Linguistic congruency of nominal concept types in German texts

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents an empirical investigation of Löbner’s (2011) theory of concept types and determination (CTD). The theory is based on the assumption of four basic types of nouns (sortal, relational, individual, functional) and their congruency with certain modes of determination. Löbner predicts that incongruent uses are less frequent than congruent uses. Horn and Kimm (2014) present a first text-based pilot study on this topic. They investigated two German fictional texts and found results that support Löbner’s prediction. However, the restricted text basis and the preliminary annotation procedure employed in their pilot study call for an improvement of the method and an extension of the texts investigated. The study presented here provides an enhanced annotation procedure and amends the text collection with a choice of German newspaper texts. This text type is expected to contain less subsequent mentions than fictional texts and a greater variety of individual nouns, e.g. proper names, and, thus, contribute to a wider picture. The results of the investigation corroborate these expectations and provide further evidence for the noun type distinction. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 provides a brief summary of the theoretical background of the study, i.e., primarily the theory of concept types and determination. In Section 2, I report the method and results of the pilot study by Horn and Kimm (2014). The improved method and the case study are presented in Section 3, followed by the conclusion in Section 4.