Hasil untuk "Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages"

Krasimir Yordzhev

The work investigates the problem of whether a context-free language is a subset of a group language. A.~V. Anisimov has shown that the problem of determining the unambiguity of finite automata is a special case of this problem. Then the question of finding polynomial algorithm verifying the inclusion of context-free languages in group languages naturally arises. The article focuses on this open problem. For the purpose, the paper describes an unconventional method of description of context-free languages, namely a representation with the help of a finite digraph whose arcs are labelled with a specially defined monoid $\mathcal{U}$. Also, we define a semiring $\mathcal{S}_\mathcal{U}$ whose elements are the set $2^\mathcal{U}$ of all subsets of $\mathcal{U}$ and with operations - product and union of the elements of $2^\mathcal{U}$. The described algorithm executes no more than $O(n^3)$ operations in $\mathcal{S}_\mathcal{U}$.

P. Ehn

Petra Anders, Michael Staiger

Editorial zur MiDU-Ausgabe 1/2025

Baumann Beate

Thomas A. Henzinger, Pavol Kebis, Nicolas Mazzocchi et al.

A quantitative word automaton (QWA) defines a function from infinite words to values. For example, every infinite run of a limit-average QWA A obtains a mean payoff, and every word w is assigned the maximal mean payoff obtained by nondeterministic runs of A over w. We introduce quantitative language automata (QLAs) that define functions from language generators (i.e., implementations) to values, where a language generator can be nonprobabilistic, defining a set of infinite words, or probabilistic, defining a probability measure over infinite words. A QLA consists of a QWA and a language aggregator. For example, given a QWA A, the infimum aggregator maps each language L to the greatest lower bound assigned by A to any word in L. For boolean value sets, QWAs capture trace properties, and QLAs capture hyperproperties. For more general value sets, QLAs serve as a specification language for a generalization of hyperproperties, called quantitative hyperproperties. A nonprobabilistic (resp. probabilistic) quantitative hyperproperty assigns a value to each set (resp. distribution) G of traces, e.g., the minimal (resp. expected) average response time exhibited by the traces in G (resp. by traces sampled according to G). We give several examples of quantitative hyperproperties and investigate three paradigmatic problems for QLAs: evaluation, nonemptiness, and universality. In the evaluation problem, given a QLA AA and an implementation G, we ask for the value that AA assigns to G. In the nonemptiness (resp. universality) problem, given a QLA AA, a threshold k, and a comparison in {>, >=} we ask whether AA assigns a value meeting the threshold to some (resp. every) language. We provide a comprehensive picture of decidability and complexity for these problems for QLAs with common aggregators as well as their restrictions to omega-regular languages and distributions generated by finite Markov chains.

Rafał Szubert

In dem vorliegenden Beitrag wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob die epistemischen Implikationen der Annahme der Binarität der Rechtswahrnehmung auf die bisherige Auffassung der Beschaffenheit der festen Wortverbindungen in der Fachsprache des Rechts Einfluss haben können. Diese Frage ist insbesondere im Kontext des Merkmals der semantischen Festigkeit derjenigen festen Wortverbindungen relevant, welche Termini sind. Nach der Meinung des Autors können Merkmale der festen Wortverbindungen der juristischen Fachsprache, welche Termini sind, nicht ohne Einbeziehung der Begriffsgeschichte erörtert werden.

T. Tan

Gothic preverb compounds illustrate several interesting characteristics, including multiple preverb stacking, idiomatisation, tmesis (i.e., separation by clitics), and P-copying (i.e., multiple pronunciation of the preverb). This paper is a close examination of the morphosyntax of these compounds, highlighting novel empirical generalisations about the Gothic language with key theoretical implications for our understanding of Germanic complex verbs and the alternations they participate in. In particular, this paper proposes a structural distinction between preverb compounds which are obligatorily semantically transparent and those which are optionally idiomatic. In arguing that transparent compounds involve the mechanism of preposition incorporation and m-merger , paralleling recent accounts of clitic doubling, while idiomatic compounds involve a thematic high applicative projection, this paper captures nuanced differences in these compounds’ case assignment and argument licensing behaviour. These structural differences will be shown to derive these two compound types’ constrained interaction with the aforementioned phenomena of stacking, tmesis, and copying. In addition, this paper compares Gothic complex verbs to their cross-linguistic correlates within and beyond Germanic, whilst also providing a diachronic pathway for the development of (multiple) preverb compounds.

Joel B. Lande, David E. Wellbery

Abstract Since its appearance in 2018, Juliane Vogel’s suggestively titled book Aus dem Grund. Auftrittsprotokolle zwischen Racine und Nietzsche has had remarkable resonance in German-language literary and cultural studies. The essays written for this special issue of The Germanic Review aim to intensify the international discussion of Vogel’s important book by bringing its theoretical framework to bear on new material.

L. Scho̵sler

This paper is anchored in the tradition of variationist linguistics of Germanic and Romance studies in Europe. In variationist linguistics, the dimension of ‘space’ is essential. According to Flydal (1952:245) this dimension is one of the “extrastructuralismes” which, together with the structures of language, forms the “architecture de langue”. The other important extrastructural dimension mentioned by Flydal is diastratic, i.e. social variation. Coseriu takes over these two notions from Flydal, adding a third dimension: the diaphasic variation (1969:148 ss.). A fourth dimension proposed by Koch & Oesterreicher (1990), opposing the spoken vs written conception, implying the distinction between communicative immediacy or distance (the diamesic variation), was, however, not included by Coseriu. A number of publications and articles have recently questioned the theoretical basis of the three or four dimensions taken over from Flydal by Coseriu and further elaborated in the tradition of variationist linguistics in Romance and Germanic studies. My contribution focuses on the diatopic level, but intends to show, by means of a number of case studies, that this level cannot be considered independently of other variation factors.

Georg Schuppener

This article examines using the Internet whether or not, the extent to which, and in what form Reich citizens use religious language in their texts. To this end, the article will first define religious language in more detail. On the basis of current constitutional protection reports in the Federal Republic of Germany and an evaluation of sources of known Reich citizens, the article has identified a total of 34 Internet domains that will serve as the basis for the investigation. The pilot investigation first examined four lexemes in terms of their distributions in the texts of these domains and showed the religious lexises in a third of the investigated domains to obviously be of no or only secondary importance. This group of domains was not reconsidered in the further investigation with regard to the use of religious language. Another third of the texts showed the religious lexises to be relevant,while the remaining third revealed the religious lexis to even be highly common. The in-depth analysis then proved the frequency of a broader spectrum of religious lexises. The article then exemplified the specific contexts of their uses. With regard to religious argumentation, the article lastly examined the three domains with high frequency religious lexises in more detail. This revealed very different concepts of how religious topics are used to legitimize the ideology of Reich citizens, namely as a justification for völkisch [ethnic] concepts, as higher knowledge, and even as part of Reich citizens’ identity. In the latter case, God-like qualities were attributed to the founder of a specific group of Reich citizens.

Sabine Anselm, Eva Hammer-Bernhard

Politische Internetmemes sind ein wertvoller Gegenstand im (Deutsch-)Unterricht, wie ausgehend von einem Beispiel gezeigt wird. Memes regen zur Auseinandersetzung mit literarästhetischen und linguistischen Fragestellungen an. In dreifacher Hinsicht lassen sich domänenspezifische Kompetenzen einer meme literacy einüben und erproben: Erstens ist die Bedeutungsentfaltung der multimodalen Sprach-Bild-Texte in der Kultur des Digitalen eine Herausforderung für interpretative Zugänge. Zweitens dokumentieren Memes die Aushandlungsprozesse gesellschaftlicher Wertvorstellungen und sind Anlass, über moralische Grenzen von gutem Geschmack und Humor zu reflektieren. Und drittens wird das den Memes inhärente Spiel zwischen Faktualität und Fiktionalität zur Herausforderung schulischer Bildung: Die genannte Differenzierung ist nicht mehr eindeutig bzw. für alle deutlich. Es gilt, die Folgeprobleme, die aus einer ungefilterten Rezeption entstehen können, zu thematisieren und im Kontext der politischen Bildung die Notwendigkeit einer reflektierten Meinungsbildungsfähigkeit herauszustellen. Gegebenenfalls müssen auch rechtlich-normative Fragestellungen, wie sie mit Art. 5 des GG verbunden sind, diskutiert bzw. vermittelt werden.   Abstract (english): Memes. Media of value education between freedom of opinion and morality Political memes on the internet are a valuable subject in (German) lessons, as will be exemplarily demonstrated. Memes stimulate the discussion of literary/aesthetic and linguistic issues. Domain-specific skills for meme literacy can be practiced and tested. First, deciphering the multimodal language-image texts in digital culture is challenging interpretative approaches. Second, memes document the process of negotiating social values and are an occasion to reflect on the moral boundaries of taste and humor. Also, the inherent play with facts and fiction in memes becomes a challenge for school education: The aforementioned differentiation is no longer clear or evident for everyone. It is necessary to address the problems that can ari-se from unfiltered reception and, in the context of political education, to emphasize the necessity of the ability to form reflected opinions. If necessary, legally-normative questions, such as those connected to Article 5 of the Grundgesetz (German Constitution), must also be discussed or communicated.

Aleksandra Belkind

Extraposition in OV Germanic languages is a complicated phenomenon, which has been analyzed in different ways—as a result of rightward movement, as base generation of extraposing items to the right, and as a result of raising of predicative elements. The most common type of item in extraposition is CP, but also PPs and heavy adjuncts are attested in extraposition in Modern German. Early New High German (ENHG) material adds complexity to this topic, since it shows much more widespread extraposition, allowed for arguments as well. In this article, I propose a twofold analysis of extraposition in ENHG. Based on DP-extraposition to the predicate, I argue that in certain cases extraposition can result from rightward movement of an extraposing XP, while in other cases it is raising of the particle to position adjoined to vP, which leaves XP in overt extraposition to the predicate.

Kristel Van Goethem, M. Norde, Francesca Masini

The present study examines the fate of the neoclassical combining form pseudo- in eight European languages, belonging to Germanic (Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish) and Romance (French, Italian, Spanish). In order to gain a better understanding of the synchronic morphological behaviour and productivity of pseudo- words in these languages, we carry out a cross-linguistic corpus analysis and compare the morphological and distributional properties of pseudo-. We also analyse its debonding behaviour and categorical flexibility in the set of languages and correlate this property with its productivity. The results of the corpus study are discussed against the typological background of the so-called Germanic and Romance Sandwiches.

J. Vincent, I. Sichel, Matthew W. Wagers 

In the first two decades following Ross’s Constraints on Variables in Syntax, a picture emerged in which the Mainland Scandinavian (MS) languages appeared to systematically evade some of the locality constraints proposed by Ross, including the relative clause (RC) part of the complex NP constraint. The MS extraction patterns remain a topic of debate, but there is no consensus as to why extraction from RCs should be so degraded in English (compared to MS)—or why it should be so acceptable in MS (compared to English). We present experiment results which indicate that English should be counted among the languages that allow extraction from RCs in at least some environments. Our results suggest a negligible island effect for RCs in predicate nominal environments and a substantially reduced island effect for those in canonical existential environments. In addition, we show that the size of the island effect resulting from extraction from an RC under a transitive verb is substantially reduced when the transitive verb is used to make an indirect existential claim. We present arguments that patterns of RC sub-extraction discovered in Mainland Scandinavian languages are mirrored in English, and we highlight methodological innovations that we believe may be useful for further investigation into this and other topics.

A. M. Nyvad, Christiane Müller, Ken Ramshøj Christensen

Adjunct clauses are traditionally assumed to be strong islands for extraction across languages. However, the universal island status of adjunct clauses has been challenged by studies showing that extraction is possible from finite adjunct clauses in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. The possibility of extraction in these languages appears to be affected by various factors, including the type of adjunct clause, the type of extraction dependency, and the presence of contextual facilitation. These findings call for a re-evaluation of the islandhood of adjunct clauses in English. We conducted an acceptability judgment study on relativization from three types of finite adjunct clauses in English (if-, when-, and because-clauses) in the presence of supporting context. We found that the three clause types showed rather non-uniform acceptability patterns: extraction from when- and because-clauses both yielded significantly lower ratings than extraction from if-clauses, which patterned with non-island that-clauses. Our results suggest that at least for relativization, if- and when-adjuncts are not invariably strong islands in English, and that extra-grammatical factors may be key in understanding island structures traditionally assumed to be purely syntactic in nature.

Andrea Colledan, Ugo Dal Lago

In the realm of quantum computing, circuit description languages represent a valid alternative to traditional QRAM-style languages. They indeed allow for finer control over the output circuit, without sacrificing flexibility nor modularity. We introduce a generalization of the paradigmatic lambda-calculus Proto-Quipper-M, itself modeling the core features of the quantum circuit description language Quipper. The extension, called Proto-Quipper-K, is meant to capture a very general form of dynamic lifting. This is made possible by the introduction of a rich type and effect system in which not only computations, but also the very types are effectful. The main results we give for the introduced language are the classic type soundness results, namely subject reduction and progress.

Guro Busterud, Terje Lohndal, Yulia Rodina et al.

Trondheims-dialekten har tradisjonelt tre grammatiske kjønn: hankjønn, hunkjønn, og intetkjønn. Denne artikkelen presenterer resultater fra to eksperimenter som viser at hunkjønn står svakere i denne dialekten enn tidligere antatt. Resultatene tyder på at dialekten er i ferd med å utvikle et togenussystem, der den ubestemte artikkelen for hunkjønn og hankjønn har falt sammen. Vi ser tydelige forskjeller mellom de fem ulike aldersgruppene som har deltatt i studien, som overraskende nok viser at den ubestemte artikkelen i hunkjønn står relativt svakt også blant voksne. I motsetning til de ubestemte artiklene endrer ikke bestemthetssuffiksene seg like mye, og vi diskuterer hva dette forteller oss om genus versus bøyningsklasse. Slike endringer er dokumentert flere steder i Norge de siste årene (Lødrup 2011, Conzett, Johansen & Sollid 2011, Westergaard & Rodina 2016), og vi diskuterer mulige forklaringer på denne utviklingen.

Bettina Bock, Pirkko Dresing

Das Lesen multimodaler (Sach-)Texte stellt einen zentralen fächerübergreifenden Bestandteil des schulischen Lernens dar. Dennoch liegt der Fokus in Lesestrategie - konzeptionen und -förderansätzen auf sprachlichen Textelementen. Die Multimoda- lität der Texte und deren Auswirkung auf den Leseprozess bleiben weitestgehend unberücksichtigt. Der Beitrag betrachtet Textkompetenz und Lesestrategien daher aus einer multimodalen Perspektive und zeigt anhand erster Ergebnisse aus einer explorativen Studie, wie Schüler:innen in inklusiven Lerngruppen multimodale Sach- texte lesen und welche multimodalen Lesestrategien dabei aus Laut-Denk- und Eye- Tracking-Daten rekonstruiert werden können.

M. Aßenmacher, A. Corvonato, C. Heumann

The lack of a commonly used benchmark data set (collection) such as (Super-)GLUE (Wang et al., 2018, 2019) for the evaluation of non-English pre-trained language models is a severe shortcoming of current English-centric NLP-research. It concentrates a large part of the research on English, neglecting the uncertainty when transferring conclusions found for the English language to other languages. We evaluate the performance of the German and multilingual BERT-based models currently available via the huggingface transformers library on the four tasks of the GermEval17 workshop. We compare them to pre-BERT architectures (Wojatzki et al., 2017; Schmitt et al., 2018; Attia et al., 2018) as well as to an ELMo-based architecture (Biesialska et al., 2020) and a BERT-based approach (Guhr et al., 2020). The observed improvements are put in relation to those for similar tasks and similar models (pre-BERT vs. BERT-based) for the English language in order to draw tentative conclusions about whether the observed improvements are transferable to German or potentially other related languages.

Antoine Amarilli, Louis Jachiet, Charles Paperman

We study the dynamic membership problem for regular languages: fix a language L, read a word w, build in time O(|w|) a data structure indicating if w is in L, and maintain this structure efficiently under letter substitutions on w. We consider this problem on the unit cost RAM model with logarithmic word length, where the problem always has a solution in O(log |w| / log log |w|) per operation. We show that the problem is in O(log log |w|) for languages in an algebraically-defined, decidable class QSG, and that it is in O(1) for another such class QLZG. We show that languages not in QSG admit a reduction from the prefix problem for a cyclic group, so that they require Ω(log |w| / log log |w|) operations in the worst case; and that QSG languages not in QLZG admit a reduction from the prefix problem for the multiplicative monoid U 1 = {0, 1}, which we conjecture cannot be maintained in O(1). This yields a conditional trichotomy. We also investigate intermediate cases between O(1) and O(log log |w|). Our results are shown via the dynamic word problem for monoids and semigroups, for which we also give a classification. We thus solve open problems of the paper of Skovbjerg Frandsen, Miltersen, and Skyum [30] on the dynamic word problem, and additionally cover regular languages.