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The present study focuses on serially occurring narrations of ‘everyday’ life, more specifically on birthing as narrated by mothers on online forums; the underlying idea being that these narrations happen against the background of cultural narratives.The present paper uses word embedding models to detect typical topics and actors in these narrations. The calculation of word embeddings automatically constructs semantic spaces, where semantic relations (synonymy in particular) can be modeled. This method offers a way to think of synonymy as ‘functional equivalence in discourse’.The present study relies on previous work with n-grams (Bubenhofer, 2018). N-grams are sequences of words that often appear together; their sequential order in different narrations gives insight in narrative patterns. A further step in the analysis is the construction of ‘narrative topoi’, which is achieved through clustering neighboring vectors. The emerging clusters can in turn be grouped into five narrative elements of ‘telling a birth story’: 1) disruption of daily life, 2) personnel, 3) body, 4) fear, 5) joy. While it seems obvious that certain themes ‘belong’ into the narration of a delivery, it is less obvious with what vocabulary these themes are expressed.The presented method of clustering word-embedding-profiles adds tremendously to the modelling of a narrative. Its advantages lie in its potential to show lexical variation, as it also includes rare, non-conformative orthographical variants. Furthermore, it allows for a discourse-specific (and usage-based) view on semantic relations. The same applies to relations between semantic clusters. Seen from a discourse linguistics or cultural analysis perspective, word embeddings renew our understanding of semantics. This shows particularly fruitful if used to analyze (discourse dependent) derivations between semantic spaces.

In this article we discuss common approaches to using data visualizations within the field of digital humanities. We argue that by assigning equal importance to the development, as well as the usage of a visualization framework, researchers can question dogmatic “best-practice” norms for data visualizations which may prevent them from developing visualizations that can be used to find emergent phenomena within the underlying data. We then focus on the question, how visualizations re-constitute language by using diagrammatic operations. Also of big importance working with digital visualizations is the technological background influencing the tools built with and the effect on the interpretation of the data. As an example approach, we present our visualization framework called “geocollocations” which can be used as an interactive tool to detect words that typically collocate with toponyms based on the data of various text corpora.

Die Verwendung von Korpora ist in der Linguistik kein neues Forschungsparadigma mehr. Schon immer wurden Textsammlungen als Belegspender benutzt – das Grimm sche Worterbuch ware ohne sie nicht denkbar, wie auch die gesamte Lexikographie bis heute. Auch die avancierte Variante der (digitalen) Korpuslinguistik ist inzwischen eingefuhrt: Hier sind Korpora nicht nur moderne Zettelkasten (Perkuhn/Belica 2006, 2), sondern erlauben quantitative Analysen des Sprachgebrauchs. Solche Analysen liegen fur alle Teildisziplinen der Linguistik vor, wie beispielsweise Einfuhrungen in die Korpuslinguistik zeigen (Baker 2012; Lemnitzer/Zinsmeister 2006; McEnery u.a. 2006; Perkuhn u.a. 2012). Trotzdem bleibt dieMethodendiskussion in derKorpuslinguistik wichtig, denn einige methodische Ansatze aus Disziplinen, die ebenfalls mit grosen Datenmengen arbeiten, werden noch kaum fur linguistische Fragestellungen ausgereizt. Im Folgenden mochte ich auf zwei Aspekte zu sprechen kommen: 1) Datengeleitete Analysemethoden und – damit im Zusammenhang stehend – 2) visuelle Analysemethoden. Diese Methoden stehen fur ein neues Forschungsparadigma, das wir andernorts schon als »Data-Driven-Turn« bezeichnet haben (Bubenhofer/Scharloth 2013; Scharloth u.a. 2013). Eine datengeleitete Korpuslinguistik erlaubt es, neue Fragen an die Daten zu stellen und andersgeartete Antworten zu erhalten. Dies mochte ich am Beispiel von sog. ›Geokollokationen‹, also typischen lexematischen Zuschreibungen zu Toponymen, zeigen.

Die Geschichte der linguistischen Diskursanalyse in den nunmehr 25 Jahren seit dem Erscheinen von Dietrich Busses Dissertation Historische Semantik. Analyse eines Programms (Busse 1987) ist eine Erfolgsgeschichte.

A view on linguistic data in the sense of corpus pragmatics leads to new insights in the domains of sociolinguistics, discourse linguistics and cultural studies. In corpus pragmatics, recurrent patterns of language use are interpreted as a result of social actions. Using modern corpus linguistic methods, these recurrent patterns of language use can be extracted in a data driven way from linguistic data. In our paper we show this techniques in the context of a corpus of alpine literature: The yearbooks of the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC). The study shows how "talking about mountains" has changed from 1864 to today.

Der Sammelband zur Genderlinguistik zeigt Praktiken der sprachlichen Konstruktion von Geschlechteridentitaten aus diversen Blickwinkeln auf. Die Beitrage prasentieren aktuelle methodische und theor ...