Die Dissertation untersucht Social Media-Daten mit fortschrittlichen NLP-Methoden, um gesellschaftliche Diskurse besser zu verstehen. In fünf Studien wurden verschiedene rechnergestützte Verfahren angewendet:Studie 1 analysierte Hassrede in ukrainischen Nachrichtenseiten während der COVID-19-Pandemie…
Betrachtet man gesprochene Sprache als eine multimodale, situativ verankerte Praxis (Clark, 1996; Kendon, 2014; Vigliocco et al., 2014; Perniss, 2018; Murgiano et al., 2020), so wird die Bedeutung von koverbalen Signalen, der physischen Umwelt und des umfassenderen kommunikativen Kontexts im Sprachgebrauch…
Computational textual aesthetics is an emerging field that aims to investigate observable differences between aesthetic categories of text. In this study, we explored structural differences between preferred and non-preferred fictional texts. To put our results into perspective, we also analyzed non-fictional…
Understanding the mechanisms behind the variation in complexity can allow us to better understand the scope of linguistic diversity and the processes of language change. The studies presented in this thesis address the research questions about how complexity of languages varies and changes using novel…
Multi-morphemic or morphologically complex words are most simply defined as lexical items composed of more than one morpheme. However, this simplicity is deceptive because, in order for this definition to work, one must endorse the notion of morphemes as independent meaningful units. This is problematic…
Quantum computing is a form of computing based on the principles of quantum mechanics. Quantum computing promises to revolutionise society through technological solutions to previously unsolvable problems or by enhancing the capacities of current computational technologies. Additionally, quantum computing…
Research in computational textual aesthetics has shown that there are textual correlates of preference in prose texts. The present study investigates whether textual correlates of preference vary across different time periods (contemporary texts versus texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries). Preference…
This study investigates the distributions of word classes in English speeches made in the European Parliament and their German (written) translations and simultaneous interpretations. For comparison, a sample of original German speeches and a selection of political interviews are used. The study is motivated…
While fictional orality (spoken language in fictional texts) has received some attention in the context of quantitative register studies at the interface of linguistics and literature, only a few attempts have been made so far to apply the quantitative methods of register studies to interior monologues…
Structural features have the potential to push the time barrier, after which we cannot test hypotheses about relatedness of languages, back in time. However, we have to know the stability of structural features in order to be able to apply them for such purposes. In this thesis I describe the typological…
This cumulative thesis is based on three separate projects based on a computer-assisted language comparison (CALC) framework to address common obstacles to studying the history of Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) languages, such as sparse and non-standardized lexical data, as well as an inadequate method…
Abstract Nouns and verbs are known to differ in the types of grammatical information they encode. What is less well known is the relationship between verbal and nominal coding within and across languages. The equi-complexity hypothesis holds that all languages are equally complex overall, which entails…
: Computational textual aesthetics aims at studying observable differences between aesthetic categories of text. We use Approximate Entropy to measure the (un)predictability in two aesthetic text categories, i.e., canonical fiction (‘classics’) and non-canonical fiction (with lower prestige). Approximate…
This study investigates global properties of three categories of English text: canonical fiction, non-canonical fiction, and non-fictional texts. The central hypothesis of the study is that there are systematic differences with respect to structural design features between canonical and non-canonical…
Lausanne: Frontiers Research Foundation, 2021-03-31
In construction grammar, the term multiple inheritance has been used to talk about constructions that inherit features that can be traced back to more than one construction. The constructions involved are organized hierarchically, in that the more specific construction inherits features from multiple…
This study investigates the extension of nominative case to the experiencer argument of ME liken and selected other impersonal verbs. Using tokens from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence as the primary database, the hypothesis is tested…
The proposal of new quantitative methods supposed to handle problems in historical linguistics has created a gap between what one could call “classical” approaches to historical language comparison and the “new and innovative” automatic approaches. Classical linguists are often skeptical of the new approaches,…
Ergebnissen gebrauchsbasierter Forschung zufolge entsteht sprachliches Wissen aus dem Gebrauch einer bestimmten Sprache. Als eine Form assoziativen Lernens beruht Sprachelernen hiernach auf den domänenübergreifenden Fähigkeiten der Lerner, wiederkehrende Erfahrungsmuster zu erkennen, sich einzuprägen…
This is a dissertation on the Kanakanavu language, i.e. that linguistic phenomena found while working on the language underwent a deeper analysis and linguistic techniques were used to provide data and to present analyses in a structured manner. Various topics of the Kanakanavu language system are exemplified:…