German-English contrasts in cohesion - Towards an empirically-based comparison (GECCo)
Final Report Abstract
The GECCo-project produced a corpus for contrastive linguistic work in the area of textual cohesion. The corpus covers English and German texts in a range of registers and exists in various releases. Its written registers and their lexicogrammatical annotations were imported in a re-organized form from the earlier CroCo-project. The corpus and its documentation can be accessed online for queries with CQPweb http://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/gecco/ / http://corpora.clarin-d. uni-saarland.de/cqpweb/ Unrestricted access to the corpus texts is not possible due to propertyright restrictions. Querying the corpus, however, with and without GECCo’s annotations is possible and open to members of the research community and students. The linguistic basis of corpus annotations lies in system-based comparisons of cohesive devices in English and German. The annotations allow empirical tests of relevant frequency distributions of cohesive configurations between the two languages, between 14 registers and between spoken and written language use. The GECCo project produced versions of the GECCo-corpus, though for lexical chains with only a subset of representative registers. The project developed and documented a mixture of automatic pre-coding with human intervention and post-editing to develop sub-corpora of sufficient quality. Collaboration with the Prague Discourse Tree Bank has led to interoperable annotations across theories and corpora. As far as empirical studies go, statistically refined evaluations of empirical results were produced from both phases of GECCo’s lifetime. The project’s generalization of cohesive contrasts in terms of degree, strength, semantic type and variation of cohesive devices and chains with particular consideration of the written-spoken dimension is new in the area of contrastive linguistics. This generalization appears necessary as one type of tertium comparationis for cross-linguistic comparison. Together with GECCo’s documented annotation guidelines, its statistical evaluation techniques constitute models for a working pipeline in corpus-based empirical work. Empirical results includ wide-ranging overviews on contrasts in cohesion English-German, as well as focused accounts of lexical cohesion and of ellipsis with particular reference to their function across the spoken-written modes. GECCo has explored and documented three areas of application of its results: its findings feed into language teaching methodologies to allow more discourse-oriented methodologies of teaching, increasing communicative competence. They furthermore provide substantial input for the modelling and teaching of translation, where again an orientation towards improved skills in the creation of target-culture-adapted text production seems highly desirable. And finally, project members jointly with collaborating co-authors produced several publications and prototypes integrating findings from GECCo into linguistic engineering and machine translation, showing how improved control of text cohesion improves linguistic engineering in various aspects.
Publications
- Shallow features as indicators of English-German contrasts in lexical cohesion. In: Languages in Contrast.18:2
Kunz, Kerstin, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, José Manuel Martínez-Martínez, Katrin Menzel & Erich Steiner
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.16005.kun) - (2014). Annotating Cohesion for Multilingual Analysis. In: Proceedings of the 10th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation in conjunction with LREC2014 the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Reykjavik, Island, Mai 2014
Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina & Kerstin Kunz
- (2014). Cohesive conjunctions in English and German: Systemic contrasts and textual differences. In: Vandelanotte, L., K. Davidse, C. Gentens & D. Kimps (eds.). Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and Exploiting Corpora. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. 229-262
Kunz, Kerstin & Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789401211130_012) - (2014). Ellipsen als Stil- und Kohäsionsmittel in deutschen und englischen politischen Reden. In: Germanistische Mitteilungen. Zeitschrift für Deutsche Sprache, Literatur und Kultur, 40.1: Deutsch kontrastiv. Brüssel. 31-50
Menzel, Katrin
- (2015). Contrastive studies of cohesion and their impact on our knowledge of translation. In: Zhang, Meifang and Munday, Jeremy (eds.). Discourse Analysis and Translation. Special issue of TARGET. International Journal of Translation Studies. 27:3. pp. 351-369. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Steiner, Erich
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/target.27.3.02ste) - (2015). Cross-linguistic analysis of discourse variation across registers. In: K. Ajmer & H. Hasselgård (eds.). Special Issue of the Nordic Journal of English Studies
Kunz, Kerstin & Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski
- (2016). Annotation of Lexical Cohesion in English and German: Automatic and Manual Procedures. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing (Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache) - KONVENS- 2016, September, Bochum, Germany
Martínez-Martínez, José Manuel, Ekaterina, Lapshinova-Koltunski & Kerstin Kunz
- (2016). Beyond Identity Coreference: Contrasting Indicators of Textual Coherence in English and German. In: Proceedings of CORBON at NAACL-HLT2016, San Diego
Kunz, Kerstin, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski & José Manuel Martínez-Martínez
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/W16-0704) - (2017). English-German contrasts in cohesion and implications for translation. In: De Sutter, G., Delaere, I. & Lefer, M.-A. (eds.). Empirical Translation Studies. New Methodological and Theoretical Traditions. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monograph
Kunz, Kerstin, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Katrin Menzel & Erich Steiner
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110459586-010)
