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Needles in Haystacks: Semi-Automatic Identification of Regional Grammatical Variation in Standard German


Tuggener, Don; Businger, Martin (2018). Needles in Haystacks: Semi-Automatic Identification of Regional Grammatical Variation in Standard German. In: Fuß, Eric; Konopka, Marek; Trawiński, Beata; Waßner, Ulrich H. Grammar and Corpora 2016. Luchswiesenstrasse 197: Heidelberg University Publishing, 313-335.

Abstract

This paper lays out a semi-automatic approach to identifying regional variation in the grammar of Standard German. Our approach takes as input manually defined templates of grammatical constructions that are auto- matically instantiated over a corpus collected from regional newspapers. These instantiations are automatically ranked by a metric that quantifies how spe- cific an instantiation is for a region. Ranked lists of instantiations are compiled that contain instantiations specific to a region and are scanned manually by linguists to identify those that denote grammatical variants of Standard Ger- man. This approach enabled us to discover variants that so far have not been documented. With respect to research on variation within standard languages as seen from a more general perspective, we aim to contribute towards research strategies that clearly rely on empiricism rather than on intuition or bias.

Abstract

This paper lays out a semi-automatic approach to identifying regional variation in the grammar of Standard German. Our approach takes as input manually defined templates of grammatical constructions that are auto- matically instantiated over a corpus collected from regional newspapers. These instantiations are automatically ranked by a metric that quantifies how spe- cific an instantiation is for a region. Ranked lists of instantiations are compiled that contain instantiations specific to a region and are scanned manually by linguists to identify those that denote grammatical variants of Standard Ger- man. This approach enabled us to discover variants that so far have not been documented. With respect to research on variation within standard languages as seen from a more general perspective, we aim to contribute towards research strategies that clearly rely on empiricism rather than on intuition or bias.

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Additional indexing

Item Type:Book Section, not_refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of German Studies
Dewey Decimal Classification:430 German & related languages
Language:English
Date:May 2018
Deposited On:11 Jan 2019 16:02
Last Modified:23 Nov 2022 10:21
Publisher:Heidelberg University Publishing
Number:361
ISBN:978-3-946054-82-5
OA Status:Green
Free access at:Publisher DOI. An embargo period may apply.
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.361.509
Official URL:https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/heiup/catalog/book/361
  • Content: Published Version
  • Language: English
  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)