Crosslinguistic Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology

Corpus-based studies have become increasingly common in linguistic typology over recent years, amounting to the emergence of a new field that we call corpus-based typology. The core idea of corpus-based typology is to take languages as populations of utterances and to systematically investigate text production across languages in this sense. From a usage-based perspective, investigations of variation and preferences of use are at the core of understanding the distribution of conventionalized structures and their diachronic development across languages. Specific findings of corpus-based typological studies pertain to universals of text production, for example, in prosodic partitioning; to cognitive biases constraining diverse patterns of use, for example, in constituent order; and to correlations of diverse patterns of use with language-specific structures and conventions. We also consider remaining challenges for corpus-based typology, in particular the development of crosslinguistically more representative corpora that include spoken (or signed) texts, and its vast potential in the future.

A Computer-Assisted Writing Tool for an Extended Variety of Leichte Sprache (Easy-to-Read German)

Leichte Sprache (LS; easy-to-read German) defines a variety of German characterized by simplified syntactic constructions and a small vocabulary. It provides barrier-free information for a wide spectrum of people with cognitive impairments, learning difficulties, and/or a low level of literacy in the German language. The levels of difficulty of a range of syntactic constructions were systematically evaluated with LS readers as part of the recent LeiSA project (Bock, 2019). That study identified a number of constructions that were evaluated as being easy to comprehend but which fell beyond the definition of LS. We therefore want to broaden the scope of LS to include further constructions that LS readers can easily manage and that they might find useful for putting their thoughts into words. For constructions not considered in the LeiSA study, we performed a comparative treebank study of constructions attested to in a collection of 245 LS documents from a variety of sources. Employing the treebanks TüBa-D/S (also called VERBMOBIL) and TüBa-D/Z, we compared the frequency of such constructions in those texts with their incidence in spoken and written German sources produced without the explicit goal of facilitating comprehensibility. The resulting extension is called Extended Leichte Sprache (ELS). To date, text in LS has generally been produced by authors proficient in standard German. In order to enable text production by LS readers themselves, we developed a computational linguistic system, dubbed ExtendedEasyTalk. This system supports LS readers in formulating grammatically correct and semantically coherent texts covering constructions in ELS. This paper outlines the principal components: (1) a natural-language paraphrase generator that supports fast and correct text production while taking readership-design aspects into account, and (2) explicit coherence specifications based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to express the communicative function of sentences. The system’s writing-workshop mode controls the options in (1) and (2). Mandatory questions generated by the system aim to teach the user when and how to consider audience-design concepts. Accordingly, users are trained in text production in a similar way to elementary school students, who also tend to omit audience-design cues. Importantly, we illustrate in this paper how to make the dialogues of these components intuitive and easy to use to avoid overtaxing the user. We also report the results of our evaluation of the software with different user groups.

The Case of the Rucava Brioche: Aspects of Interpreting and Written Text Production

Rakstā apskatīti adīšanas lingvistiskie un tekstuālie aspekti starpkultūru un komunikatīvajā aspektā. Mūsdienās adīšana ir kļuvusi par populāru brīva laika nodarbi, par kuru jaunas zināšanas iegūst ne tikai no grāmatām vai tiešsaistes materiāliem, bet arī klātienē – adīšanas nometnēs, kurās ārzemju interesenti tiekas ar adīšanas meistariem no Latvijas, lai apgūtu tradicionālos latviešu adīšanas paņēmienus. Raksta autore šajās nometnēs ir piedalījusies kā latviešu-angļu-latviešu valodas tulce. Tika novērotas arī kultūru atšķirības, proti, – mutiskā adīšanas kultūra pretstatā kultūrai, kur pieņemts tekstu veidot rakstiski, kā arī izpratne par dažādiem terminoloģiskiem aspektiem. Rakstā arī apskatīts, kā pierakstīta un tulkota informācija, kura tradicionāli ir reti pierakstīta – Rucavas tīkla patents.

Internet Comments as Delegitimization-Driven Discourse (a Case Study of the Fox News Materials on the Political Actions of the U.S. President Joe Biden)

The article introduces delegitimization as a macro-strategy of non-professional political discourse. The author studied comments on the site of the American Fox News to analyze the strategy of rational pessimism chosen by its readers as recipients of political news about the new president of the United States Joe Biden. The delegitimization discourse in the genre of Internet comments to political news proved to combine rational text production, emotional message, and an appeal to universal values. The strategy of rational pessimism manifested itself in the ideologies of the crises of democracy and presidential power. These cognitive-discursive units were actualized by both the broad extralinguistic context, i.e. the current political situation, and the immediate context, i.e. the publication aimed at discrediting Biden’s policy. The commentators' arguments about problems in the sphere of politics, economics, and business determined the interdiscursive nature of communication. While expressing pessimistic moods and negative attitude to the political actions of the U.S.President and the Democratic Party, the commentators appealed to the value categories of personal and state security.