Project Details
Projekt
Pronouns as a constructional network: usage-based analysis of practices of referring to persons in spoken interactions
Applicant
Dr. Jens Philipp Lanwer
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457855466
The project is part of the research unit “Practices of person reference: personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in use”. The focus of the subproject is pronoun use in spoken interaction. With respect to German, interactive procedures of establishing reference by means of pronominal expressions have hardly been studied so far. At the same time, little is known about the systematics of clitic forms and the integration of pronouns into larger, prefabricated units in everyday language use. The project addresses these desiderata from a constructionist perspective that systematically combines interactional and constructional analysis. The aim of the project is a data-driven description of the German pronoun system considering phonological (phonetic-segmental structure and act accentuation) and syntactic (collocation profiles) properties in relation to aspects of the conceptualization of scenes (construal) and the positioning of social actors. The scope of the study is limited to monosyllabic singular subject pronouns. Furthermore, the study is limited to the language use in the northern part of Germany. The focus is on everyday language use beyond the base dialects. A corpus of 18 table conversations with a total length of 26 hours (350,296 tokens) is used as the database for the study. The conversations were collected within the context of the DFG project “Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland” (SiN) and were edited separately for the planned research project. The data are available as time-aligned transcriptions (GAT, minimal), which were additionally annotated with an automated part-of-speech tagging. The data will be analyzed with the help of a statistically based collection analysis. The method adopts the technique of collection analysis from the field of conversational analysis and combines it with structure-discovery methods from the field of statistical network analysis. By means of the statistically based collection analysis, similarity-based clusters can be formed via the systematic comparison of parameterized single case analyses and thus patterns in empirical data can be discovered, which can be interpreted as constructions and modeled as a constructional network. Knowledge guiding questions of the study are: (1) which morphophonological differentiations of the pronominal subsystem under consideration can be reconstructed with the help of the data-driven procedure, (2) how these are related to the observable collocation profiles, and (3) what role the functional dimensions of conceptualization and positioning play for the analysis of pronoun use in (northern) German. On a more general level, theoretical as well as methodological implications for usage-based grammar description can be expected.
DFG Programme
Research Units
