Project Details
Projekt
German-English contrasts in cohesion - Towards an empirically-based comparison (GECCo)
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2010 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 189428651
The proposed continuation phase of our project addresses two major research questions in the area of contrastive linguistics English-German:First, we intend to provide a contrastive account of cohesion in the two languages generally, complementing existing contrastive accounts of lexicogrammar. Cohesion is the way lexico-grammatical devices are used in textual encoding to create links across grammatical domains. Our investigation involves comparisons of systemic resources of English and German as well as textual functions. The latter show up in frequencies of cohesive devices and antecedents, relative proportions between alternatives, and empirical data about chains. We have addressed these mechanisms for the cohesive phenomena of reference, substitution and conjunctive relations in our work in GECCo to date. First findings so far indicate a generally richer lexicogrammatical repertoire of German cohesive forms and thus less encoding ambiguity in antecedent-proform relationships relative to English. This is partially counter-balanced by higher ambiguity due to the higher flexibility of German word order and information-structure as well as a higher multi-functionality of particular forms. Our proposed focus in the second GECCo phase will be on cohesive ellipsis and lexical cohesion but also on their interaction with reference, substitution and conjunction. The second research question has to do with cohesion along the written vs. spoken continuum. Core constellations of situational contexts cause registerial variation intra-lingually through typical (co-)occurrences of cohesive mechanisms. In a process-perspective, which will only function as an explanatory background in our project, this variation is the result of context-dependent vs. context independent modes of production. So far, this has not received much attention from a contrastive perspective. It is sometimes assumed that English and German differ in the strength and type of expression of cohesive variation between written and spoken varieties. With the continued corpus-based focus of our project in its continuation phase, we propose to generalize our findings about individual cohesive variables into debates about the written-spoken dimension. We hope to strengthen research avenues into questions of language change and language contact English-German, and into issues to do with encoding complexity, its relationship to changing contexts, and its manifestation in cohesion and texture.As a contribution to digital infrastructures for the humanities, we shall create a web-interface for the GECCo-corpus, aiming at a more widely usable resource for empirical linguistic research. This will be realized through already existing local co-operation with CLARIN-D.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
