Vahid Mortezapour

Universität zu Köln

Romanisches Seminar

Projects

A06 Modeling register variation across languages

Contact

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6832-0057

Publications & Presentations

    Publications

  • Adli, Aria; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Lehmann, Nico; Mortezapour, Vahid; Vander Klok, Jozina  (2024) Lang*Reg: A multi-lingual corpus of intra-speaker variation across situations [DOI] [ViVo]

    The Lang*Reg corpus records intra-speaker variation across languages and different situational-functional contexts, presumed to result in different registers. It has been prepared in the SFB1412 Register with data collections taking place in 2021-2022 for the following languages included in this version: German, Persian, Kurdish, Javanese. The data sets for each language comprise the speech of the same language users in a variety of spoken conversations and one written interaction. A minimum of 12 participants per language traversed a course of 6 situations in which they were asked to produce language in three types of activities: telling a story to a friend, talking freely with various interlocutors (friend, stranger, taxi driver) and engaging in an interview with a (university) professor. Moreover, our design included the storytelling in two modes, which allows for the comparison between spoken and written modes of the same language user. 

    Lang*Reg has a basic syntactic segmentation (one matrix clause and all its dependent clauses per segment). v0.2.0 includes the data sets with transcriptions, normalizations and tokens for each language as well as additional language-specific annotations such as glosses and syntactic annotations. We prepared each data set also for use with the browser-based search and visualization architecture ANNIS. For further language-specific morpho-syntactic and sociolinguistic annotations, refer to the respective data set description. For an overview of all data set characteristics, please see the corpus documentation in each data set.

  • Adli, Aria; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Lehmann, Nico; Mortezapour, Vahid; Vander Klok, Jozina  (2023) Lang*Reg: A multi-lingual corpus of intra-individual variation across situations [DOI] [ViVo]
    Language: German, Persian, Yucatec Maya, Kurdish, Javanese
    Size: 36 hours
    Description: same speakers varied by mode, acquaintance, professionalism, and expertise
    Features: transcription, syntactic segmentation, normalization, token, glossing or POS-tags, some syntax
    Access: transcription or annotation in progress; CC-BY-NC-ND
  • Pescuma, Valentina Nicole; Serova, Dina; Lukassek, Julia; Sauermann, Antje; Schäfer, Roland; Adli, Aria; Bildhauer, Felix; Egg, Markus; Hülk, Kristina; Ito, Aine; Jannedy, Stefanie; Kordoni, Valia; Kühnast, Milena; Kutscher, Silvia; Lange, Robert; Lehmann, Nico; Liu, Mingya; Lütke, Beate; Maquate, Katja; Mooshammer, Christine; Mortezapour, Vahid; Müller, Stefan; Norde, Muriel; Pankratz, Elizabeth; Patarroyo, Angela Giovanna; Plesca, Ana-Maria; Ronderos, Camilo R.; Rotter, Stephanie; Sauerland, Uli; Schulte, Britta; Schüppenhauer, Gediminas; Sell, Bianca Maria; Solt, Stephanie; Terada, Megumi; Tsiapou, Dimitra; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Weirich, Melanie; Wiese, Heike; Zaruba, Kathy; Zeige, Lars Erik; Lüdeling, Anke; Knoeferle, Pia; Schnelle, Gohar  (2023) Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods  In: Frontiers in Psychology [DOI] [PDF] [ViVo]
    In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center ‘Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of SituationalFunctional Variation’ (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define ‘register’ as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of ‘register’, by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: 1. To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. 2. To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals’ social, language, and educational background. 3. We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.

    • Presentations