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Request for confirmation sequences in British and American English
Get PDFThis article presents the quantitative findings from a comparative study of request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in British English (BE) and American English (AE). The study is part of a large-scale cross-linguistic research project on RfCs in ten languages. RfCs put forward a proposition about which the speaker claims some knowledge but for which they seek (dis)confirmation from an informed co-participant. The article examines linguistic resources for building RfCs and their responses in the two English varieties. RfCs are analyzed with regard to their syntactic design, polarity, modulation, inference marking, connectives, question tags, and the prosodic design of confirmables and potential question tags. Responses to RfCs are analyzed with regard to response type, the use, type and position of response tokens, (non-)minimal responses in turns with a response token, response prefacing, and repeat responses. BE and AE are found to resemble each other closely in most categories. A major exception is their prosodic design, however. Specifically, the preference for the final pitch pattern of RfCs differs markedly in the two varieties: BE shows a strong preference for final falling pitch; AE shows a preference for final rising pitch. This suggests that the two varieties have routinized distinct intonation patterns for expressing epistemic (un)certainty in RfCs
Self-translations in multilingual workplace interaction
No full textIn multi-lingual workplace interaction involving L2-speakers with different levels of proficiency, L1-speakers can be seen to use self-translation of their own prior contributions as a repair-practice to restore intersubjectivity. This paper shows that self-translations are produced in three environments: (a) in response to repair-initiation by recipients, (b) in response to inadequate or missing responses, (c) after disaffiliative responses in order to elicit a more favorable uptake. Self-translations therefore are not only used to deal with linguistic understanding problems, but can also use linguistic diversity as a resource for dealing with lack of affiliation and alignment. Self-translations are produced by a switch to the addressee’s L1 or to a lingua franca. They are only partial, being restricted to a translation of the core semantic content of the turn to be translated, thus relying heavily on a shared understanding of the pragmatic context and being designed so as to support interactional progression. Data come from video-taped meetings in Finland involving Finnish and Russian L1-speakers and various kinds of professional trainings in Germany involving instructors with German as L1 and refugees with various linguistic backgrounds
What to expect from a poem? The primacy of rhyme in college students’ conceptions of poetry
Get PDFWe report results from an exploratory study of college students’ conceptions of poetry in which we asked them to name three things they expect from a poem. Frequency- and list-based analyses of their responses revealed that they primarily expect poems to rhyme, but they also identified a number of form-, content-, and reception-related genre expectations, which we discuss in relation to relevant previous research. We propose that rhyme’s predominance in college students’ genre expectations reflects its perceptual and cognitive salience during incremental poetry comprehension rather than its frequency in contemporary poetic practice. Our results characterize the genre conceptions of the population that empirical studies of poetry comprehension typically investigate, and thus provide relevant background information for the interpretation of empirical
findings in this field
Schriftgrammatische Perspektiven auf das Amtliche Regelwerk
Get PDFDas Schriftsystem ist ein System und es zeigen sich Folgen, wenn Schreibungen gegen den Schreibusus geändert werden. Exemplarisch wird dies erstens an der Veränderung des Verbsuffixes -iren zu -ieren im Nachgang der Rechtschreibreform von 1876 und zweitens der Veränderung von Gruppen wie im Allgemeinen in der Reform von 1996 gezeigt. Beide verursachen unbeabsichtigte Folgefehler. Wie systematisch manche Variation und damit auch mancher Fehler ist, wird sowohl am Komma vor Vergleichssätzen als auch an Fehlern in der Getrennt- und Zusammenschreibung gezeigt. Das Statut des Rechtschreibrates besagt, dass bei der Weiterentwickung des Amtlichen Regelwerks die ständige Beobachtung der Schreibentwicklung, die Klärung von Zweifelsfällen, die Erarbeitung und die wissenschaftliche Begründung von Vorschlägen zur Anpassung des Regelwerks an den allgemeinen Wandel der Sprache im Vordergrund stehen. Das ist zu begrüßen, weil viele Zweifel bei den Zweifelsfällen grammatische und nicht orthographische Ursachen haben
Prosody and Multimodality
No full textDie Analyse prosodisch-phonetischer Ressourcen stand neben morpho-syntaktischen, lexiko-semantischen und diskurspragmatischen von Anfang an im Mittelpunkt interaktional-linguistischer Forschung. In den letzten Jahren sind darüber hinaus visuell wahrnehmbare Phänomene zunehmend Gegenstand interaktional-linguistischer Beschreibungen von Kommunikationssituationen geworden.
Der vorliegende Sammelband enthält neun Untersuchungen, die auf Korpora von Alltagsgesprächen oder institutionellen Interaktionssituationen (Unterricht und Parlamentsdebatten) in unterschiedlichen Sprachen (Deutsch, Englisch, Mandarin) beruhen. Die Beiträge zeigen, welchen Anteil unterschiedliche semiotische Ressourcen – interpretiert in ihrer holistischen Gestalt – an der Organisation sozialer Interaktionen haben. Der Band trägt somit dazu bei, die Rolle multimodaler Ressourcenbündel in ihrer Situiertheit, Prozesshaftigkeit und Kontextsensitivität für die Durchführung kommunikativer Aufgaben besser zu verstehen
IDS aktuell. Neues aus dem Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Jg. 2024, Heft 1
Get PDFObject order and the Thematic Hierarchy in older German
Get PDFThe relative order of dative and accusative objects in older German is less free than it is today. The reason for this could be that speakers of the direct predecessor of Old High German organized the referents according to the Thematic Hierarchy. If one applies a Case Hierarchy Nom>Acc>Dat to this, the order Nom - Dat - Acc falls out. It becomes apparent that the status of the Thematic Hierarchy is not a factor governing underlying word order, but a factor inducing scrambling. Arguments from binding theory, whose validity is discussed, indicate that the underlying order is ‘accusative before dative
Donalies, Elke: Sprachanfragen – Wer fragt? Wer wird gefragt? Wie wird gefragt? Was wird gefragt? Warum wird gefragt? Heidelberg: Winter, 2023. – ISBN 978-3-8253-9509-4. 141 Seiten, € 22,00 [Rezension]
No full textSemantic decomposition of character encodings for linguistic knowledge discovery
Get PDFAnalysis and knowledge representation of linguistic objects tends to focus on larger units (e.g. words) than print medium characters. We analyse characters as linguistic objects in their own right, with meaning, structure and form. Characters have meaning (the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet denote phonetic categories, the character represented by the glyph ‘∪’ denotes set union), structure (they are composed of stems and parts such as descenders or diacritics or are ligatures), and form (they have a mapping to visual glyphs). Character encoding initatives such as Unicode tend to concentrate on the structure and form of characters and ignore their meaning in the sense discussed here. We suggest that our approach of including semantic decomposition and defining font–based namespaces for semantic character domains provides a long–term perspective of interoperability and tractability with regard to data–mining over characters by integrating information about characters into a coherent semiotically–based ontology. We demonstrate these principles in a case study of the International Phonetic Alphabet