Empirische Linguistik / Empirical Linguistics

This empirical study examines self-initiated and other-initiated self-repairs in German and Russian SMS communication by applying methods from conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. It describes the sequential organization and functions of self-repairs in the analyzed data from the two languages and contrasts them with each other.

This study provides a new methodological approach to the corpus-based analysis of case marking in spoken language and provides the first quantitatively based insights into the construction of a dialectal case system and its interaction with morphosyntactical and semantic categories as well as the morphological organisation of space by linking morphological-theoretical questions with typological and dialect-geographical questions.

This interdisciplinary study examines how transgender individuals change their names in the course of their gender transition. It reveals the enormous social significance of first names in interpersonal communication and managing gender – along with other social differences – thereby showing the close interrelationships between language, law, and society in this realm.

The theoretically and empirically based contributions in this edited volume in honour of Susanne Günther examine different consolidations on the level of interaction. They span from relatively detailed formats such as consolidated practices and actions up to the major forms of communicative genres. It also examines non-verbal routine patterns such as gestures.

Most forms of construction grammar offer a usage-based model of grammar. To date, construction grammar researchers have been dismissive of prosody. This anthology seeks to redress this gap in the research, examining the extent to which prosodic characteristics may be viewed as more or less stable characteristics of linguistic constructions.

This study inquires into the specific forms of critical interaction that occur in conversations during intermissions in the theater lobby. Using conversational analysis, it reconstructs how the assessments shared during these interactions impact audience members’ attitudes to the content of the theater piece. The book adds to our understanding of the little-studied area of non-professional private communication about performative art.

The study examines patterns of language usage in scientific texts and describes the academic style based on a data-derived corpus analysis at the formal and pragmatic levels. Theoretically grounded in multiple linguistic subdisciplines, the book offers an important contribution to the description of text types, the discussion of norms, and research on writing.

The volume presents seven research papers written in connection with the interdisciplinary DFG Network “Empirical Investigation of Internet-based Communication.” It addresses issues related to the modeling and analysis of language and interaction on the internet, drawing on written and multimodal data.

This study presents the gestures typically combined with seven German modal particles (denn, doch, eben, eigentlich, einfach, halt, and ja) and analyzes the degree to which the co-occurrences discovered should be seen as multimodal constructions as defined by construction grammar. The study also explores the grammaticalization of such gestures (especially head-shakes and pointing gestures).

Because of their brevity and speed, text messages are often considered elliptical. This publication uses a Swiss German corpus of text messages to examine the validity of this assumption. It statistically analyzes pre-field and middle-field omissions as well as ellipsis of articles and prepositions. In addition, the authors examine whether newer technologies – such as the use of emojis in WhatsApp – influence elliptical structures.

By examining communication among young people in East Tyrol, this study offers for the first time detailed insight into everyday conversation between Austrian adolescents. The central theme of this corpus-based analysis is to discover the areas of syntactic variation in which one can detect preferential use of particular syntactic constructions by adolescents and the role played by specific dialectical features of Bavarian.

This study uses a corpus of authentic language data to examine the linguistic and communicative practices whereby participants develop the social institutional reality of the "parent-teacher conference." The focus is on a linguistic analysis of the conversational acts that constitute the genre: informing, counseling, and assigning responsibility.

This study focuses on a previously untapped interface between discourse and areal linguistics. It assigns a different primary status to usage at the stage of theory development. Using actual discourse data from Northern Germany, it provides an integrated comparative description of areal linguistic variations in terms of their linguistic structure and discursive function.

This book covers anaphora resolution for the English language from a linguistic and computational point of view.
First, a definition of anaphors that applies to linguistics as well as information technology is given. On this foundation, all types of anaphors and their characteristics for English are outlined. To examine how frequent each type of anaphor is, a corpus of different hypertexts has been established and analysed with regard to anaphors. The most frequent type are non-finite clause anaphors - a type which has never been investigated so far. Therefore, the potential of non-finite clause anaphors are further explored with respect to anaphora resolution. After presenting the fundamentals of computational anaphora resolution and its application in text retrieval, rules for resolving non-finite clause anaphors are established.
Therefore, this book shows that a truly interdisciplinary approach can achieve results which would not have been possible otherwise.

Open Access:
In July 2019, this volume was retroactively turned into an Open Access publication thanks to the support of the Fachinformationsdienst Linguistik.
https://www.linguistik.de/

This study examines statements about language attitudes expressed by bilingually raised Germans of Vietnamese origin during language biographical interviews in search of specific conversational features. A further focus of the research is on the linguistic construction of different “language spaces” in which the interviewees position themselves as multilingual individuals.

The contributions of this volume examine the phenomena of metaphor and metonymy from different perspectives. They adopt current tendencies in metaphor and metonymy research, discuss theoretical and methodological questions based on empirical analyses, and outline new approaches in both single-language and cross-linguisic research.

In Germany, feminization (Arbeitgeberin, Youtuberin, Studentinnen, etc.) has recently been generating attention and controversial debates like almost no other linguistic phenomenon. The nineteen chapters in this volume take a linguistic perspective and empirical approach to delve into gender inflection historically, dialectally, in contemporary language use, and through language comparison.

Smart speakers – stationary language assistance systems like Alexa and Google Home – can be controlled verbally through voice inputs and outputs. In addition, they deploy voice user interfaces (VUIs). This study sheds light on VUIs from the perspective of media and conversation linguistics. It begins by analyzing linguistic practices from dyadic dialogues with VUIs, before examining VUIs in multiparty interactions.

It is not just since the Covid-19 pandemic that communication in vaccination consultations has been enormously relevant as well as of great political and media interest. This study is the first to analyze the specific communicative features of travel medicine vaccination consultations. It applies genre and conversation analysis methodology and has practical implications for the training of medical professionals.

Systems for referring to persons are more complex in most German dialects than in standard German. Using a mixed methods approach of direct and indirect methods, this study examines structural and pragmatic variation in dialectal reference to persons. In addition to language maps, individual dialect studies in particular offer revealing insights into the interplay between grammar and pragmatics.