The 20 most recently published documents
Lexicographers working with minority languages face many challenges. When the language in question is also a sign language, circumstances specific to the visual-spatial modality have to be taken into consideration as well. In this paper, we aim to show and discuss which challenges we encounter while compiling the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DW-DGS), the first corpus-based dictionary of German Sign Language (DGS). Some parallel the challenges minority language lexicographers of spoken languages encounter, e. g. few resources, no written tradition, and having to create one dictionary for all potential user groups, while others are specific to sign languages, e. g. representation of visual-spatial language and creating access structures for the dictionary.
Research on language politics, policy, and planning is of importance to contact linguistics, since political relations between groups of language users, the way in which the use of language(s) is organized, and how language issues are politicized fundamentally shape the political and social conditions under which language varieties are in contact. This chapter first provides a short sketch of how language policy, planning, and politics have so far been conceptualized. Major subfields will be discussed, and then relevant actors and factors in these processes will be introduced. At the end, these aspects will be discussed from a contact linguistic perspective and summarized in a graphic visualization.
The article aims to examine grammatical features and pragmatic concerns of communicating in the Sciences. In the research of certain languages, it became common to explaingrammatical features such as the usage of passive voice and nominal structures by communication requirements such as objectivity and precision. With the assumption that communication in Science is designed to help gain and spread new insight, the authors tried to integrateseveral approaches to pragmatic and grammatical features of communication. By discussing therelationship between the grammar of certain languages and of the corresponding commonlanguage, the article also places the subject of communication in the Sciences in the discipline oflanguage Variation.
This chapter discusses functions of the German language in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of the Baltic states, with a focus on the Latvian capital Riga. For this end, it applies the "Spot German" approach (cf. Heimrath 2017) in the context of debates on the international role of German (cf. Ammon 2015). It argues that German is an "additional language of society" (cf. Marten 2017b), i.e. it is not a dominant language in the Baltics but can regularly be found in a variety of functions. These relate both to the historical role of German in the region (including its contemporary commodification) and to current relations between the Baltics and the German-speaking countries. These include tourism, business, or educational and political institutions, but also point to, e.g., discourses on the quality assigned to products from the German-speaking region. In this sense, the Baltic states are part of what may, in accordance with Kachru's (1985) 3-circle-model for English, be labelled as "extended circle" of German. At the same time, the chapter discusses how conclusions from Linguistic Landscape research can be used for understanding marketing both in and for the German language: On the one hand, German carries the potential of persuading customers to opt for a certain product. On the other hand, the abundance of situations where German can be "spotted" suggests that the LL may successfully be used for language-marketing purposes, as exemplified by a brochure and a poster created by the DAAD Information Centre for the Baltic states in Riga.
Numerous academics and politicians have in recent years contributed to the description and analysis of language policy for the benefit of smaller languages. The present paper tries to add to these by taking up the notion of yet another aspect of politics and language, exemplified by two case studies. The political aspect is the decentralization of parliamentary power for the benefit of minority languages. The two case studies deal with the relationship between the Scottish Parliament and the Gaelic language on the one hand, and between the Norwegian Sarni Parliament, the Sameting, and the Sami language on the other hand. The underlying idea is to consider whether parliamentary bodies may contribute to the empowerment of speakers of minority languages regarding the language of individual choice in as many instances as possible. This applies to any domain of language use, but in particular public bodies, education, and the media, at local, regional and national levels.
This paper focuses on so called syntactic projection phenomena in the German language. This term from the German Gesprächsforschung is used to define the fact that an utterance or part of it foreshadows another one. This paper aims at pointing out how such projection phenomena are consciously exploited for rhethorical purposes. This will be observed on the basis of excerpts from the Stuttgart 21 mediation talks. The linguistic analysis carried out in this paper will focus on syntactic projection phenomena involving the use of causal adverbial connectives deshalb and deswegen.
Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit dem Gebrauch von konnektintegrierbaren Konnektoren im gesprochenen Deutsch. Die Analyse wird am Beispiel der Adverbkonnektoren deshalb und deswegen als Korrelate zum Subjunktor weil und ausgehend von theoretischen Prämissen aus der traditionellen Grammatik und aus der Gesprächsforschung durchgeführt. Der Gebrauch der genannten Konnektoren wird innerhalb einer Auswahl von Korpusdaten gesprochener Sprache beobachtet, die mehrere verschiedene Gattungen der alltäglichen bzw. der institutionellen Kommunikation umfasst.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, wie Konnektoren als sprachliche Mittel zur Aktualisierung von zwei Arten konversationeller Aktivitäten eingesetzt werden können, nämlich von intersubjektiven bzw. gesprächsorganisatorischen Verfahren. Auf intersubjektive Verfahren greift ein Sprecher zurück, um in Kooperation mit seinem Gesprächspartner einen gemeinsamen Wissenshintergrund (common ground) zu schaffen. Durch gesprächsorganisatorische Verfahren greift der Sprecher in die gesprächsthematische Struktur des Interaktionsgeschehens ein. In diesem Beitrag wird die Aktualisierung dieser beiden konversationellen Verfahren am Beispiel der kommunikativen Gattung autobiographisches Interview betrachtet. Diese Gattung ist für eine solche Analyse m. E. besonders geeignet, denn sie zeichnet sich durch eine relativ scharfe Trennung der Gesprächsrollen aus, die das Nachvollziehen des Interaktionsgeschehens erleichtert. An einem autobiographischen Interview sind zwei Subjekte beteiligt: der Interviewte, der als Wissensträger gilt, und der Interviewer, der durch seine Rolle als Gesprächsleiter die Wissensvermittlung begünstigen soll. Der Interviewer ist also mit einer zweifachen Aufgabe konfrontiert, denn er muss die anfängliche Wissensasymmetrie ausgleichen und ist zugleich für die Gesprächsorganisation zuständig. Im Folgenden soll am Beispiel des Konjunktors und veranschaulicht werden, wie der Gebrauch von Konnektoren zur Bewältigung dieser beiden kommunikativen Aufgaben beitragen kann.
This paper aims at investigating the usage of present subjunctive (Konjunktiv I), which is traditionally labelled as a feature of standard written language and therefore as typically occurring in communication genres based on it such as press texts and reporting, in everyday spoken German. Through an analysis of corpus data performed according to theory and method of Interactional Linguistics and encompassing private, institutional and public interactional domains, the paper will show how this particular verb form expresses different epistemic stances according to its syntactic embedment.
Die Rolle der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation erweist sich in den Interviews aus dem Israelkorpus m. E. als besonders wichtig. Es wird von der Tatsache ausgegangen, dass es sich bei den Informanten um Personen mit besonders delikaten biographischen Hintergründen handele. Die Interviewerinnen müssen demzufolge mit der starken emotionalen Belastung rechnen, der die Interviewten während der Rekonstruktion ihrer Lebensgeschichte ausgesetzt sind. Ein sehr direkter Frage-Antwort-Stil könnte wegen dieser emotionalen Belastung als unangenehm empfunden werden. Der Einsatz von Verfahren antizipatorischer Verstehensdokumentation weist stattdessen m. E. eindeutig darauf hin, wie sich die Interviewerinnen offensichtlich um Empathie bemühen und im Sinne einer intersubjektiven Inreraktionskonstitution mit den Interviewten kooperieren. Ziel dieses Beitrages ist es zu zeigen, wie solche Verfahren der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation durch den systematischen Einsatz der Konnektoren und, also, dann realisiert werden können.
Post-field syntax and focalization strategies in National Socialist political speech. This paper deals with a syntactic feature of spoken German, i.e. post-field filling, and with its occurrence in one specific discourse type – political speech – throughout one significant period of the history of German language – National Socialism. This paper aims at pointing out the communicative pragmatic function of right dislocation in the NS political speech on the basis of some collected examples.
Nach einem kurzen Überblick über die heutige sprachökologische Situation in Lettland möchte ich dabei auf die Rolle der deutschen Sprache in verschiedenen Bereichen der lettischen Gesellschaft eingehen. Komplettiert wird der Überblick über die deutsche Sprache im heutigen Lettland durch einige Überlegungen zu Maßnahmen, die die Situation zugunsten des Deutschen ändern könnten.
Dieser Beitrag möchte einen Überblick über die Rolle geben, die die Regionalsprache Lettgallisch im Bildungssektor im Baltikum spielt. Zum einen soll in groben Zügen die historische gesellschaftliche Entwicklung des Lettgallischen mit einem Schwerpunkt auf dem Bildungsbereich dargestellt werden, zum anderen werden Entwicklungen der letzten Jahre diskutiert, in denen Diskurse und Einstellungen zum Lettgallischen eine Wandlung durchlaufen. Der theoretische Rahmen dafür sind internationale Diskussionen zu Regional- und Minderheitensprachen sowie Debatten in der Bildungspolitik. Damit soll nicht zuletzt Aufmerksamkeit für das Lettgallische in der deutschsprachigen Wahrnehmung des Baltikums generiert werden, das in einem Kompendium zu Bildungsgeschichte(n) im Baltikum nicht fehlen darf. Nach einer kurzen Einführung in die Region Lettgallen (Latgale) und das Lettgallische folgen aktuelle Beispiele für den sich ändernden Gebrauch des Lettgallischen und seine Einordung in Diskurse zu Minderheitensprachen. Schließlich wird auf jüngste politische Entwicklungen eingegangen, etwa im Kontext der Ausarbeitung neuer Lehrstandards für die staatlichen Schulen in Lettland.
In English, past tense stative clauses embedded under a past-marked attitude verb, like Eric thought that Kalina was sick, can receive two interpretations, differing on when the state of the complement is understood to hold, i.e. Kalina’s sickness precedes the time of Eric’s thinking (backward-shifted reading), or Kalina is sick at the time of Eric’s thinking (simultaneous reading). As is well known, the availability of the simultaneous reading—also called Sequence of tense (SOT)—is subject to cross-linguistic variation. Non-SOT languages only allow for the backward-shifted interpretation. This cross-linguistic variation has been analysed in two main ways in the literature: a structural approach, connecting the availability of the simultaneous reading in a language to a syntactic mechanism that allows the embedded past not to be interpreted; and an implicature approach, which links the absence of such a reading to the presence of a “cessation” implicature associated with past tense. We report a series of experiments on Polish, which is commonly classified as a non-SOT language. First, we investigate the interpretation of complement clauses embedded under past-marked attitude verbs in Polish and English. This investigation revealed a difference between these two languages in the availability of simultaneous interpretations for past-under-past complement clauses, albeit not as large as a binary distinction between SOT and non-SOT languages would lead us to expect. We then address the question of whether the lower acceptability we observe for simultaneous readings in Polish might be due to an embedded cessation implicature. On the way to address this question, we show that in simple matrix clauses, Polish gives rise to the same cessation inference as English. Then we investigate Polish past-under-past sentences in positive and negative contexts, comparing their potential cessation implicature to the exclusive implicature of disjunction. In our results, we found that the latter was endorsed more often in positive than in negative contexts, as expected, while the cessation implicature was endorsed overall very little, with no difference across contexts. The disanalogy between the disjunction and the temporal cases, and the insensitivity of the latter to monotonicity, are a challenge for the implicature approach, and cast doubts on associating SOT phenomena with implicatures.
The EMLex Dictionary of Lexicography (= EMLexDictoL) is a plurilingual subject field dictionary (in German, English, Afrikaans, Galician, Italian, Polish and Spanish) that contains the basic subject field terminology of lexicography and dictionary research, in which the dictionary article texts are presented in a sophisticated but comprehensible form. The articles are supplemented by a complex crossreferencing system and the current subject field literature of the respective national languages. Following the lemma position, the dictionary articles contain items regarding morphology, synonymy, the position of the definiens, additional explanations, the cross-reference position, the position for literature, the equivalent terms in the other six languages of the dictionary as well as the names of the authors.
This paper focusss on the first Slavonic-Romanian lexicons, compiled in the second half of the 17th century and their use(rs), proposing a method of investigating the manner in which lexical information available in the above corpus relates, if at all, to the vocabulary of texts from the same period. We chose to investigate their relation to an anonymous Old Testament translation made from Church Slavonic, also from the second half of the 17th century, which was supposed to be produced in the same geographical area, in the same Church Slavonic school or even by the same author as the lexicons. After applying a lemmatizer on both the Biblical text (Books of Genesis and Daniel) and the Romanian material from the lexicons, we analyse the results and double the statistical analysis with a series of case studies, focusing on some common lexemes that might be an indicator of the relatedness of the texts. Even if the analysis points out that the lexicons might not have been compiled as a tool for the translation of religious texts, it proves to be a useful method that reveals interesting data and provides the basis for more extensive approaches.
Given the relevance of interoperability, born-digital lexicographic resources as well as legacy retro-digitised dictionaries have been using structured formats to encode their data, following guidelines such as the Text Encoding Initiative or the newest TEI Lex-0. While this new standard is being defined in a stricter approach than the original TEI dictionary schema, its reuse of element names for several types of annotation as well as the highly detailed structure makes it difficult for lexicographers to efficiently edit resources and focus on the real content. In this paper, we present the approach designed within LeXmart to facilitate the editing of TEI Lex-0 encoded resources, guaranteeing consistency through all editing processes.