Abstract In this article, we argue that not only personal pronouns, but also formats that defocus participants, such as the impersonal pronoun man/ein- , passive and infinitive constructions, are resources for the interpersonal perspectivization of situations. In a case study of 17th-century balneological texts, a historical genre of medical treatise and instruction, we use quantitative and qualitative analyses to show how different resources are used throughout the text to achieve different perspectivization effects (including the typification of discourse roles, the focusing on action steps, and the establishment of deontic authority). The concept of perspectivization proves to be a suitable overarching concept for different communicative practices of viewing events and involving participants in observation arrangements.
Abstract This article examines the hyperbolic, non-referential use of the universally quantifying personal pronouns alle (‚all‘) and jeder (‚everyone‘) in social interaction. The results of the analysis suggest that the two expressions are used in argumentative actions (e. g., normalizing one’s own or others‘ behavior, contradicting opposing positions) as well as in evaluative actions (e. g., praise, reproach, criticism). The reference to jeder and alle indicates or claims intersubjective agreement and unquestionable evidence. It is used to intensify the communication of evaluative and emotional stances, which are at the same time contextualized as objectively grounded. References to jeder and alle occur in different positions within turns and sequences. The pronouns are not always interchangeable; differences in the use of jeder and alle are rooted in the distinct semantics of the two pronouns. The non-referential character of these hyperbolic uses becomes apparent when speakers refer to indeterminate reference populations and use them in a speaker-exclusive way. The data are based on telephone and video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in German from the FOLK corpus.
Abstract Verb-initial declarative sentences are rarely used in present-day German. They are currently found primarily in jokes such as Kommt ein Pferd in eine Bar ‚A horse walks into a bar‘ and are generally associated more with spoken than written language (Auer 1993; Sandig 2000). In terms of information structure, verb-initial declarative sentences in modern German are considered to be thetic expressions with sentence focus (Önnerfors 1997). Historical findings from Old High German indicate that the frequency of this sentence pattern was significantly higher at the outset of the German language’s history than it is in present-day German. Recent literature attributes this primarily to the fact that the verb-second grammar of present-day German only gradually became established in the history of the language, whereas the use of the pre-verbal position in Old High German is still considered optional (Axel 2007; Petrova 2011). Verb-initial declaratives would therefore be grammatically motivated in Old High German, as they are seen from a diachronic perspective as exponents of the transition between the declarative verb-final sentences of the pre-Old High German period and the declarative verb-second sentences of later periods in the history of the German language. However, Hinterhölzl & Petrova (2005, 2011) argue that verb-initial declaratives in Old High German, like their modern German counterparts, have no sentence topic, i.e., they should be classified as thetic sentences. They therefore argue for a discourse-pragmatic motivation for the verb-initial declarative and its assignment to the concept of narrative inversion already in Old High German. Overall, there is no consensus in the literature that the history of verb-initial declarative sentences can be described as a continuous development from Old High German to present-day German. The present paper addresses this question from the perspective of Early New High German, a period in the history of the German language characterized by a sharp increase in the use of verb-initial declarative sentences. It is demonstrated that only a clear distinction between different types allows for a plausible answer to the question of the diachronic scenario of verb-initial declarative sentences in German. Based on such a typology, it can then be shown that the use of verb-initial sentences in Early New High German is primarily motivated by discourse pragmatics: In terms of discourse structure, verb-initial sentences indicate coordinating discourse relations, which, however, do not necessarily have to be narrative. In terms of information structure, verb-initial declarative sentences in Early New High German are used in particular to signal continuity between two discourse segments, which brings them into close proximity to verb-initial declarative sentences in Old Icelandic (Booth & Beck 2021). Methodologically, this work is a corpus study whose corpus consists of prose novels from the Early Modern Period.
Abstract The lexical item man is characterized by a combination of specific morphosyntactic and semantic properties and a broad range of usages. It is argued that this is due to a process of grammaticalization that in the earliest stages of German started with its separation from the noun meaning ‚man‘/‘human being‘ and is not completed in present-day German. Focussing on today’s most frequent usage of man – its personal usage – it is argued that man has taken on the function of a role variable, thus having entered the paradigm of dialogue roles in opposition to the functions of the first and second person. The semantic features inherent in the lexeme man in this paradigm are identified as [+human] and [unspecified role in the communicative event]. The latter feature provides the distinctive value against first person [speaker role], sesond person [hearer role] as well as against the central value of all third person nominals, which is defined as [-dialogue role].
Abstract Swiss-AL (Swiss Applied Linguistics) is a language data platform for the applied sciences developed at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences. It enables multilingual and comparative discourse analyses with a focus on Switzerland. Accessible at www.swiss-al.zhaw.ch, the platform contains publicly available documents from collective actors in politics, industry, civil society, science and journalistic media in all four language regions of Switzerland. The documents are processed as linguistic corpora and made available as an open research data resource using corpus linguistic methods in a specially developed browser-based workbench. Swiss-AL is intended for researchers from various scientific disciplines who work with language data to address practical problems (e.g. applied linguistics, social sciences, psychology, public health and strategic communication). The following article first outlines the purpose and genesis of Swiss-AL, then presents its theoretical foundations and composition, including the corpora hosted on the platform and their technical implementation, before discussing Swiss-AL as a resource for open research data with particular attention to the implementation of the FAIR principles and to the functionalities, access conditions and usability of the browser-based workbench. Finally, it describes the accompanying documentation and open educational resources as well as selected usage scenarios.
Abstract This paper examines reported speech as a key linguistic feature in three German-language newspapers from 1740 to 1835: the Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen , Hamburgischer Correspondent , and Wiener Zeitung . Through the analysis of a self-compiled corpus of 198,006 words and 1,666 instances of reported speech, two key trends emerge: the increasing use of direct speech, often linked to objectivity, and the rise of explicitly identified sources. These trends are most prominent in the Wiener Zeitung , which by 1835 adopted direct speech and identifiable sources as dominant practices thus aligning with the Enlightenment ideal of transparency that shaped the press from the end of the 18th century. The Berlinische Nachrichten and Hamburgischer Correspondent , on the other hand, displayed more gradual shifts, retaining higher instances of indirect speech and anonymous sources. The paper explores potential explanations for these divergent developments, considering factors such as editorial practices, censorship, and regional media influences, highlighting the interplay between linguistic change and socio-historical contexts.
Abstract This study examines the interplay of self-reference, epistemic stance, and gaze in children’s argumentative decision-making. Drawing on video recordings of peer discussions among first- and sixth-graders, we employ multimodal interaction analysis to investigate (i) how I as a form of self-reference is combined with multimodal epistemic markers and gaze practices to perspectivize positions in different ways; (ii) what consequences these perspectivizations have for the management of responsibilities in (joint) decision-making; and (iii) how perspectivizations of positions with I differ across age groups. Our findings show that the person reference I is used in two variants: I-for-myself and I-as-part-of-us . With I-for-myself , positions are presented with epistemic certainty, thereby limiting opportunities for interlocutors to negotiate the position. In contrast, I-as-part-of-us marks positions as uncertain, engages recipients through gaze, and provides self-initiated justifications, thus inviting further negotiation. The age-related comparison reveals substantial differences in the use of these variants. These findings suggest that referential, epistemic, and gaze practices are closely interrelated and constitute an integral part of argumentative competence.
Abstract This paper investigates practices of person-deictic shifts–a phenomenon traditionally associated with the narrative construction of reported talk. In contrast to previous studies that focus on reported talk of Self and Others, I examine how speakers animate the addressee’s thoughts and feelings in co-present interaction. In what I term origo inversion , the speaker deploys the first-person singular pronoun not to refer to themselves ( ego ), but to shift deictically to the addressee ( alter ) in the shared here-and-now and animate their ego -perspective. The analysis draws on video recordings of 25 sessions of a psychodynamic therapy with a depressed client. In the sequences under investigation, the therapist deictically adopts the client’s first-person perspective and animates, based on the client’s telling, their problem-related thoughts and feelings. The findings show that animations of the addressee’s ego -perspective are an interactionally delicate practice. They invert the participant roles of speaker and addressee, or ego and alter , impinging on the addressee’s epistemic rights and face concerns, and thus rarely occur in everyday talk. In psychotherapy, by contrast, this practice is (partially) licensed by the institutional role and task of the therapist, though not without interactional risks. On the one hand, the (non-canonical) therapeutic practice of animating the client’s feelings and thoughts provides an interactional resource for demonstrating understanding, affiliation, and empathy through perspective-taking. On the other hand, it risks encroaching on the client’s personal territory and eliciting resistance. Notably, clients‘ reactions also depend on the extent to which their own view of their inner experiences is transformed by the therapist’s rendering. Accordingly, client responses range from explicit affirmation, elaboration, and self-animation to dispreference marking, silence, and overt rejection.
Verb-initial declarative sentences are rarely used in present-day German. They are currently found primarily in jokes such as Kommt ein Pferd in eine Bar ,A horse walks into a bar' and are generally associated more with spoken than written language (Auer 1993; Sandig 2000). In terms of information structure, verb-initial declarative sentences in modern German are considered to be thetic expressions with sentence focus (& Ouml;nnerfors 1997). Historical findings from Old High German indicate that the frequency of this sentence pattern was significantly higher at the outset of the German language's history than it is in present-day German. Recent literature attributes this primarily to the fact that the verb-second grammar of present-day German only gradually became established in the history of the language, whereas the use of the pre-verbal position in Old High German is still considered optional (Axel 2007; Petrova 2011). Verb-initial declaratives would therefore be grammatically motivated in Old High German, as they are seen from a diachronic perspective as exponents of the transition between the declarative verb-final sentences of the pre-Old High German period and the declarative verb-second sentences of later periods in the history of the German language. However, Hinterh & ouml;lzl & Petrova (2005, 2011) argue that verb-initial declaratives in Old High German, like their modern German counterparts, have no sentence topic, i.e., they should be classified as thetic sentences. They therefore argue for a discourse-pragmatic motivation for the verb-initial declarative and its assignment to the concept of narrative inversion already in Old High German. Overall, there is no consensus in the literature that the history of verb-initial declarative sentences can be described as a continuous development from Old High German to present-day German.The present paper addresses this question from the perspective of Early New High German, a period in the history of the German language characterized by a sharp increase in the use of verb-initial declarative sentences. It is demonstrated that only a clear distinction between different types allows for a plausible answer to the question of the diachronic scenario of verb-initial declarative sentences in German. Based on such a typology, it can then be shown that the use of verb-initial sentences in Early New High German is primarily motivated by discourse pragmatics: In terms of discourse structure, verb-initial sentences indicate coordinating discourse relations, which, however, do not necessarily have to be narrative. In terms of information structure, verb-initial declarative sentences in Early New High German are used in particular to signal continuity between two discourse segments, which brings them into close proximity to verb-initial declarative sentences in Old Icelandic (Booth & Beck 2021). Methodologically, this work is a corpus study whose corpus consists of prose novels from the Early Modern Period.
This paper examines reported speech as a key linguistic feature in three German-language newspapers from 1740 to 1835: the Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, Hamburgischer Correspondent, and Wiener Zeitung. Through the analysis of a self-compiled corpus of 198,006 words and 1,666 instances of reported speech, two key trends emerge: the increasing use of direct speech, often linked to objectivity, and the rise of explicitly identified sources. These trends are most prominent in the Wiener Zeitung, which by 1835 adopted direct speech and identifiable sources as dominant practices thus aligning with the Enlightenment ideal of transparency that shaped the press from the end of the 18th century. The Berlinische Nachrichten and Hamburgischer Correspondent, on the other hand, displayed more gradual shifts, retaining higher instances of indirect speech and anonymous sources. The paper explores potential explanations for these divergent developments, considering factors such as editorial practices, censorship, and regional media influences, highlighting the interplay between linguistic change and socio-historical contexts.
This paper investigates practices of person-deictic shifts-a phenomenon traditionally associated with the narrative construction of reported talk. In contrast to previous studies that focus on reported talk of Self and Others, I examine how speakers animate the addressee's thoughts and feelings in co-present interaction. In what I term origo inversion, the speaker deploys the first-person singular pronoun not to refer to themselves (ego), but to shift deictically to the addressee (alter) in the shared here-and-now and animate their ego-perspective. The analysis draws on video recordings of 25 sessions of a psychodynamic therapy with a depressed client. In the sequences under investigation, the therapist deictically adopts the client's first-person perspective and animates, based on the client's telling, their problem-related thoughts and feelings. The findings show that animations of the addressee's ego-perspective are an interactionally delicate practice. They invert the participant roles of speaker and addressee, or ego and alter, impinging on the addressee's epistemic rights and face concerns, and thus rarely occur in everyday talk. In psychotherapy, by contrast, this practice is (partially) licensed by the institutional role and task of the therapist, though not without interactional risks. On the one hand, the (non-canonical) therapeutic practice of animating the client's feelings and thoughts provides an interactional resource for demonstrating understanding, affiliation, and empathy through perspective-taking. On the other hand, it risks encroaching on the client's personal territory and eliciting resistance. Notably, clients' reactions also depend on the extent to which their own view of their inner experiences is transformed by the therapist's rendering. Accordingly, client responses range from explicit affirmation, elaboration, and self-animation to dispreference marking, silence, and overt rejection.
This study examines the interplay of self-reference, epistemic stance, and gaze in children's argumentative decision-making. Drawing on video recordings of peer discussions among first- and sixth-graders, we employ multimodal interaction analysis to investigate (i) how I as a form of self-reference is combined with multimodal epistemic markers and gaze practices to perspectivize positions in different ways; (ii) what consequences these perspectivizations have for the management of responsibilities in (joint) decision-making; and (iii) how perspectivizations of positions with I differ across age groups. Our findings show that the person reference I is used in two variants: I-for-myself and I-as-part-of-us. With I-for-myself, positions are presented with epistemic certainty, thereby limiting opportunities for interlocutors to negotiate the position. In contrast, I-as-part-of-us marks positions as uncertain, engages recipients through gaze, and provides self-initiated justifications, thus inviting further negotiation. The age-related comparison reveals substantial differences in the use of these variants. These findings suggest that referential, epistemic, and gaze practices are closely interrelated and constitute an integral part of argumentative competence.
In this article, we argue that not only personal pronouns, but also formats that defocus participants, such as the impersonal pronoun man/ein-, passive and infinitive constructions, are resources for the interpersonal perspectivization of situations. In a case study of 17th-century balneological texts, a historical genre of medical treatise and instruction, we use quantitative and qualitative analyses to show how different resources are used throughout the text to achieve different perspectivization effects (including the typification of discourse roles, the focusing on action steps, and the establishment of deontic authority). The concept of perspectivization proves to be a suitable overarching concept for different communicative practices of viewing events and involving participants in observation arrangements.
This article examines the hyperbolic, non-referential use of the universally quantifying personal pronouns alle (,all') and jeder (,everyone') in social interaction. The results of the analysis suggest that the two expressions are used in argumentative actions (e. g., normalizing one's own or others' behavior, contradicting opposing positions) as well as in evaluative actions (e. g., praise, reproach, criticism). The reference to jeder and alle indicates or claims intersubjective agreement and unquestionable evidence. It is used to intensify the communication of evaluative and emotional stances, which are at the same time contextualized as objectively grounded. References to jeder and alle occur in different positions within turns and sequences. The pronouns are not always interchangeable; differences in the use of jeder and alle are rooted in the distinct semantics of the two pronouns. The non-referential character of these hyperbolic uses becomes apparent when speakers refer to indeterminate reference populations and use them in a speaker-exclusive way. The data are based on telephone and video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in German from the FOLK corpus.
Open Science is transforming the way researchers collect, process, analyze, and store empirical research data, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where language data is crucial. This transformation process especially concerns developers and providers of large language corpora and manifests itself in at least three challenges when providing these corpora as Open Research Data (ORD). Challenges concern heterogeneous practices that researchers apply when working with language data, research data lifecycle, and legal and ethical aspect. In this paper, we present Swiss-AL, a language data platform developed in Switzerland that is being transformed into an Open Research Data Resource for Applied Sciences within the Swiss Open Science Strategy. The paper gives an overview over the data contained in Swiss-AL and the infrastructure that is used to process and analyze the data. Furthermore, it presents approaches to the three abovementioned challenges to language ORD.
Silence is constitutive medium of both music and language. Based on semantic reflections on central concepts (e.g. ‚silence‘), selected ‚silent passages‘ by Claudio Monteverdi and Heinrich Schütz ( Representative Silence ) and reflections on the ‚Unsagbarkeitstopos‘ of Romantic musical aesthetics ( Sonorous Silence ), this article explores analogies and differences with regard to the phenomenon ‚Silence‘ across the boundaries of language and music. Following on from that, with John Cage, attention is drawn to the silence that surrounds us, which we then perceive as resonant silence ( Real Silence ). In this, silence ultimately becomes music itself.
