Publikationsserver des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache
Not a member yet
11061 research outputs found
Sort by
Less than one percent of words would be affected by gender-inclusive language in German press texts
Get PDFResearch on gender and language is tightly knitted to social debates on gender equality and non-discriminatory language use. Psycholinguistic scholars have made significant contributions in this field. However, corpus-based studies that investigate these matters within the context of language use are still rare. In our study, we address the question of how much textual material would actually have to be changed if non-gender-inclusive texts were rewritten to be gender-inclusive. This quantitative measure is an important empirical insight, as a recurring argument against the use of gender-inclusive German is that it supposedly makes written texts too long and complicated. It is also argued that gender-inclusive language has negative effects on language learners. However, such effects are only likely if gender-inclusive texts are very different from those that are not gender-inclusive. In our corpus-linguistic study, we manually annotated German press texts to identify the parts that would have to be changed. Our results show that, on average, less than 1% of all tokens would be affected by gender-inclusive language. This small proportion calls into question whether gender-inclusive German presents a substantial barrier to understanding and learning the language, particularly when we take into account the potential complexities of interpreting masculine generics
Some students are more equal: Performance in Author Recognition Test and Title Recognition Test modulated by print exposure and academic background
Get PDFReading is a key skill for university students. The Author Recognition Test (ART) and the Title Recognition Test (TRT) have both been used for decades to measure print exposure which correlates with reading and other linguistic skills. Given the available evidence for interindividual differences in reading skills, this study addresses three open issues. First, to what extent do ART and TRT scores correlate with individual differences regarding students’ study programs? Second, how do these results correlate with the self-reported time spent reading different types of text genres (e.g., fiction, nonfiction) per week? And third, this study compares ART and TRT to one another. We tested students from six study programs in the humanities and (medical) sciences which vary in the amount and kind of reading material required for study success. We found that students perform significantly differently in the ART and the TRT depending on their field of study. Students in a study program focusing on fiction and literature perform best overall. We also replicated the well-known effect of age on ART and TRT scores: older students have better scores. We did not find reliable effects of reading time on test performance, whereas individual creative writing habits did positively predict ART/TRT test results. These results raise a number of important questions regarding the ART/TRT in general and regarding interindividual differences in personal reading and writing habits and the change in reading habits in times of media convergence
Small data in der linguistischen Diskursanalyse? Ein methodisches Experiment am Beispiel des Mehrsprachigkeitsdiskurses
Get PDFQuantitative approaches and big data analyses are widespread in current discourse linguistic studies and have influenced the field considerably. However, building on Fix’ ONE-text-discourse-analysis (2015) and using the example of discourses around multilingualism, this paper will try and attempt an exemplary small data analysis, using a very small corpus of just three very different data samples in order to see what kind of insights can be gained with a strictly qualitative approach. The texts that were chosen deal with discourses around multilingualism in very different ways. They include an online newspaper article, language portraits by multilingual school children and a language learning video on methods how to study a language such as German. After analysing all three artefacts and their particular value and insights when it comes to research on discursive attitudes towards multilingualism in Germany, it shall be discussed whether and how this small data approach could generally be useful in combination with other discourse linguistic methods
Linguistische Diskursethnographie als Zugriff auf das Praxisfeld Queer-Gottesdienst
Get PDFGerman-Speaking Discourse Linguistics has long been concerned with the analysis of primarily textual data. Thus, other approaches to discourse building up on ideas from qualitative social research have often been neglected. Following Phillip Dreesen (2018), I am going to argue in this paper that ethnographic research strategies are a useful complement to traditional text-analytical approaches. Accordingly, I will illustrate what I mean by Linguistic Discourse-Ethnography and how it can connect to the already existing interdisciplinary research within Discourse Studies. In order to illustrate my arguments, I am going to investigate the phenomenon of hermeneutic speechlessness and how queer church-services help actors to resolve it. Eventually, I will argue that one of the major strengths of Linguistic Discourse-Ethnography is that it can give insight into process of subjectification i.e. that it can illustrate how actors use hegemonic linguistic resources to reconceptualize ways of becoming a subject in discourse
The design of internet dictionaries
Get PDFDesign can be so much more than creating something pleasing to the eye. The right choice of design tools can support the essential functions of a product. In the case of dictionaries, with their overwhelming number of word entries and sometimes confusing internal article structure, good design can create a “guiding thread” through the maze of information, allowing users to orient themselves and not lose sight of their path.
This chapter will provide an overview of the essential role played by design in both the form of dictionaries and their usability and will also examine the different traditions that exist in the design of (print and electronic) dictionaries (→Section 6.2.1). The development of dictionary design depends on the intended context in which the dictionary will be used, its potential users, and its data modelling (→Section 6.2.2). Usage studies (→Section 6.3) can help delve deeper into user needs concerning dictionary design. Design practice is dependent on a number of elements that are not unique to dictionaries but also on many dictionary-specific factors, for example whether the dictionary is a retrospective digitalisation project or whether the design takes the content of the dictionary or its intended users as its starting point (→Section 6.4). Search functionality is what provides access to an Internet dictionary, so the design of this functionality also has to be planned carefully (→Section 6.5). Finally,the role of established design guidelines and frameworks will be considered, including how templates are employed and how the lexicographic process should be informed by the interconnected development of content and design (→Section 6.6)
Zeichensetzung
Get PDFDie Zeichensetzung dient der grammatischen Gliederung, der Kennzeichnung kommunikativer Funktionen und der Markierung von Unvollständigkeiten, Abbrüchen oder Unterbrechungen. Die Regeln hierfür werden im Amtlichen Regelwerk der Deutschen Rechtschreibung genau zusammengefasst
Am Experimentiertisch: Position und Positionierung im Chemieunterricht
Get PDFIm vorliegenden Beitrag werde ich nach einigen methodischen und begrifflichen Vorüberlegungen (Kap. 2 und 3) der Frage nachgehen, mit welchen Implikationen der (unbesetzte) Chemiesaal durch seine Herrichtung und Ausstattung für Interaktion verbunden ist (Kap. 4). In einem zweiten Schritt soll anhand von vier Standbildern die Raumnutzung des Lehrers unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Positionen und Posituren deskriptiv erfasst und sozialtopografisch ausgedeutet werden (Kap. 5). Abschließend erfolgt dann die Konstitutionsanalyse des Interaktionsgeschehens (Kap. 6)
The VinKo Corpus. Oral data from Romance and Germanic local varieties of Northern Italy
Get PDFThe VinKo corpus is a parallel corpus with audio recordings from German and Italian dialects and minority languages spoken in the Italian regions Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto. The data has been crowdsourced via the online platform of the VinKo project and was produced in response to a pronunciation and translation task targeted at eliciting phonological and morpho-syntactic phenomena for language contact studies. The VinKo corpus V1.1 contains over 125.000 audio files from 11 language varieties. The project strives towards a ‘open science’ approach with an integral ‘citizen science’ component by active collaboration with local institutions and freely sharing the data with different stakeholders, e. g. speech communities, scientific community. All collected data can be accessed via the admin interface of the VinKo website or downloaded from the online repository, and a selection of the data is represented via an online map targeted at a non-specialist audience
Studying minority languages in the linguistic landscape
Get PDFBeing visible may be as important for minority languages as being heard. Traditional research on minority languages focuses on language maintenance and language shift, on language endangerment and revitalization, on language transmission in the family, on education, and on language policies in other social domains such as the media. Although literacy has become an important issue also for speakers of minority languages, much less attention has been given to the written displays of minority languages in the public space. In this volume, our aim is to explore the contribution of linguistic landscape research to the understanding of the dynamics of minority language situations, with an explicit focus on Europe. We wish to add a new perspective to the long history of studies of linguistic minorities, because we believe the aspect of the visibility of minority languages in public space has received too little attention in traditional minority language research. The linguistic landscape approach seems particularly appropriate for a number of reasons. First, it adopts an all-encompassing view on written language in the public space, paying attention to all signs, rather than limiting its scope to the study of predominantly one type of signs. Second, linguistic landscape research not only studies the signs, but it investigates as well who initiates, creates, places and reads them. Moreover, linguistic landscape research as presented in this volume looks at how the linguistic landscape is manipulated — consciously or unconsciously — in order to confirm or to resist existing or presumed language prestige patterns and hierarchies
Structuring a diachronic corpus. The Georgian National Corpus project
Get PDFThe paper deals with the structural premises of diachronic corpora that are meant to represent specimens of a given language throughout its historical stages and to provide a diachronic cross-century retrieval. On the basis of the Georgian National Corpus project, it discusses ways to cope with variation caused by the use of different scripts and by language change, as well as requirements of annotating the different layers (chronological, dialectal, sociolectal, genre-based, etc.) the text materials pertain to, including a critique of the concepts of the ISO 639-6 standard