allows for a better assessment of all factors involved. This paper reevaluates and outlines strategies to identify Early New High German compounds, aiming to serve as an easily adaptable guideline for future research.
We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of conventionalization, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and diversification, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexical-semantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.