Article published in:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 18:2 (2018) ► pp. 175–206

Shallow features as indicators of English–German contrasts in lexical cohesion

| Heidelberg University (Germany)
| Saarland University (Germany)
| Saarland University (Germany)
| Saarland University (Germany)
| Saarland University (Germany)

This paper contrasts lexical cohesion between English and German spoken and written registers, reporting findings from a quantitative lexical analysis. After an overview of research aims and motivations we formulate hypotheses on distributions of shallow features as indicators of lexical cohesion across languages and modes and with respect to register ranking and variation. The shallow features analysed are: highly frequent words in texts, lexical density, standardized type-token-ratio, top-frequent content words of the language within individual registers and texts, and several types of Latinate words. Descriptive analyses of the corpus are then presented and statistically validated with the help of univariate and multivariate analyses. The results are interpreted relative to our hypotheses and related to the following properties of texts in terms of lexical cohesion: semantic variability, cohesive strength, number and length of nominal chains, degree of specification of lexis, and degree of variation along all of these properties.

Keywords: lexical cohesion, shallow features, written vs. spoken mode, language contrast, English / German
Article outline
  • 1.Aims and Motivation
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Hypotheses
    • 2.2Data
    • 2.3Statistical Techniques
  • 3.Analyses
    • 3.1Most frequent words
    • 3.2Lexical density
    • 3.3Standardized type-token ratio
    • 3.4Top content words
    • 3.5Latinate words
    • 3.6Overall comparison
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
    • 4.1Language contrast English vs. German
    • 4.2Spoken vs. written mode
    • 4.3Register ranking
    • 4.4Register variation
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.16005.kun
References
Baayen, H.
2008 Analyzing Linguistic Data. A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beaugrande, R.-A. de and Dressler, W. U.
1981 Introduction to Text Linguistics. London, New York: Longman (German version also published by Niemeyer in 1981). CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Berg, T.
2012 The cohesiveness of English and German compounds. The Mental Lexicon 7/21, 1–33 CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Berzlanovich, I.
2008 Lexical Cohesion and the Organization of Discourse. First year report PhD student: University Groningen.Google Scholar
Biber, D.
1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D. and Finegan, E.
1989 Drift and evolution of English style: a history of three genres. Language. 651:487–517. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E.
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Brinker, K.
2005 Linguistische Textanalyse: Eine Einführung in Grundbegriffe und Methoden. 6th edition. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. M., Cleveland, W. S., Kleiner, B., and Tukey, P. A.
1983 Graphical Methods for Data Analysis. The Wadsworth Statistics / Probability Series. Duxbury Press, Boston.Google Scholar
Collins, P.
2012 Grammatical Variation in English Worldwide: The Role of Colloquialization. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 8(3):289–306.Google Scholar
Cohen, J.
1992 A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1):155–159. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften (ed.)
2013 Reichtum und Armut der deutschen Sprache. Erster Bericht zur Lage der deutschen Sprache. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fiehler, R., Barden, B., Elstermann, M. and Kraft, B.
2004 Eigenschaften gesprochener Sprache. Tübingen: Narr (Studien zur Deutschen Sprache 30).Google Scholar
Fischer, K.
2013 Satzstrukturen im Deutschen und Englischen. Typologie und Textrealisierung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gast, V.
2008 V-N Compounds in English and German. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 56(3). 269–282. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Greenacre, M.
2010 Correspondence Analysis in Practice. CRC Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R.
1976 Cohesion in English. London, New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K.
2005 On Grammar. Vol. 11 of Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, S., Neumann, S. and Steiner, E.
2012 Cross-linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations. Insights from the Language Pair English – German. Series Text, Translation, Computational Processing. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, M.
2010 Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies. Language 86(4).Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A.
1986 A Comparative Typology of English and German. Unifying the Contrasts. London etc. Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Hennig, M.
2006 Grammatik der gesprochenen Sprache in Theorie und Praxis. Kassel: University Press.Google Scholar
House, J.
1997 Translation Quality Assessment. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Jenset, G. B. and McGillivray, B.
2012 Multivariate analyses of affix productivity in translated English. In Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies, M. P. Oakes and M. Ji (eds). John Benjamins. 301–324. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koch, P. and Oesterreicher, W.
1985 Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36/851:15–43.Google Scholar
König, E. and Gast, V.
2012 Understanding English–German Contrasts. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. [3rd, extended edition].Google Scholar
Kunz, K., Lapshinova-Koltunski, E. and Martínez Martínez, J. M.
2016 Beyond Identity Coreference: Contrasting Indicators of Textual Coherence in English and German. In Proceedings of CORBON at NAACL-HLT2016, San Diego. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kunz, K., Degaetano-Ortlieb, S., Lapshinova-Koltunski, E., Menzel, K. and Steiner, E.
(2017) English-German contrasts in cohesion and implications for translation. In De Sutter, G. and Delaere, I. and Lefer, M.-A. (eds.). Empirical Translation Studies. New Theoretical and Methodological Traditions. TILSM series. Vol. 3001. Mouton de Gruyter, 265–312Google Scholar
Lapshinova-Koltunski, E., Kunz, K. and Amoia, M.
2012 Compiling a Multilingual Spoken Corpus. Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference: Speech and corpora, Firenze: Firenze University Press 2012, 79–84, Available at: http://​store​.torrossa​.it​/pages​/ipplatform​/itemDetails​.faces [last accessed 16/02/2015]
Lapshinova-Koltunski, E. and Kunz, K.
2014 Annotating Cohesion for Multillingual Analysis. 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, Iceland 2014 Available at: http://​www​.lrec​-conf​.org​/proceedings​/lrec2014​/workshops​/LREC2014Workshop​-ISA​-10%20Proceedings​.pdf [last accessed 18/01/2015]
Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, C. and Smith, N.
2009 Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leisi, E. and Mair, C.
2008 Das heutige Englisch: Wesenszüge und Probleme. 9th edition Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.Google Scholar
Martínez Martínez, J. M.
2015 GECCo UPOS. Internal Technical Report. Available at: http://​www​.gecco​.uni​-saarland​.de​/GECCo​/Korpus​_files​/gecco​_upos​_tech​_report​.pdf [Last accessed 15/02/2016]
Martínez Martínez, J. M., Lapshinova-Koltunski, E. and Kunz, K.
2016 Annotation of Lexical Cohesion in English and German: Automatic and Manual Procedures. Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing, KONVENS-2016, September 19–21, Bochum, Germany.Google Scholar
Mair, C.
2006 Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nenadic, O. and Greenacre, M.
2007 Correspondence analysis in R, with two- and three-dimensional graphics: The ca package. Journal of Statistical Software 20(3): 1–13.Google Scholar
Neumann, S.
2013 Contrastive register variation. A quantitative approach to the comparison of English and German. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Petrov, S., Das, D., and McDonald, R.
2012 A Universal Part-of-Speech Tagset. Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12). Istanbul, Turkey: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Available at: http://​www​.lrec​-conf​.org​/proceedings​/lrec2012​/pdf​/274​_Paper​.pdf [last accessed 18/01/2015]
Steiner, E.
2015 Contrastive studies of cohesion and their impact on our knowledge of translation (English–German). Special issue Discourse Analysis in Translation Studies. Target 27(3): 351–369 CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schmid, H.
1995 Improvements in Part-of-Speech Tagging with an Application to German. Proceedings of the ACL SIGDAT-Workshop. Dublin, Ireland.Google Scholar
1994 Probabilistic Part-of-Speech Tagging Using Decision Trees. Proceedings of International Conference on New Methods in Language Processing, Manchester, UK.Google Scholar
Stokes, N.
2004 Applications of Lexical Cohesion Analysis in the Topic Detection and Tracking Domain. PhD Thesis Dublin: UCD.Google Scholar
Tanskannen, S.
2006 Collaborating towards Coherence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Venables, W. N. and Smith, D. M.
2010 An Introduction to R. Notes on R: A Programming Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics. Electronic edition. Available at: http://​cran​.r​-project​.org​/doc​/manuals​/R​-intro​.html.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Hasselgård, Hilde
2020. Corpus-based contrastive studies. Languages in Contrast 20:2 ► pp. 184 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 05 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.