Alle Publikationen
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2019
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(2019): Understanding Legal Meaning through Word Embeddings. In: SSRN Electronic Journal. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3455747
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3455747 Abstract: For judges and legal scholars, the quest for meaning and the identification of methods appropriate for understanding word meaning animates volumes upon volumes of debate. Likewise, social scientists interested in studying the law have increasingly recognized the variations in choices over words as important barometers for understanding the law. In this paper, I suggest recent advances in computational linguistics -- notably, the efficient estimation of distributed representations of word meanings, or word embeddings -- offer a potentially transformative avenue by which to assess the strategy, choice, and impact of judicial language. Utilizing a corpus of more than one million federal and state appellate court decisions, I estimate word embeddings for the more than 400,000 most common words found in legal opinions. In a series of simple illustrations, I demonstrate the value of this treatment of word meaning for new avenues of law and politics research.
2013
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(2013): Foreign-language users confronting anti-normative politeness in a Mexican university. In: Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (1), S. 101-130. DOI: 10.1515/ip-2013-0004
Abstract: When foreign-language learners abandon the relative safety of the classroom and confront actual language use, they face decisions regarding how they wish to participate in a given target-language group. They may find that different interactional patterns and practices reflect a community's norms and how its members come across: Interactants may employ, for instance, seemingly impolite words and expressions in inoffensive ways. Although this phenomenon has been categorized as mock impoliteness, I will adopt the term anti-normative politeness (adapted from Zimmerman 2003) since interactants are ultimately engaging in polite rather than impolite practices. The foreign-language user's decision as to whether to engage in such practices will depend to a large extent on pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic understandings and how she wants to come across - and is allowed to come across in the target language. In this paper, I examine how French and German exchange students at a Mexican university approached and confronted the use of the normally insulting word guey, which seems to have become more and more prevalent in Mexican society. Findings indicate that foreign-language learners of Spanish understand the friendly intention underscoring the use of anti-normative politeness but fail to fully appreciate "positive politeness" (Brown and Levinson 1987) such a key feature of Mexican interpersonal language use.
1991
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(1991): Verbal, prosodic, and kinesic emotive contrasts in speech. In: Journal of Pragmatics 15 (6), S. 521-549. DOI: 10.1016/0378-2166(91)90110-J
Abstract: The signaling of logical relations between, and emotive reactions to, subjects in face-to-face speech are complexly interrelated processes, making it sometimes difficult to fully distinguish what people say from how they say it. Emotive communication, an aspect of the latter (style, rhetoric, speech strategy), may be viewed, following Stankiewicz (1964), as the culturally learned, cognitively mediated use of nonpropositional signals to express feelings, manage impressions, and reach goals in speech. The paper introduces some pragmatically relevant American English verbal, vocal, and kinesic emotive contrasts, e.g., shifts of verbal explicitness, verbal value-ladenness, verbal intensity, vocal emphasis, intonation, gaze, facial expression, body posture and so on, and discusses their functions in speech as signals of (un)assertiveness, (non)affiliation, and (un)involvement. Methodological and theoretical questions raised by the nondiscrete, gradient, ‘more/less’ nature of emotive contrasts are discussed, and some conventional cross-modal emotive strategies in American English are explained. The paper is at once an introduction to basic problems in the study of emotive communication, and an invitation to a synthesis of cognitive and emotive standpoints in pragmatic research on face-to-face speech.
Keywords: Ausdruck von (Nicht-)Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl, Betonung, Blick / Gaze, Brown & Levinson, Disziplin, Emotive Kommunikation, Erste Welle, Favoriten, FTA Face Threatening Acts, Gestik/Mimik, Höflichkeit, Höflichkeitsforschung, Höflichkeitsforschung der ersten Welle, (Im)Politeness Research, Klarheit/Eindeutigkeit der Ausdrucksweise, Körperhaltung, Linguistik, Modelle/Theorien, Politeness, Soziale Angemessenheit, Sprachgebrauch, Sprechmelodie/Prosody, Supportive Facework, Übermitteln von Gefühlen/Emotionen, Wortbedeutung
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