Abstract
English Comparative Correlatives (CCs) consist of two clauses, C1 and C2:
[The more we get together,]C1 [the happier we’ll be.]C2
Recently, large corpus studies based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English have unearthed various meso-constructions in English CCs using covarying–collexeme analysis. The present study tests these findings against data from the British National Corpus (BNC), aiming to replicate previous results against data from another standard variety of English (British English) and a corpus that is sampled from a wider range of registers. Over 2,000 CC tokens from the BNC were analyzed with regard to hypotactic features, filler types encountered as comparative elements, and deletion phenomena. Moreover, in contrast to earlier corpus studies (such as Hoffmann, Thomas, Jakob Horsch, and Thomas Brunner. 2019. “The more data, the better: a usage-based account of the English comparative correlative construction.” Cognitive Linguistics 30(1): 1–36), the present study also investigates the frequency of the semantically related C2C1 construction (You will be the happier C2, the more we get together C1) that previously has been found to be considerably less frequent than its counterpart. The results of the present analysis confirm that English CCs possess more paratactic than hypotactic features and, supporting most of the findings of Hoffmann, Horsch, and Brunner (2019) provide even stronger evidence for the existence of several symmetric meso-constructions.
Abstract
Spain’s sluggish recovery from the financial crisis of the past decade, changing domestic and international politics, armed conflicts and natural disasters, all constitute factors that prompt migration and lead to significant changes in the composition of society. The main objective of this article is to compare and contrast the level of linguistic integration of the migrant population at two different moments during the twenty-first century. The study is focused mainly on central Spain and two specific public-service settings: police and health care. A descriptive–comparative method is used to observe, collect and analyze data and describe and compare them to previous studies. A quantitative and qualitative approach is followed. The results indicate that the situation has changed only slightly over the past two decades. Communication between immigrants and public-service providers is still far from fluent, and the financial crisis has negatively affected the development of public service interpreting and translation.
Abstract
The article describes the characteristics of the negotiation of meaning (NOM) in oral interaction between native Spanish speakers and Chinese immigrant speakers of Spanish by assessing the context through 15 recordings, in which the candidates orally interacted with their interviewers. The goals of the research were to observe whether, in this context, NOM occurs; identify and classify the most frequent negotiation strategies of meaning in terms of their function; determine whether reactive negotiation strategies or preventive strategies predominate; establish which of the two interlocutors leads the negotiation; and determine whether this negotiation is effective. It has been observed that NOM is present in 11.21% of the total number of conversational turns (n = 4,379). The most frequently used strategies were confirmation check, comprehension check response, and confirmation. Of the strategies used (n = 491) by participants and interviewers to negotiate the meaning in this context, 64.95% was of a preventive nature. The NOM was effective in 90.02% of the cases.
Abstract
Based on a corpus study conducted using the GerManC corpus (1650–1800), the paper sketches the functional and sociosymbolic development of subordinate clause constructions introduced by the subjunctor da ‘since’ in different text genres. In the second half of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century, the da clauses were characterized by semantic vagueness: Besides temporal, spatial and causal relations, the subjunctor established conditional, concessive, and adversative links between clauses. The corpus study reveals that different genres are crucial to the readings of da clauses. Spatial and temporal usages, for example, occur more often in sermons than in other genres. The conditional reading, in contrast, strongly tends to occur in legal texts, where it displays very high frequency. This could be the reason why da clauses carry indexical meaning in contemporary German and are associated with formal language. Over the course of the 18th century, the causal usages increase in all genres. Surprisingly, these causal da clauses tend to be placed in front of the matrix clause despite the overall tendency of causal clauses to follow the matrix clause.
Abstract
This article contains a comparative study of heuristic textual practices in various scientific disciplines. By this we mean formulation practices with which new knowledge is generated in institutionally influenced routines and connected to existing knowledge, e. g. ‚highlighting the relevance of a research topic‘, ‚defining a concept‘ or ‚supporting a statement argumentatively‘.
The aim is to find out to what extent such textual practices occur in different scientific disciplines, how they are distributed and combined. Furthermore, we study the effects domain-specific contexts have on heuristic textual practices. The data basis of our study is a corpus of 65 dissertations from the 13 different faculties of the TU Darmstadt. In the pilot study we report here, we examined the introductory chapters of the dissertations. Methodologically, it is an annotation study: Based on the current state of research on the subject, we have derived a basic annotation scheme, which we have developed and refined in a collaborative process of guideline creation. Our study affiliates on socio-pragmatic research on text production and formulation routines in the sciences. It is theoretically informed by the philosophy of science research on heuristics, methodically we make a contribution to the scientific debate on collaborative annotation procedures.
Abstract
Under the background of the current refugee crisis in Europe, Germany is undoubtedly playing an increasingly decisive role, which is why the substantive changes to German Asylum Act have attracted attention worldwide. In order to contribute to a better understanding of the information delivery and communication of the Asylum Act, this article analyzes the relevant paragraphs of this Act from a functional sentence perspective (FSP). By scrutinizing the influencing factors of the communicative dynamics (CD) of the Asylum Act, this article examines and clarifies how FSP participates in the communication of the Act. Besides tracking and assessing the related approach, varied types of results that can be achieved by functional analysis are particularly presented. This article hopes to produce some new insights into the FSP theory and shed light on future research directions for the applications of FSP.