Grammar and variation in the classroom

Grammar is the structural foundation of successful communication, language use, and literacy development. Grammar is therefore sometimes viewed as the heart of language with an important place in language teaching. In a classroom setting, regulation of grammar knowledge through teachers is strongly influenced by teachers’ linguistic competence and beliefs. In this paper, we will first show the diversity in this knowledge by means of teacher interviews and speeded grammatical-acceptability data from pupils and students. We will then sketch a socio- and psycholinguistic perspective on several selected morphosyntactic variables in German. These will be discussed with reference to social forces that determine what is standard in a language (language norm authorities, language experts, model texts, and codifiers). Finally, we will draw a roadmap for teachers, language practitioners and editors looking for a qualified solution to grammatical cases of doubt in contemporary German and provide practical examples by drawing upon the German reference corpus.

Keyness and Collocation Distinctions in How Latter-day Saint Communities Relate to God: Implications for Mental Health Professionals

Multicultural competence includes understanding how spirituality informs client worldview. This corpus linguistics study examines the worldview of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through analysis of the Book of Mormon as a sacred text. Keywords of the Book of Mormon text are identified by using the Hebrew Bible and New Testament as reference corpuses, and the Book of Mormon is used as a reference corpus to identify biblical keywords as well. Collocates of deity within the Book of Mormon text are identified and examined. Limitations and implications for research and practice are discussed.

Self-mention in the academic discourse of ELF writers

English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca in the international environment and in no environment is this more true than in the academic one. Self-mention, especially in academic settings, has been studied extensively; however, not so in written ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) academic discourse, as the prevailing focus of ELF studies has been on the spoken form. In this corpus-based study, I choose Walková’s (2019) three-dimensional model of self-mention and apply it in the self-mention analysis in the SSH category of the SciELF corpus, a corpus of unpublished research articles written by ELF users. The results are compared with the reference corpus CSSH compiled to be comparable to the SSH corpus in terms of discipline. Features related to self-reference are chosen to represent each dimension. The results are tested for statistical significance using the Log-likelihood test. Some data proved to be of greater statistical significance (the use of personal pronouns) while other data did not carry any (the use of boosters).

Key Words and Political Parties in the 2020 Pre-Election Campaign on Facebook

The research paper analyses key words found in pre-election communication of electorally successful political parties, based on which the main communication differences among those parties and the specifics of pre-election communication, as well as the pre-election discourse as a whole, are identified. Research material consists of political parties’ microblogs published on individual political parties’ Facebook profiles in the period from January 1, 2020 to February 28, 2020, with a reference corpus formed by the total of these microblogs. The analysis showed professionalization of political communication, the use of new, but also traditional ways of interaction with the electorate, pre-election communication based on the presentation of candidates, offensive and combative tone of the most successful parties, self-presentation, hints of persuasive and manipulative techniques, topic points of electoral programmes, but also thematic neutrality and non-specificity that suggest smaller electoral success.

A Novel Deep Neural Network-Based Approach to Measure Scholarly Research Dissemination Using Citations Network

We investigated the scientific research dissemination by analyzing the publications and citation data, implying that not all citations are significantly important. Therefore, as alluded to existing state-of-the-art models that employ feature-based techniques to measure the scholarly research dissemination between multiple entities, our model implements the convolutional neural network (CNN) with fastText-based pre-trained embedding vectors, utilizes only the citation context as its input to distinguish between important and non-important citations. Moreover, we speculate using focal-loss and class weight methods to address the inherited class imbalance problems in citation classification datasets. Using a dataset of 10 K annotated citation contexts, we achieved an accuracy of 90.7% along with a 90.6% f1-score, in the case of binary classification. Finally, we present a case study to measure the comprehensiveness of our deployed model on a dataset of 3100 K citations taken from the ACL Anthology Reference Corpus. We employed state-of-the-art graph visualization open-source tool Gephi to analyze the various aspects of citation network graphs, for each respective citation behavior.

Towards a broad-coverage graphemic analysis of large historical corpora

This paper presents a method which we are developing to explore graphemic variation in large historical corpora of German. Historical corpora provide an amount of data at the level of graphemics which cannot be handled exhaustively using common methods of manual evaluation. To deal with this challenge, we apply methods from computational linguistics to pave the way for a broad-coverage graph(em)ic analysis of large historical corpora. In this paper, we show how our approach can be applied to the Reference Corpus of Middle High German. Illustrating our method and linguistic analysis, we present findings from our investigations into diatopic and/or diachronic variation as documented in 13th and 14th century charters (Urkunden) from the corpus.

What does solid spelling reveal about cognition? Evidence from Middle Low German

This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of lexically complex graphemic units in Middle Low German – sequences that once occurred written as one word, but from today’s perspective are considered separate linguistic units. Examples are enwolde ‘did not want’ or isset ‘is it’. This phenomenon has received little attention, although it gives direct insight into the word concept of German and its diachronic change. The central question is what favors the perception of multiple words as a unit. Data from the Reference Corpus Middle Low German/Low Rhenish (1200–1650) show that it is mainly function words that occur in lexically complex graphemic units. Moreover, this study shows that besides from prosodic patterns, agreement and government relations reinforce lexical sequences to be perceived as linguistic units.

The emergence of light verb constructions

This paper takes a data-driven perspective on the grammaticalization of German light verb constructions (LVCs) with kommen ‘come’. LVCs are complex predicates consisting of a semantically light verb and an eventive noun realized within a phrasal complement, e.g. German zur Vollendung kommen, lit. ‘come into completion’. We assume that (at least) two different processes interact in the emergence of LVCs: the desemanticization of the verb on the one hand and the realization of eventive nouns in the complement-PP of the verb on the other. In order to check whether these processes take place in parallel or if one precedes the other, we conduct a corpus study based on samples from the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), focusing on the animacy and concreteness of the subject NPs and the PP-internal nouns. Our results indicate that we can first observe an increase in the use of abstract nouns in subject position and that only later – from Middle High German to Early New High German – eventive nouns in PP-internal position become more frequent.

The Europe of Brexit: a corpus-assisted discourse study of identities in the press

Drawing on a what is known as corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach (Baker et al., 2008), this article will research the construction of different identities by means of the language used in two newspaper articles on Brexit from the Spanish El País and the British The Guardian, to examine how these identities are constructed through media discourse at the time following the Brexit referendum (2016-2018). Media discourse surrounding Brexit is examined under the consideration of media power. A comparable corpus made up of original newspaper articles about Brexit was used to carry out the analysis, identifying statistically significant keywords compared with a reference corpus with the aim of providing an example of how the British and Spanish press construct identity.

Diachronie der Zukunft

Based on the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), this paper investigates the development of the German future construction werden + Infinitive as well as constructions that are often seen as its predecessors and/or competitors. The paper focuses on the construction werden + Present Participle but also takes modal verb constructions with mögen, müssen, sollen, and wollen into account. A semantic analysis of the dependent verbs occurring in the constructions with regard to their aspectual characteristics reveals that werden + Infinitive and werden + Present Participle undergo parallel developments that can be seen as context expansion from a grammaticalization-theoretical perspective. The modal verb constructions, by contrast, remain stable with regard to the aspectual semantics of their dependent verbs. Furthermore, it is argued that, following recent theoretical approaches from diachronic Construction Grammar, the complex relationship between werden + Infinitive and werden + Participle can be modelled as ›attraction‹ or contamination between different constructions.