L1: Lexikographie und Sprachdokumentation
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One of the fundamental questions about human language is whether all languages are equally complex. Here, we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. We present a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections consisting of ~ 3.5 billion words or ~ 9.0 billion characters and covering 2069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of what we call average prediction complexity. We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. In addition, we show that speaker population size predicts entropy. We argue that both results constitute evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective.
Travel guides and travel reports constitute an important source for the generation and spread of popular geopolitical epistemes and assumptions. With regard to colonial attitudes and their possible perpetuation, it is therefore of great interest what kind of information such texts convey regarding (post)colonial places, and how they contextualize it. The paper compares descriptions of Qingdao (Tsingtau), a German colonized territory between 1897 and 1914, in travel guides and related material from colonial and postcolonial times and in different European languages. It investigates what differences can be found between these descriptions in relation to time, language, and medium (print or online) of publication. Of particular interest is the question whether, and in what ways, colonial perspectives are perpetuated in present-day (especially German) travel literature.
In this paper we present an experimental semantic search function, based on word embeddings, for an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWPD). The LWPD synthesizes an increasing number of lexicographical resources and provides basic cross-resource search options. Onomasiological access to the lexical units of the portal is a highly desirable feature for many research questions, such as the likelihood of borrowing lexical units with a given meaning (Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009; Zeller, 2015). The search technology is based on multilingual pre-trained word embeddings, and individual word senses in the portal are associated with word vectors. Users may select one or more among a very large number of search terms, and the database returns lexical items with word sense vectors similar to these terms. We give a preliminary assessment of the feasibility, usability and efficacy of our approach, in particular in comparison to search options based on semantic domains or fields.
Der nationalsozialistische Interaktions- und Kommunikationsraum war mithin bevölkert von kommunikativ konstruierten Sozialfiguren. Hierbei gab es sowohl positiv Konnotierte (z. B. Volksgenosse, Nationalsozialist, Parteigenosse, SA-Mann, Alter Kämpfer) als auch negativ Konnotierte (z. B. Asozialer, Judenfreund, Schwarzer, Roter, Freimaurer). Diese stereotypisierten Sozialfiguren, an die wiederum vielfältige positive wie negative Attribuierungen geknüpft waren, stellten gleichsam Diskurspositionen dar, die anderen zugewiesen wurden oder eingenommen werden konnten – sofern den individuellen Voraussetzungen nach möglich – und die mit unterschiedlichen Graden der In- bzw. Exklusion einhergingen. Die folgenden Ausführungen konzentrieren sich auf zwei dieser Figuren, die spezifischer als Grenzfiguren begriffen werden können: Meckerer und Märzgefallene. Es wird untersucht, wie diese beiden Grenzfiguren sprachlich konstruiert, in welchen Kontexten und Kommunikationssituationen sie angeeignet und verwendet wurden. In beiden Fällen wird der Fokus dabei über den wörtlichen Ausdruck hinaus auf zeitgenössisch ähnliche oder eng verwandte Bezeichnungen ausgeweitet.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, about 2000 new lexical units have entered the German lexicon. These concern a multitude of coinings and word formations (Kuschelkontakt, rumaerosolen, pandemüde) as well as lexical borrowings mainly from English (Lockdown, Hotspot, Superspreader). In a special way, these neologisms function as keywords and lexical indicators sketching the development of the multifaceted corona discourse in Germany. They can be detected systematically by corpus-linguistic investigations of reports and debates in contemporary public communication. Keyword analyses not only exhibit new vocabulary, they also reveal discursive foci, patterns of argumentation and topicalisations within the diverse narratives of the discourse. With the help of quickly established and dominant neologisms, this paper will outline typical contexts and thematic references, but it will also identify speakers' attitudes and evaluations.