The 50 most recently published documents
Der Beitrag stellt die wissenschaftlichen und methodologischen Herausforderungen für die Erstellung einer innovativen, korpusbasierten lexikografischen Ressource zur Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch in der Interaktion vor und zeigt neue Wege für lexikografische Arbeiten auf. Neben allgemeinen Projektinformationen zu den Ausgangspunkten, der Datengrundlage, den Methoden, Zielen und dem konkreten Gegenstandsbereich werden ausgewählte Ergebnisse von zwei projektbezogenen empirischen Studien zu Erwartungshaltungen an eine lexikografische Ressource des gesprochenen Deutsch präsentiert. Für korpusbasierte quantitative Informationen werden die Möglichkeiten eines Tools, welches im Rahmen des Projekts entwickelt wurde, aufgezeigt. Außerdem wird ein Einblick in die konzeptionellen und methodologischen Überlegungen zur Mikrostruktur der geplanten Ressource gegeben.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DEREKO and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
We present web services implementing a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 "Language resource management - Transcription of spoken language". The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.
For a long time, the lecture dominated performatively presented scientific communication. Given academic traditions, it is possible to make a connection between the lecture and classical rhetoric, a highly differentiated instrument of analysis. The tradition of the lecture has been perpetuated in the presentation of research results, first in the use of transparencies and subsequently through computer-based projections. Yet the use of media technology has also allowed new practices to emerge, including mediation practices hitherto neglected in the theory of rhetoric.
Construction-based language models assume that grammar is meaningful and learnable from experience. Focusing on five of the most elementary argument structure constructions of English, a large-scale corpus study of child-directed speech (CDS) investigates exactly which meanings/functions are associated with these patterns in CDS, and whether they are indeed specially indicated to children by their caretakers (as suggested by previous research, cf. Goldberg, Casenhiser and Sethuraman 2004). Collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) is employed to uncover significantly attracted verb-construction combinations, and attracted pairs are classified semantically in order to systematise the attested usage patterns of the target constructions. The results indicate that the structure of the input may aid learners in making the right generalisations about constructional usage patterns, but such scaffolding is not strictly necessary for construction learning: not all argument structure constructions are coherently semanticised to the same extent (in the sense that they designate a single schematic event type of the kind envisioned in Goldberg’s [1995] ‘scene encoding hypothesis’), and they also differ in the extent to which individual semantic subtypes predominate in learners’ input
Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
Digitale Medien haben in einer rasenden Geschwindigkeit inzwischen alle Lebensbereiche verändert. Sie greifen immer weiter in gewachsene Strukturen ein und prägen immer mehr unsere Wirtschafts-, Arbeits- und Sozialwelt, aber auch unsere private Kommunikation und unser alltägliches Leben. Ständig neue Entwicklungen stellen dabei alle Beteiligten immer wieder vor neue Herausforderungen. Damit einher geht die Notwendigkeit, sich kontinuierlich neues Wissen anzueignen. Als Schlüsselqualifikation zur Beherrschung dieser neuen Anforderungen in unserer sich ständig ändernden Gesellschaft gilt Medienkompetenz. Neben Lesen, Schreiben und Rechnen ist sie zur vierten Kulturtechnik geworden, die alle Bürgerinnen und Bürger in unserer Gesellschaft unabhängig von Alter, Geschlecht und Herkunft beherrschen sollten. Um an den aktuellen gesellschaftlichen und politischen Entwicklungen überhaupt noch teilnehmen und erwerbsfähig bleiben zu können, muss diese Kompetenz sogar beherrscht werden können. Damit wird ihre Vermittlung zum staatlichen Bildungsauftrag.
A large database is a desirable basis for multimodal analysis. The development of more elaborate methods, data banks, and tools for a stronger empirical grounding of multimodal analysis is a prevailing topic within multimodality. Prereq- uisite for this are corpora for multimodal data. Our contribution aims at developing a proposal for gathering and building multimodal corpora of audio-visual social media data, predominantly YouTube data.Our contribution has two parts: First we outline a participation framework which is able to represent the complexity of YouTube communication. To this end we ‘dissect’ the different communicative and multimodal layers YouTube consists of. Besides the Video performance YouTube also integrates comments, social media operators, commercials, and announcements for further YouTube Videos. The data consists of various media and modes and is interactively engaged in various discourses. Hence, it is rather difficult to decide what can be considered as a basic communicative unit (or a ‘turn’) and how it can be mapped. Another decision to be made is which elements are of higher priority than others, thus have to be integrated in an adequate transcription format. We illustrate our conceptual considerations on the example of so-called L e t’s Plays, which are supposed to present and comment Computer gaming processes.The second part is devoted to corpus building. Most previous studies either worked with ad hoc data samples or outlined data mining and data sampling strategies. Our main aim is to delineate in a systematic way and based on the conceptual outline in the first part necessary elements which should be part of a YouTube corpus. To this end we describe in a first Step which components (e.g., the Video itself, the comments, the metadata, etc.) should be captured. ln a second Step we outline why and which relations (e.g., screen appearances, hypertextual struc- tures, etc.) are worth to get part of the corpus. In sum, our contribution aims at outlining a proposal for gathering and systematizing multimodal data, specifically audio-visual social media data, in a corpus derived from a conceptual modeling of important communicative processes of the research object itself.
Materia prima. Zur Semantik des Begriffs in naturkundlichen Sachschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts
(2019)
Katharina Dück widmet sich in diesem Buch dem umfangreichen Doktrinenschatz des Begriffs „Materia prima“ im Spannungsfeld von Theorie und wiederholbarer Praxis in deutschsprachigen alchemisch-naturkundlichen Sachschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts. Sie trägt damit neue Aspekte zur Debatte des Materialismus in der Frühen Neuzeit bei. Untersucht werden Texte sogenannter Meisterdenker als auch Zeugnisse derer, die bisher wenig berücksichtigt wurden. Dem Corpus Paracelsicum und der Strömung des Paracelsismus wird besondere Beachtung gezollt. Drei rasterartig umrissene Grundmuster, denen die „Materia prima“-Vorstellungen zugeordnet sind, werden ausführlich vorgestellt und dabei Kontinuitäten sowie Transformationen von vorhandenen Materie-Konzepten festgestellt.
Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.
Der Beitrag spürt dem spannungsreichen Verhältnis von diskursanalytischen Ansätzen und (neo-)marxistischer Kapitalismuskritik nach und erkundet mögliche Beiträge diskursanalytischer Perspektiven zu Kapitalismusanalysen. In einem ersten Schritt wird anhand einiger ausgewählter Diskurstheoretikerinnen und -theoretiker der Eindruck einer zwischen affirmierter Nähe und skeptischer Abgrenzung schwankenden Positionierung zu marxistischen Ansätzen verdeutlicht. Gegen elementare Grundannahmen marxistischer Wissenschafts- und Gesellschaftskonzepte, so etwa den Begriff der ‚Ideologie‘ oder die Annahme einer klar nachvollziehbaren und damit voraussagbaren gesellschaftlich-politischen Determinierung durch ökonomische ‚Basisprozesse‘ setzten sie die Ansicht, dass Wissen, Wahrheit, soziale Identitäten wie auch gesellschaftliche Praktiken als kontingente und stets unabgeschlossene Ergebnisse sozialer Konstruktionsprozesse zu begreifen seien. Am Beispiel verschiedener marxistischer Grundannahmen, wie der Trennung von Lohnarbeit und Kapital, dem Verwertungszwang des Kapitals, dem Auseinanderfallen von Politik und Ökonomie, wird anschließend dafür plädiert, diese nicht als gegebene Tatsachen hinzunehmen, sondern in ihrer diskursiven Verfasstheit selbst zu untersuchen. Erst dann – so die Annahme – lässt sich zeigen, ob und wie diese Elemente gesellschaftlich wirkmächtig werden.
Modern theoretical linguistics lives by the insight that the meanings of complex expressions derive from the meanings of their parts and the way these are composed. However, the currently dominating theories of the syntax-semantics interface hastily relegate important aspects of meaning which cannot readily be aligned with visible structure to empty projecting heads non-reductively (mainstream Generative Grammar) or to the syntactic construction holistically (Construction Grammar). This book develops an alternative, compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal and comparative meanings of a range of productive constructions of which pseudorefl exive, excessive and directional complement constructions take center stage. Accordingly, a contradiction-inducing hence semantically problematic part of literally coded meaning is locally ignored and systematically realized „expatriately“ with respect to parts of structure that achieve the indexical anchoring of propositional contents in terms of times, worlds and standards of comparison, thus yielding the observed hidden meanings.
This investigation targets a syntactic phenomenon of German which is commonly referred to as the absentive construction. The absentive is considered a universal grammatical category denoting absence. Its syntax is characterised by the occurrence of an auxiliary or copula verb accompanied by a non‐finite VP containing a main verb. The expression of absence, predicated over the clausal subject, is assumed to be based on a constructional meaning. Reviewing a wide range of syntactic and interpretive properties of this structure in German, we will demonstrate that certain empirical claims about the construction are not well founded and that its seemingly idiosyncratic properties are indeed available for compositional analyses. We will propose a structural analysis of its core syntactic and interpretive properties: The predication expresses the localisation of the subject at the location of the event, denoted by the infinitival verb. The interpretation of absence, then, can be explained by an implicature.
We propose a Cross-lingual Encoder-Decoder model that simultaneously translates and generates sentences with Semantic Role Labeling annotations in a resource-poor target language. Unlike annotation projection techniques, our model does not need parallel data during inference time. Our approach can be applied in monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual settings and is able to produce dependencybased and span-based SRL annotations. We benchmark the labeling performance of our model in different monolingual and multilingual settings using well-known SRL datasets. We then train our model in a cross-lingual setting to generate new SRL labeled data. Finally, we measure the effectiveness of our method by using the generated data to augment the training basis for resource-poor languages and perform manual evaluation to show that it produces high-quality sentences and assigns accurate semantic role annotations. Our proposed architecture offers a flexible method for leveraging SRL data in multiple languages.
This article investigates the use of überhaupt and sowieso in German and Dutch. These two words are frequently classified as particles, if only because of their pragmatic functions. The frequent use of particles is considered a specific trait common to German and Dutch, and the description of their semantics and pragmatics is notoriously difficult. It is unclear whether both particles have the same meaning in Dutch (where they are loanwords) and German, whether they can fulfil the same syntactic functions and to what extent the (semantic and pragmatic) functions of überhaupt und sowieso overlap. There has already been linguistic research on überhaupt and sowieso by Fisseni (2009) using the world-wide web and by Bruijnen and Sudhoff (2013) using the EUROPARL corpus. In the present study we critically evaluated the corpus study, integrating information on original utterance language and discussing the adequacy of this corpus. Moreover, we conducted an experimental survey collecting subjective-intuitive judgements in three dimensions, thus gathering more data on sparse and informal constructions.
By using these complementary methods, we obtain a more nuanced picture of the use of überhaupt and sowieso in both languages: On the one hand, the data show where the use of both words is more similar and on the other hand, differences between the languages can also be discerned.
Falsche Plurale?
(1988)
Zwischen Genus und Sexus
(1988)
In diesem Artikel wird der Tempus-Modus-Gebrauch in indirekter Redewiedergabe im Niederdeutschen im Vergleich mit dem Hochdeutschen, Englischen und Norwegischen untersucht. Die hochdeutsche Standardsprache verfügt über eine voll ausgebaute Indikativ-Konjunktiv-Unterscheidung, wobei eine der Funktionen des Konjunktivs in der Markierung indirekter Rede besteht. Viele andere germanische Sprachen, hier vertreten durch das Englische und Norwegische, kennen keine vergleichbare Konjunktivkategorie (mehr). Indirekte Rede steht dort im Indikativ, wobei häufig das Phänomen der Tempusverschiebung zu beobachten ist. Das nördliche Niederdeutsche kennt ebenfalls keine distinkten Konjunktivformen, womit sich die Frage stellt, ob auch die Redewiedergabe wie in den anderen konjunktivlosen Sprachen funktioniert. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht dieser Frage im Rahmen einer empirischen Untersuchung nach. Als Datengrundlage dienen nordniederdeutsche Radionachrichten. Es zeigt sich, dass die Verteilung von Präsens und Präteritum in den niederdeutschen Radiodaten weiter ausfällt als in den konjunktivlosen Vergleichssprachen: Das Präsens tritt, wie im Hochdeutschen, auch dort auf, wo im Englischen und Norwegischen mit einer Verschiebung zum Präteritum zu rechnen wäre. Und für das Präteritum ergibt sich eine reportiv-konjunktivische Verwendung, die keine Entsprechung im Englischen oder Norwegischen hat.
Ein CERN der deutschen Sprache. Überlegungen zu einem Dokumentationszentrum der deutschen Sprache
(2019)
This paper focuses on easily confused items (so-called paronyms) in German in terms of their general, technical or academic contextual uses. It outlines the semantic discrepancies between contextual usages of pairs such as Methode/Methodologie/Methodik and unehelich/nichtehelich/außerehelich depending on their linguistic registers and varieties. While previous studies lack empirical evidence and primarily operate with morphological criteria (cf. Lăzărescu 1999) the descriptions here derive from corpus-based examinations of general written and of technical discourse. It is shown that causes of lexical confusion arise from formal, phonetic resemblances or semantic similarities, regular co-occurrence, incorrect morphological analogies and political governance of language. Context, knowledge, associations and experience determine the choice of lexical terms. Speakers need to apply linguistic and extra-linguistic principles in order to create adequate contexts. With the help of paronym examples and corpus data, these will be elucidated in more detail.
Einleitung
(2017)
Kertész, András (2017): The historiography of generative linguistics. Tübingen: Narr. [Rezension]
(2019)
Die vorliegende Arbeit geht der Frage nach, wie bzw. mit welchen sprachlichen Mitteln der Islam im öffentlichen Diskurs konstituiert wird. Hierfür wurde ein Korpus aus überregionalen Medientexten erstellt und qualitativ analysiert. Die Auswertung des gesamten Korpus weist darauf hin, welche inhaltlichen Merkmale im Islamdiskurs sprachlich nachweisbar sind und sich im gesamten Diskurs stets wiederholen. Schlüsselwörter wie Islam, Islamismus, Islamisierung, Muslim, Dschihad, Scharia oder Koran wurden detailliert präsentiert. Außerdem wurden die aus dem untersuchten Korpus entstandenen Stereotype rekonstruiert. Weiterhin wurden Metaphern bzw. Metaphernkonzepte untersucht, die sich im Islamdiskurs abbilden lassen. Exemplarisch anhand der drei Weltereignisse Iranische Revolution 1978/79, 11. September 2001 und Arabischer Frühling 2011 hat die vorliegende Arbeit gezeigt, wie der Islam in unterschiedlichen Zeitabständen wahrgenommen wird und inwieweit gesellschaftspolitische Ereignisse und Auseinandersetzungen die Thematisierung des Islams beeinflussen können.
In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisited, using ten years’ worth of it rather than just two, and using the improved methodology. We conclude that there is indeed a positive relationship. In addition, we show that online dictionary look-up behaviour is remarkably similar across languages, even when, as in our case, one is dealing with languages from very dissimilar language families. Furthermore, online dictionaries turn out to have minimum look-up success rates, below which they simply cannot go. These minima are language-sensitive and vary depending on the regularity of the searched-for entries, but are otherwise constant no matter the size of randomly sampled dictionaries. Corpus-informed sampling always improves on any random method. Lastly, from the point of view of the graphical user interface, we argue that the average user of an online bilingual dictionary is better served with a single search box, rather than separate search boxes for each dictionary side.