Cornelia Loos

Beiträge aus Forschung und Anwendung
– Jörg Meibauer: Konzepte des unwahrhaftigen Implikatierens – Realistisches Lügenkonzept und die Verpflichtung auf die Wahrheit konversationeller Implikaturen.
Abstract: A realistic concept of [...]

Beiträge aus Forschung und Anwendung
– Lena Stutz: ‚Wo ein Sprichwort ist, ist auch ein Muster.‘ Korpusbasierte Studien zur Produktivität und Schematizität deutscher Sprichwortmuster.
Abstract: This article focuses a certain ty [...]

The paper offers the first systematic investigation of iconic form-meaning mappings in the domain of speech act verbs in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and American Sign Language (ASL). It addresses the question of how pervasive the representation of linguistic action as oral speech is in sign languages. Using dictionary data coupled with consultant work, I show that oral speech forms the single most productive source of iconicity in NGT speech act verbs. This contrasts with ASL, which also draws on oral speech to encode linguistic action but to a significantly lesser degree than NGT. Depictions of oral speech may be metonymic, using mouth/jaw or tongue movement, or they may represent spoken language metaphorically via instantiations of the conduit metaphor and its sub-metaphor THE MOUTH IS A CONTAINER (FOR UTTERANCES). The second frequent motivation for iconic speech act verbs are hand movements or co-speech gestures that accompany a linguistic act. I further show that the source of iconicity correlates with how strongly a given SAV is associated with language use. Lastly, I provide a historical framework against which to interpret the frequent representation of linguistic action in terms of oral speech. I propose that different strategies for lexical borrowing coupled with a societal bias against spoken English in the American Deaf community may have discouraged the encoding of speech act verbs via oral speech in ASL.

This paper has two objectives: we provide a detailed description of the DGS corpus, the largest existing collection of German Sign Language (DGS) data, and we show how such a corpus may be and already has been used as a resource for linguistic research in academic settings. In the first part, we describe where and how the Public DGS Corpus can be accessed, the types of elicitation tasks and formats that were used for data collection, and the regional and sociolinguistic background of the participants. Taking into account which phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical information has been annotated thus far, we then make suggestions for a wide range of applications of the corpus in phonetic, morphological, syntactic, information structural, sociolinguistic, and typological studies of DGS. Lastly, we summarize the methodologies and results of selected research projects that are based on the DGS corpus.