GECCo (DFG project)
GECCo ( German-English Contrasts in Cohesion - Towards an empirically-based comparison ) is a linguistic research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to investigate linguistic means of sentence linking (so-called cohesion means ). The English and German language, written and spoken texts and different types of text are compared with each other (project duration: April 2011 to January 2017).
Numerous publications have emerged from the project that focus on different aspects of text cohesion in English and German. The concept of text cohesion goes back to Halliday / Hasan (1976), who divide the phenomenon into five main categories: reference , substitution, ellipse , connectors and lexical cohesion. Cohesion is created by the totality of the lexical and grammatical means that combine sentences into a coherent text of the written or spoken language.
In addition to linguistic differences between English and German in the Cohesion Foundation, which can be explained at the level of the language system, the research project also determined the frequency of use of cohesion funds in English and German corpus texts of the written and spoken language. The analyzed corpus texts come from the Saarbrücken GECCo corpus , which contains around 1.7 million tokens and includes both parallel and comparable subcorpora for English and German. It is annotated with linguistic information on several levels, e.g. B. Tokens , lemma and part-of-speech information. The written component is a parallel corpus, consisting of English and German original texts and their translations. The spoken texts are transcriptions of comparable English and German original texts.
The GECCo corpus currently contains 14 registers, which include both spoken and written text types : ACADEMIC (academic lectures), ESSAY (political articles), FICTION (fiction), FORUM (verbally conceived dialogues from Internet forums), INSTR (operating instructions), INTERVIEW (Interviews about work and everyday life) MEDCONSULT (medical consultations), POPSCI (popular science texts), SERMON (sermons), SHARE (shareholders ' letters ), SPEECH (pre-formulated political speeches), TALKSHOW (TV talk shows ), TOU (tourism brochures ), WEB (websites from Companies and organizations).
The GECCo corpus is an extension of the CroCo corpus created as part of a previous project, with the focus in the CroCo project ("Cross-linguistic corpora for the investigation of explicitation in translations") on the corpus-based investigation of linguistic properties of translations.
The GECCo corpus has a web-based version that was granted via CLARIN-D and is available to the scientific public with restricted access (on request) for corpus queries.
In the project, contrasts in the implementation possibilities for a wide range of cohesion funds were described, with quantitative and qualitative investigations being carried out to determine how individual text elements are syntactically and semantically related to each other across sentence boundaries.
Literature (selection)
- Halliday, M., R. Hasan (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
- Kunz, K., E. Lapshinova-Koltunski, JM Martínez-Martínez, K. Menzel, E. Steiner (published, 18: 2). Shallow features as indicators of English-German contrasts in lexical cohesion. In: Languages in Contrast.
- Kunz, K., S. Degaetano-Ortlieb, E. Lapshinova-Koltunski, K. Menzel, E. Steiner (in press). GECCo - an empirically-based comparison of English-German cohesion. In: De Sutter, G., I. Delaere, M.-A. Lefer (ed.). New Ways of Analyzing Translational Behavior in Corpus-Based Translation Studies.TILSM series. Mouton de Gruyter.
- Kunz, K. (2015). Cohesion in English and German. A corpus-based approach to language contrast, register variation and translation. Habilitation thesis. University of Saarland.
- Kunz, K. & E. Lapshinova-Koltunski (2015). Cross-linguistic analysis of discourse variation across registers. In: K. Ajmer and H. Hasselgård (Eds.). Special Issue of Nordic Journal of English Studies Vol 14, No 1 (2015), Cross-linguistic Studies at the Interface between Lexis and Grammar. pp. 258-288.
- Lapshinova-Koltunski, E. (2016). Inter- and Intralingual Variation in a Multilingual Context: Dimensions, Interactions, and their Implications. Habilitation thesis. University of Saarland.
- Menzel, K. (2016). Understanding English-German contrasts - a corpus-based comparative analysis of ellipses as cohesive devices . PhD dissertation. University of Saarland.
- Steiner, E. (2015). Contrastive studies of cohesion and their impact on our knowledge of translation. In: Zhang, M., J. Munday (Eds.). Discourse Analysis in Translation Studies Special issue of Target 27: 3 (2015). International Journal of Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.