Search Results for: kratschmer

LingoSlam 2022! More exciting than ever!

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pokal

It happened again! On April 22, 2022 (please also note the date!) 5 ingenious linguistics students competed with great humorous and performative (pun intended) abilities against each other to win in the four categories “poetry”, “academia”, “creativity” and “humor”, and not least – in anticipation for the overall winner – the LingoSlam trophy. The latter led to a surprise, but more on that later. Everything was, as usual, carried forward by a high-spirited and cheering crowd!

LingoSlam is a long-standing tradition that has always been a testament to the ingenuity, high professionalism and not least the ability and willingness of linguistics students to entertain a large crowd of like-minded people.

LingoSlam was invented and for many years organized by Peter … ↪

A Computational Linguist with HOPE

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logo HOPE

Hope project logo

In late February 2020, I found myself sitting at a table in the Interacting Minds Center with a diverse group of Aarhus University researchers discussing how to research the social and behavioural aspects of the emerging Covid-19 epidemic. The expertise of the other researchers spanned media and information studies, anthropology and ethnography, religious studies, political science, and computer science. I represented linguistics. At the time, Covid-19 had not (to our knowledge) reached Denmark, and it was still at least a week before the WHO would officially designate it a global pandemic. We suspected that this virus might have significant consequences for our lives, but we could never have imagined how much and how quickly.

Just weeks later, … ↪

How do you define “samfundssind”? – A little questionnaire study

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Along with the word “hygge”, the Danish word “samfundssind” (roughly ‘community mindedness’) has recently become one of the few internationally known Danish words. The concept it stands for has achieved worldwide credit for the comparatively successful handling of the COVID-19 crisis in Denmark.

The word was first introduced into the Danish language in 1936 by Thorvald Stauning (Danish Prime Minister 1924 – 1926 and 1929 – 1942) to urge the Danish people to solidarity in the difficult times around World War II. Since then, the word has been used, but without anyone paying too much attention to it (the online dictionary of The Danish Language Council ordnet.dk quotes, for example, a passage from the regional newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende from 2007: … ↪

”I read your Facebook post and (I think) I know who you are”, part 2: A mini-experiment on author psychology assessment

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minieksp

In part 1 on this blog, “A mini-history of author analysis”, I pointed out that attempting to draw conclusions about the author of a text based on traits of the text alone has a long tradition in forensics (identifying perpetrators or revealing forgeries), literary studies (authorship identification) and psychology (from psychoanalysis to modern customer/consumer behavior studies). In its modern, machine learning version, psychological author profiling is often based on the ”Big Five” model (see figure 1) going back to McCrae & Costa 1989.

Billede2

But how do human readers decode and interpret concrete features of text as to its authors personality?

In order to find preliminary answers to this question, I performed a mini-experiment in my lesson on “Communicative … ↪

”I read your Facebook post and (I think) I know who you are”, part 1: A mini-history of author analysis

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Billede1

Attempting to draw conclusions about the author of a text based on traits of the text alone has a long tradition. It has been a topic of interest in forensics (identifying perpetrators or revealing forgeries), literary studies (authorship identification) and psychology (from psychoanalysis to modern customer/consumer behavior studies). In 15th Century Italy, Lorenzo Valla proved the forgery of the Donation of Constantine based on anachronistic word choice (8th, and not 4th, century A.D.) and poor grammar. Contending the authorship of certain texts previously attributed to Shakespeare goes back to the end of the 17th Century and builds on the philological methods stemming from biblical and classic studies, developed in the Renaissance period, analyzing language style (word choice and grammar). In … ↪

The eagle: a metaphor for power – or rather a symbol?

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gary

In modern, mainstream linguistics, metaphors and symbols do not have anything to do with each other. Metaphors are by definition motivated, no matter which theoretical approach to them one might have. One can, as Aristoteles did, treat a metaphor as the rhetoric trope comparatio in absentia (an “absent” or implicit comparison), allowing to refer to for example ‘government’ by ‘yoke’, based on a common quality (the tertium comparationis, third element of the comparison, e.g. ‘suppression/power over’). One can follow Black and lay emphasis on the interplay between focus and frame. Or one can be interested, as Lakoff and Johnson, in the so-called  conceptual metaphor as a cognitive tool helping to understand one conceptual domain in terms of … ↪