Wolfgang Teubert

Ist Diskurs ein sprachwissenschaftliches Objekt? Zur Methodenfrage der historischen Semantik

Nach zwanzig Jahren diskursanalytischer Forschung in Frankreich und mehr als funfzehn Jahre nach der Kenntnisnahme und Diskussion dieser Forschungsrichtung in Deutschland scheint die Diskursanalyse und der Begriff „Diskurs“ selbst noch immer nicht in der deutschen (oder genauer: der germanistischen) Sprachwissenschaft angekommen zu sein (jedenfalls nicht in dem Sinne, in dem auserhalb der linguistischen Gesprachsanalyse – engl. „discourse analysis“ – und auserhalb des Habermasschen Diskursimperiums dieser Begriff uberwiegend verwendet wird). Worin konnen die Grunde fur diese eklatante Verspatung, dieses Nicht-Reagieren auf eine mittlerweile international gewordene wissenschaftliche Thematik liegen? Die Diskursanalyse in Frankreich hatte, wie u. a.

Units of Meaning, Parallel Corpora, and their Implications for Language Teaching

Translation equivalence is a key issue for all who apply multilingual skills in a professional environment. This includes language teachers, translators, lexicographers and terminologists, as well as experts in computational linguistics. Translation equivalence has therefore to be dealt with by academic foreign language teaching. There are two reasons. The units of meaning are only rarely the traditional single words; much more common are larger chunks, compounds, multi-word units, set phrases and even full sentences. In corpus linguistics, these are called collocations. They are the true vocabulary of a language. Collocations are statistically significant co-occurrences of words in a corpus. But they also have to be semantically relevant. They have to have a meaning of their own, a meaning that is not obvious from the meaning of the parts they are composed of. Whether an English text chunk is a true collocation or just a chain of words can only be decided from the perspective of a source language. This is why a list of English collocations for students with other native languages would have to be compiled from a parallel corpus. I will show how an approach to translation equivalence based on collocations yields results that can be applied in language teaching.

Extraction of translation unit from Chinese-English parallel corpora

More and more researchers have recognized the potential value of the parallel corpus in the research on Machine Translation and Machine Aided Translation. This paper examines how Chinese English translation units could be extracted from parallel corpus. An iterative algorithm based on degree of word association is proposed to identify the multiword units for Chinese and English. Then the Chinese-English Translation Equivalent Pairs are extracted from the parallel corpus. We also made comparison between different statistical association measurement in this paper.

Escritura, hermenéutica y lingüística de corpus

En una sociedad oralizada, la gente no pregunta que significa este (trozo de) texto, sino que que quieres decir, es decir, se pregunta por la intencion del autor, entendido como individuo autoconsciente. Pero, con el advenimiento de la escritura, el texto se ha separado de su autor y, como consecuencia, ha pasado a estar en el foco de lo que debe ser averiguado. Asi, es con la escritura que el significado se hace una parte del texto (escrito). Las primeras formas de escritura, las tablillas cuneiformes, se referian a cosas concretas, alla afuera, en alguna realidad externa al discurso. Esto hizo surgir la idea de que el lenguaje puede ser descrito como un sistema de signos, siendo los signos objetos materiales que estan en vez de otros objetos. Si fuera posible unir el signo y la realidad en forma permanente, entonces, manipulando los signos se podria tambien manipular la realidad. Esta ultima es la ambicion que ha movido, por muchos siglos, la busqueda de una “lengua perfecta”, esto es una que este libre de las imperfecciones de las lenguas naturales y, por tanto, una que exhiba limpiamente el verdadero significado, por cuanto transparente la relacion entre la palabra y el objeto real al que se refiere. A la busqueda del significado que se hace desde la flosofia analitica, a traves de la lengua perfecta, desde el cognitivismo y desde la inteligencia artificial, se suma, tras La Reforma, la que se hace a traves de la hermeneutica o arte de la interpretacion. Desde esta ultima se entiende que la interpretacion de un texto solo puede hacerse a luz de otros textos. Asi, si queremos comprender lo que dice un (trozo de) texto, debemos observar los otros textos a los que se refere implicita o explicitamente. A traves de este trabajo, pretendo mostrar que la linguistica de corpus, al considerar el discurso como un sistema autopoietico que se puede describir sin referencia a alguna realidad extra discursiva o a los estados mentales de los miembros de la comunidad discursiva; puede ayudar, en alguna medida, a sustentar metodologicamente el arte de la interpretacion

Some notes on the concept of cognitive linguistics

In this contribution, I argue that the cognitive sciences are troubled by some internal contradictions that seem to me difficult to resolve. Cognitive linguistics is the part of the cognitive sciences dealing with language, and the philosophy of mind provides its theoretical underpinnings. Its goal is to describe the language system as a mechanism that processes thoughts into utterances and utterances into thoughts. While thoughts involve intentionality, the processing mechanism is thought to operate without our awareness. But what do we actually know about this mechanism? Is there really a language of thought, and how innate and how universal would it be? What do we know about the mind as the locus where cognition is processed? How dependable is the computational model of the mind? Do the various factions of cognitive linguistics offer scientific evidence or just possible models of how the mind, if there is one, might work? In the end, cognitive linguistics cannot account for meaning. We do not have access to our own or anyone elses mental concepts. Meaning and knowledge, on the other hand, is public; it is what is exchanged, negotiated, and shared in the discourse. Whatever cognitive linguists may be able to find out about our mental representations, to the extent that it is effable it can never be more than a duplication of what we find in the discourse.

Die Wirklichkeit des Diskurses

Viel Zeit ist vergangen‚ seitdem der oft zitierte Aufsatz „Ist Diskurs ein sprachwissenschaftliches Objekt“ erschienen ist‚ ausgegeben als Gemeinschaftswerk von Busse/Teubert (Busse/Teubert 1994‚ im vorliegenden Band S. 13ff.). In seiner Bescheidenheit hat Dietrich Busse nie deutlich gemacht‚ dass er es in Wirklichkeit alleine war‚ der diesem Text seine endgultige Gestalt gegeben hat. Darin eingearbeitet ist ein Diskussionspapier von mir‚ aber auch der Ertrag‚ den unsere Gesprache in einem kleinen Zirkel erbracht haben‚ der sich mal in Mannheim‚ mal in Heidelberg traf und an dem auch der so fruh verstorbene Fritz Hermanns‚ Andreas Liebert‚ Horst Schwinn und gelegentlich auch Rainer Wimmer teilgenommen haben. Dabei brachte jeder von uns Ideen ein‚ die er sich im Kammerlein ausgedacht hatte. Was uns vorschwebte‚ war‚ Foucaults aspektreiches Nachdenken uber den Diskurs in ein realistisches operationalisierbares Programm zu uberfuhren.

Provinz eines föderalen Superstaates — regiert von einer nicht gewählten Bürokratie? Schlüsselbegriffe des europakritischen Diskurses in Großbritannien

Den Sozialwissenschaften geht es um die Ermittlung von Tatsachen. Was Tatsachen sind, ist eine Frage der Theorie und der Methode. Spatestens seit den sechziger Jahren ist mit dem einflussreichen Buch von Berger und Luckmann „Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit“ (1980) eine Alternative zu dem uberkommenen Verstandnis, dass das eine Tatsache sei, was mit der Wirklichkeit ubereinstimmt, die konkurrierende Auffassung getreten, dass die Wirklichkeit, die im Diskurs einer Gesellschaft zur Verhandlung steht, von dieser Gesellschaft ausgehandelt wird. So finden sich heute neben Ansatzen, die sich unterschiedlichen Auspragungen des philosophischen Realismus verpflichtet sehen, andere Vorstellungen, die als konstruktivistisch oder, weniger von ihren Befurwortern als von ihren Gegnern, mit dem oft pejorativ gemeinten Adjektiv relativistisch bezeichnet werden. Als Gegenschrift zu Berger und Luckmann versteht sich wohl John Searles „Die Konstruktion der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit“ (1997). Wie gestort die Beziehungen zwischen Realisten und Konstruktivisten sind, zeigt sich auch darin, dass Searle jeden Verweis auf Berger und Luckmann unterlasst; auch in seinem Literaturverzeichnis sucht man vergebens nach ihrem Buch.

Did Lou inspire guilt, as well?

Abstract I discuss the late nineteenth century emergence of the expressions guilt and guilt feelings (to denote a complex emotion, and not the established idea of culpability), across several European language-cultures. I nominate a specific spot in time as having prompted one of the earliest appearances in print of the German expression Schuldgefühl and its associated complex reflexive sense (that others – ones community – may hold you culpable for some transgression or impropriety, but you yourself know that any manifested remorse conceals a deeper absence of remorse). This is the occasion on which Nietzsche returned to his friend Paul Rée from a mountain hike with the irresistibly captivating and unchaperoned Lou von Salomé (a “summit experience” precise details of which are unclear.) As Nietzsche well knew, Rée was equally smitten with the delightful Lou: and here Friedrich had taken flagrant advantage (of Rée, ill-fatedly absent from the mountain adventure). In response to Rées censure, Nietzsche feels in himself a complex reaction: not of remorse, exactly, and not at all of repentance, but Schuldgefühl (feeling of guilt), a new formulation for a newly-identified (or newly-invented) condition. Thereafter I chart what seems to be the spread of the phrase and concept (denoting the emotion) in some representative English literature Victorian fiction, in Freud, Kafka, and current non-literary usage. A final point of orientation is Vronskys (or is it Tolstoys?) projection of guilt feelings, avant la lettre, in Anna Karenina.

Applications of a lexicographical data base for German

The Institut fHr deutsche Sprache recently has begun setting up a LExicographical DAta Base for German (LEDA). This data base is designed to improve efficiency in the collection, analysis, ordering and description of language material by facilitating access to textual samples within corpora and to word articles, within machine readable dictionaries and by providing a frame to store results of lexicographical research for further processing. LEDA thus consists of the three components Tezt Bank, Diationary Bank and ResuZt Bank and serves as a tool to suppport monolingual German dictionary projects at the Institute and elsewhere. I INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Since the foundation of the Institut fHr deutsche Sprache in 1964, its research has been based on empirical findings; samples of language produced in spoken or written from were the main basis. To handle efficiently large quantities of texts to be researched it was necessary to use a computer, to assemble machine readable corpora and to develop programs for corpus analysis. An outline of the computational activities of the Institute is given in LDV-Info (1981 ff); the basic corpora are described in Teubert (1982). The present main frame computer, which was installed in January 1983, is a Siemens 7.536 with a core storage of 2 megabytes, a number of tape and disc decks and at the moment 15 visual display units for interactive use. Whereas in former years most jobs were carried out in batch, the terminals now make it possible for the linguist to work interactively with the computer. It was therefore a logical step to devise Lexicographical Data Base for German (LEDA) as a tool for the compilation of new dictionaries. The ideology of interactive use demands a different concept of programming where the lexicographer himself can choose from the menu of alternatives offered by the system and fix his own search parameters. Work on the Lexicographical Data Base was begun in 1981; a first version incorporating all three components is planned to be. ready for use in 1986. What is the goal of LEDA? In any lexicographical project, once the concept for the new dictionary has been established, there are three major tasks where the computer can be employed: (i) For each lemma, textual samples have to be determined in the corpus which is the linguistic base of the dictionary. The text corpus and the programs to be applied to it will form one component of LEDA, namely the Text Bank. (ii) For each lemma, the lexicographer will want to compare corpus samples with the respective word articles of existing relevant dictionaries. For easy access, these dictionaries should be transformed into a machine readable corpus of integrated word articles. Word corpus and the pertaining retrieval programs will form the second component, i.e. the Dictionary Bank. (iii) Once the formal structure of the word articles in the new dictionary has been established, description of the lemmata within to the framework of this structure can be begun. A data base system will provide this frame so that homogenous and interrelated descriptions can be carried out by each member of the dictionary team at all stages of the compilation. This component of LEDA we call the Result Bank.