A stand-off XML-TEI representation of reference annotation

International audienceIn this poster, we present an XML-TEI conformant stand-off representation of reference in discourse, building on the seminal workcarried out in the MATE project (Poesio, Bruneseaux & Romary 1999) and the earlier proposal on a reference annotation framework in Salmon-Alt & Romary (2005). We make a three-way distinction between markables (the referring expressions), discourse entities (referents in the textual or extra-textual world), and links (relations that hold between referents, e.g., part-whole). Our approach differs from previous suggestions in that (i) inherent properties of the referent itself (e.g., animacy) are disentangled from the expressions used to refer to that referent, (ii) existing annotations from other layers such as morphosyntax are cleanly separated from the annotation of reference, but can be combined in queries and (iii) ourproposal is integrated into the larger structure of existing TEI-ISO standards, thereby allowing for compatibility with existing TEI-encodedcorpora and data sustainability. The workflow of adding reference annotations to an existing corpus willbe demonstrated with concrete examples from ongoing work in the SFB 1252 (subprojects C01 and INF), where this representation ofreference is the backbone for the annotation of (sentence) topic chains in dialogue data and for queries of topics in various grammaticalconstructions

Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation

The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extract from the frame text of the proposal for the CRC 1412, which was submitted to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2019, followed by a successful onsite evaluation that took place in 2019. The CRC 1412 then started its work on January 1, 2020. The theoretical part of the frame text gives an extensive overview of the theoretical and empirical perspectives on register knowledge from the viewpoint of 2019. Due to the high collaborative effort of all PIs involved, the frame text is unique in its scope on register research, encompassing register-relevant aspects from variationist approaches, psycholinguistics, grammatical theory, acquisition theory, historical linguistics, phonology, phonetics, typology, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics, as well as qualitative and quantitative modeling. Although our positions and hypotheses since its submission have developed further, the frame text is still a vital resource as a compilation of state-of-the-art register research and a documentation of the start of the CRC 1412. The theoretical part without administrative components therefore presents an ideal starter publication to kick off the CRC’s publication series REALIS. For an overview of the projects and more information on the CRC, see https://sfb1412.hu-berlin.de/

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional 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.Peer Reviewe

Global burden of 288 causes of death and life expectancy decomposition in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021

BACKGROUND Regular, detailed reporting on population health by underlying cause of death is fundamental for public health decision making. Cause-specific estimates of mortality and the subsequent effects on life expectancy worldwide are valuable metrics to gauge progress in reducing mortality rates. These estimates are particularly important following large-scale mortality spikes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. When systematically analysed, mortality rates and life expectancy allow comparisons of the consequences of causes of death globally and over time, providing a nuanced understanding of the effect of these causes on global populations. METHODS The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2021 cause-of-death analysis estimated mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) from 288 causes of death by age-sex-location-year in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations for each year from 1990 until 2021. The analysis used 56 604 data sources, including data from vital registration and verbal autopsy as well as surveys, censuses, surveillance systems, and cancer registries, among others. As with previous GBD rounds, cause-specific death rates for most causes were estimated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model-a modelling tool developed for GBD to assess the out-of-sample predictive validity of different statistical models and covariate permutations and combine those results to produce cause-specific mortality estimates-with alternative strategies adapted to model causes with insufficient data, substantial changes in reporting over the study period, or unusual epidemiology. YLLs were computed as the product of the number of deaths for each cause-age-sex-location-year and the standard life expectancy at each age. As part of the modelling process, uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated using the 2·5th and 97·5th percentiles from a 1000-draw distribution for each metric. We decomposed life expectancy by cause of death, location, and year to show cause-specific effects on life expectancy from 1990 to 2021. We also used the coefficient of variation and the fraction of population affected by 90% of deaths to highlight concentrations of mortality. Findings are reported in counts and age-standardised rates. Methodological improvements for cause-of-death estimates in GBD 2021 include the expansion of under-5-years age group to include four new age groups, enhanced methods to account for stochastic variation of sparse data, and the inclusion of COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality-which includes excess mortality associated with the pandemic, excluding COVID-19, lower respiratory infections, measles, malaria, and pertussis. For this analysis, 199 new country-years of vital registration cause-of-death data, 5 country-years of surveillance data, 21 country-years of verbal autopsy data, and 94 country-years of other data types were added to those used in previous GBD rounds. FINDINGS The leading causes of age-standardised deaths globally were the same in 2019 as they were in 1990; in descending order, these were, ischaemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lower respiratory infections. In 2021, however, COVID-19 replaced stroke as the second-leading age-standardised cause of death, with 94·0 deaths (95% UI 89·2-100·0) per 100 000 population. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the rankings of the leading five causes, lowering stroke to the third-leading and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to the fourth-leading position. In 2021, the highest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (271·0 deaths [250·1-290·7] per 100 000 population) and Latin America and the Caribbean (195·4 deaths [182·1-211·4] per 100 000 population). The lowest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 were in the high-income super-region (48·1 deaths [47·4-48·8] per 100 000 population) and southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania (23·2 deaths [16·3-37·2] per 100 000 population). Globally, life expectancy steadily improved between 1990 and 2019 for 18 of the 22 investigated causes. Decomposition of global and regional life expectancy showed the positive effect that reductions in deaths from enteric infections, lower respiratory infections, stroke, and neonatal deaths, among others have contributed to improved survival over the study period. However, a net reduction of 1·6 years occurred in global life expectancy between 2019 and 2021, primarily due to increased death rates from COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality. Life expectancy was highly variable between super-regions over the study period, with southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania gaining 8·3 years (6·7-9·9) overall, while having the smallest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 (0·4 years). The largest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean (3·6 years). Additionally, 53 of the 288 causes of death were highly concentrated in locations with less than 50% of the global population as of 2021, and these causes of death became progressively more concentrated since 1990, when only 44 causes showed this pattern. The concentration phenomenon is discussed heuristically with respect to enteric and lower respiratory infections, malaria, HIV/AIDS, neonatal disorders, tuberculosis, and measles. INTERPRETATION Long-standing gains in life expectancy and reductions in many of the leading causes of death have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the adverse effects of which were spread unevenly among populations. Despite the pandemic, there has been continued progress in combatting several notable causes of death, leading to improved global life expectancy over the study period. Each of the seven GBD super-regions showed an overall improvement from 1990 and 2021, obscuring the negative effect in the years of the pandemic. Additionally, our findings regarding regional variation in causes of death driving increases in life expectancy hold clear policy utility. Analyses of shifting mortality trends reveal that several causes, once widespread globally, are now increasingly concentrated geographically. These changes in mortality concentration, alongside further investigation of changing risks, interventions, and relevant policy, present an important opportunity to deepen our understanding of mortality-reduction strategies. Examining patterns in mortality concentration might reveal areas where successful public health interventions have been implemented. Translating these successes to locations where certain causes of death remain entrenched can inform policies that work to improve life expectancy for people everywhere. FUNDING Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Topic chains in dialogues

This paper analyzes topic chains (TChs) in spontaneous speech dialogues. The chain-building property of topical elements is an essential means for managing prominence on the discourse level, creating thematic coherence across sentences. TChs relate the sentential and the discourse aspect of information structure by extending the sentence-internal division between prominent and non-prominent information to the cross-sentential level, where we can distinguish between categorical sentences that continue a TCh and those that begin a new TCh. The paper examines the role of the speaker and addressee feature (Harley and Ritter, 2002) on chain building. My assumption is that prominence management differs between 3rd and 1st/2nd person topics, i.e. according to [-local] or [+local] (Ritter and Wiltschko, 2009). I assume that common assumptions on TChs (Chafe, 1976; Reinhart, 1981; Brunetti, 2009) are plausible with 3rd person referents, but much less so with local persons: 1st and 2nd persons are never new referents in a dialogue situation. I therefore propose an analysis with two parallel TChs: one in the local domain and one in the nonlocal domain. The paper concentrates on topical overt and null subject pronouns in Spanish. I will demonstrate that a detailed analysis of topicality differentiating between two parallel chains allows us to understand hitherto unexplained variance with regard to the variation between sentences with realized subject pronouns (e.g. yo canto esta canción ‘I sing this song’) and their counterparts with zero subjects (e.g. ∅ canto esta canción ‘I sing this song’)

Globalising the study of language variation and change: A manifesto on cross-cultural sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistic study of variation and change has a long-standing bias towards speech communities in Western and especially Anglophone societies. We argue that our field requires a much wider scope for variation studies, which puts more emphasis on culturally contextualised social meaning in the full range of human societies. The pursuit of understanding, generalizations, and even universals in the study of the social life of human language demands a global empirical base. In a meta-analysis of studies appearing in major sociolinguistic journals and conferences, we find little broadening of the language and cultural scope in the last 30 years. English alone and a few Western societies continually account for the great majority of studies. We propose several ways for going forward: testing and rethinking existing theories using data from understudied languages and regions, engaging with sociolinguistic scholarship in languages other than English, learning from other disciplines that incorporate cross-cultural approaches, engaging the dimensions of social organization and practice instantiated in cultures of the Global South, and moving towards research designs that compare different places and languages

A stand-off XML-TEI representation of reference annotation

International audienceIn this poster, we present an XML-TEI conformant stand-off representation of reference in discourse, building on the seminal workcarried out in the MATE project (Poesio, Bruneseaux & Romary 1999) and the earlier proposal on a reference annotation framework in Salmon-Alt & Romary (2005). We make a three-way distinction between markables (the referring expressions), discourse entities (referents in the textual or extra-textual world), and links (relations that hold between referents, e.g., part-whole). Our approach differs from previous suggestions in that (i) inherent properties of the referent itself (e.g., animacy) are disentangled from the expressions used to refer to that referent, (ii) existing annotations from other layers such as morphosyntax are cleanly separated from the annotation of reference, but can be combined in queries and (iii) ourproposal is integrated into the larger structure of existing TEI-ISO standards, thereby allowing for compatibility with existing TEI-encodedcorpora and data sustainability. The workflow of adding reference annotations to an existing corpus willbe demonstrated with concrete examples from ongoing work in the SFB 1252 (subprojects C01 and INF), where this representation ofreference is the backbone for the annotation of (sentence) topic chains in dialogue data and for queries of topics in various grammaticalconstructions

Les Fronteres del llenguatge: lingüistica i comunicació no verbal

Text: Aria Adli, Marina Alamo, Núria Alturo, Carles Bertran, Emili Boix, Eudald Carbonell, Ignasi Clemente, Jaume Filó, Mireia Galindo, Marta Juanhuix, Jaume Mascaró, Juan Pablo Mora. Marta Payà, Lluís Payrató, lsabella Poggi, Fernando Poyatos, Miquel Pueyo, Josep Quer, Sebastia Serrano, F. Xavier ViJa i Jorge Wagensberg. Edició: Lluís Payrató, Núria Alturo i Marta PayàAquest volum aplega les contribucions que es van fer, per una banda, en el Novè Col·loqui Lingüístic de la Universitat de Barcelona (CLUB 9, 2001), i, per una altra, les que es van fer a la VII Jornada sobre la Variació Lingüística, organitzada per la Xarxa Temàtica Variació Lingüística: Dialectologia, Sociolingüística i Pragmàtica, amb el títol de «Línies de recerca en lingüística i comunicació no verbal (2002). El volum recull les quatre ponències del congrés, que exposen, de manera panoràmica i introductòria, els múltiples punts de contacte entre els aspectes verbals i els no verbals, les categories no verbals i l’ús de la literatura com a font de dades. La taula rodona se centra en el tema de l’anàlisi (conjunta) de la comunicació verbal i no verbal, i pel que fa a la Jornada de la Xarxa Temàtica, l’objectiu va ser oferir una mostra representativa de diferents estudis que plantegessin la interfície verbal - no verbal amb diferents punts de vista i metodologies