Volume 53, Issue 1

This paper examines syntactic negation in conspiracy theories from a discourse and constructionist perspective. A corpus study provides an overview of the use of negation in different conspiracy theories, where it can serve to deny the official version, i.e., the visible plot, in order to present the conspiracy theory (the invisible plot) as more believable. The corpus linguistic approach reveals a syntactic pattern of negation, which can be considered a form-meaning pair in the sense of Construction Grammar and which is analyzed in more detail in two selected conspiracy theories (attack on the Berlin Christmas market 2016 and “climate change lie”): [ es V geben Neg kein X NP ] (e.g., es gibt keine Verletzten [engl. there are no injured people], es gibt keinen Zusammenhang zwischen CO2 und Lufttemperatur [engl. there is no correlation between CO2 and air temperature). Based on 229 instances, the paper describes the form, meaning, and especially the discursive function of this so-called inexistence construction. For instance, the construction occurs in the context of a specific pattern of argumentation used to deny evidence of the official version. Overall, the article argues for a more intensive study of grammatical phenomena in discourse linguistics and for a stronger combination of Discourse Grammar and Construction Grammar.

Synthetic voices are increasingly integrated into everyday interactions, ranging from navigation systems in our cars and voice assistants in our homes to social robots in elderly care and nursing homes. Despite their prevalence, our understanding of their potential remains incomplete. This study aims to address fundamental questions regarding synthetic voices and their ability to evoke sympathy to enhance human-machine interaction. Specifically, exploring questions like: How can we engender likability for disembodied devices, such as voice assistants, that solely communicate through voice? What are the social challenges that might arise when developing sympathetic female voices for voice assistants? And in which domains can likable voices significantly improve human-machine interaction? This article sheds light on this proverbial black box by examining different fundamental frequencies (F 0 ) in human and synthetic voices, with the aim of identifying a potential “golden frequency”, the ultimate likable frequency. For this goal two perceptions studies were conducted: The first experiment (N=107) is conducted as a pilot study to explore likability in human female voices, while the second experiment (N=435) extends the investigation to synthetic female voices, on which will be the main focus in this article. The results revealed that female human voices were perceived as most likable at a frequency around 260 Hz, which coincides with what former studies concluded as the most attractive frequency as well. However, this does not hold true for female synthetic voices, where a vertex becomes evident already around 240 Hz. These findings bear interesting implications for the future of human-machine interaction, offering noteworthy applications in various realms of human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI). These applications extend to (personal) assistance systems, e-learning, and educational contexts, with particular significance in healthcare and nursing homes.

While previous dialectometric analyses of colloquial German have explored the spatial distribution of variants in order to sketch a picture of how German-speaking areas are linguistically structured, there have been no investigations into the extent to which reported everyday language use converges to or diverges from the standard language. What is more, dialectological perspectives have largely neglected the role of social factors such as age, gender, and mobility on patterns of language variation in colloquial German in lieu of strictly examining geography as a predictor for differences in the spatial distribution of variation in everyday language use. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile dialectometric and sociolinguistic perspectives by examining, in an integrative manner, the influence of social and spatial variables in predicting differences in patterns of variation in colloquial German. Specifically, we analyze ten phonetic-phonological variables from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (‘Atlas of Colloquial German’) and address the question of where informant reports of colloquial German resemble (non-)standard language. To do so, we employ generalized additive mixed-effects models (GAMMs), which can simultaneously detect underlying (non-)linear aggregate geographical patterns and identify the relative importance of social predictors. Our results indicate that geography is the strongest predictor of differences in colloquial German, and that the interaction between age and gender most notably affects the number of (non-)standard variants informants report for their respective locality. Methodological implications for applying GAMMs to the investigation of social and spatial variation are discussed.

This study investigates German verbo-nominal constructions of the type [ auf / unter PP & stehen / stellen / setzen ], which have been classified in previous research under the broader phenomenon of “Funktionsverbgefüge” (FVG). While some studies treat FVG as a unified category (von Polenz 1987; Helbig 1979; Kamber 2008), others focus on specific (families of) constructions and their unique properties (Zeschel 2008; Kabatnik 2020; Fleischhauer 2022). This study is a first step toward a typology of German verbal multi-word constructions that dispenses with the assumption of a category of FVG. The aim is to demonstrate that many structures traditionally discussed under this term actually belong to entirely different types of constructions. Consequently, any attempt at overarching categorization proves to be fundamentally flawed. Our analysis concludes that constructions with the pattern [ auf / unter PP & stehen / stellen / setzen ] can be classified into four distinct groups based on structural and semantic parameters. In none of the identified construction types systematic (= functional) differences can be observed that are attributable to the verbal element when the overall schematic (= constructional) meaning remains constant. We therefore argue that these constructions should not be classified as FVG.

Linguistic research frequently requires the categorization of language phenomena in corpus data (annotation). Since those may occur plentifully, a partial or full automation of the annotation process appears attractive. The filtering and recombination of existing annotation layers seems to further provide an elegant solution to the deduction of higher-level annotations. In this contribution, we show at the example of German split particle verbs that this approach results in a number of linguistic, technological, and epistemological challenges related to the precise definition of the various models employed and their interfaces. We argue that the manual annotation of corpus data is not merely a preprocessing task, but is itself an epistemological process central to the development of linguistic theory. We discuss why machine-based language processing can neither mimic nor replace this process; why it can generally not reach a level of precision that would be suitable for linguistic research without further integration, adaptation, and manual correction; and how its blind application systematically skews results in crucial areas of research. We close with the suggestion of several best practice approaches which help to prevent and resolve incompatibilities and delays arising from common problems of corpus-based language modeling.

This article examines the alternation between the dative object construction (e.g.  Der Kassierer gab dem Räuber das Geld aus der Kasse ‘The cashier gave the robber the money from the cash drawer’) and the prepositional object construction (e.g. Der Körper gibt Signale an den Kopf ‘The body sends signals to the head’) in German on the basis of synchronic and diachronic corpus data. The analysis adopts a language-specific functional perspective on grammatical structures along the lines of Eugenio Coserius “Funktionelle Syntax” approach, but also considers current developments in the discussion on argument structure constructions. Theoretically, the approach revolves around three key factors: i) the principled distinction between language-specific meaning (“signifié”), designation (reference) and text-meaning (“Sinn”, “sensus”); ii) a focus on language-specific grammatical functions and the different levels of grammatical structuring, including the Coserian account of “grammatical synonymy”, and iii) the distinction between the language system (“langue”) and normal (i.e. conventionalized) language use. On the empirical side, the study reports the findings of multivariate analyses of a large number of annotated sentences with four ditransitive verbs ( geben  ‘give’,  übergeben  ‘transfer, hand over, deliver’,  senden  ‘send’ and  schicken  ‘send’), which are analysed against the background of a layered model for the synchronic and diachronic account of the dative alternation in German. The model establishes the hierarchical relationship between a higher-level ‘constructeme’ (the ‘ditransitive construction’ in the narrow sense of the term), which is underspecified in terms of its language-specific expression and meaning, and two ‘allostructions’, the dative object construction and the prepositional object construction respectively, which are the constructional variants of the dative alternation. The model also accommodates the variation between the prepositions an and zu (‘to’) found with a number of ditransitive verbs in the prepositional object construction.