Open Access

The adequate use of social deixis is highly dependent on the situation and context and has therefore always been at the center of linguistic pragmatics. So far, principles of pronominal address have mainly been modelled with a focus on oral, co-present interaction. The use of pronominal address in computer-mediated communication (CMC) with its translocal and partially anonymous contexts is still a research gap. This paper asks, from a contrastive perspective, how the appropriate use of address pronouns is negotiated on talk pages of the German, French, and Italian Wikipedia. The talk pages of Wikipedia share features of CMC genres such as a dia logic structure and an informal writing style with non-standard language. There are two types of Wikipedia talk pages, whose data are considered in this study based on the multilingual corpora by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language: article talk pages, where authors negotiate online encyclopedic content, and user talk pages, where the contributions of individual authors are discussed. These two types of talk pages will be analysed for the study. Based on corpus data, it can be shown that the unidirectionality of this transition from the formal form (in German: Sie, in French: vous, in Italian: Lei) to the informal form (in German: du, in French: tu, in Italian: tu) in CMC is not always given. In both analysed Wikipedia subcorpora, i.e., the Wikipedia article talk pages on the one hand and the article talk pages on the other hand, a greater deal of discussions about addressing styles takes place on the user talk pages, with the informal you variant being discussed more frequently than the formal you variant. Aspects of pronominal address among speakers of German, French and Italian are characterized by instability and uncertainty – especially in CMC. Moreover, it can be shown that Wikipedia authors discuss, among others, the reasoning behind their preference for a certain form as well as the notion of “distance” in which informal variants show familiarity which is not perceived as desirable by all users.

Concordancing is one of the oldest corpus analysis tools, especially for written corpora. In NLP concordancing appears intraining of speech-recognition system. Additionally, comparative studies of different languages result in parallel corpora. Concordancing for these corpora in a NLP context is a new approach. We propose to combine these fields of interest for a multi-purpose concordance for Spoken Language Data, opening the opportunity of combining corpus-linguistic and NLP methods resulting in a broader empirical basis for NLP research. Theoretic models for audio-concordances are discussed. Principles of the structure and design of a parallel audio concordance are given, coding by means of XML to ensure reusability and flexibility, using time stamps for referencing from annotations to the signal.

Authentizität ist eine Reflexionskategorie und für die Linguistik von großem Interesse. Denn Sprache ist »das zentrale Medium bei der kommunikativen Authentizitätsherstellung«, die selbst immer zwischen den Polen der »Wahrhaftigkeit und Inszenierung« angesiedelt ist (Felder / Gardt 2016; 2020). Die Sprachwissenschaft hat insofern eine besondere Aufgabe in diesem Zusammenhang. Authentizität wird sprachlich-diskursiv erzeugt und ist ein Aushandlungsergebnis, Authentisierungsakte sind die Realisate der Aushandlung. Unter dieser Voraussetzung ist der Gegenstand gesellschaftlich eminent relevant. Das haben die Arbeiten deutlich gemacht, die den Authentizitätsbegriff in Kunst, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft, in Kommunikation und Öffentlichkeit, sowie hinsichtlich semantischer Strukturen dargestellt und beschrieben haben.

This paper quantifies textual patterns relating to gendered assumptions in a fairly unique text, an entire “women’s encyclopedia” from 1830’s Germany, which at 10 volumes and 1,461,000 word tokens was of comparable size to contemporary general encyclopedias, but written and marketed for a female audience. We perform experiments on classifying gender of biographical entries and querying a specific textual feature, calendar dates, with context from comparison 19th-20th century encyclopedias from the EncycNet corpus.