• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• DE close
• FI close
• Konstanzer Online-Publikations-Syst... close
• Antiquity close

Feature-based approaches to second language (L2) phonology conceptualize the acquisition of new segments as operations that involve either the addition of new phonological features, or the rebundling of existent ones. While the deficit hypothesis assumes that only features that are fully specified in the L1 can be redeployed to the L2 in order to create new segments, it has been shown that features which are completely absent in the L1 can also be learned. This article investigates whether a learning scenario in which features are only partially available (that is, they are present in the L1, but are redundant with other features) is less challenging than learning an entirely new feature, even when the new feature has acoustically salient cues. Since Spanish has a much smaller vowel system /i e a o u/, L2 learners of German with Spanish as L1 need to learn a system with front rounded vowels as well as tense/lax contrasts. We tested L1 Spanish speakers' perception of the German contrasts /i/ ~ / I / (e.g., Miete/mitte , where [+/– tense] is acquired) and /u/ ~ /y/ (e.g., Spulen/spülen , where L1 feature [+/–round] redeploys to a front vowel). The results showed that experienced L2 learners are more successful when discriminating between sounds in a feature acquisition scenario than in redeployment; however, neither of the non-native contrasts was easier to perceive than the other in the identification task. The differences in performance between tasks and in the acoustic saliency of the cues by contrast (F2 vs. duration and F1) suggests that L2 phonological acquisition is likely to take place at a surface level and favors learning through attunement to auditorily salient acoustic cues over internal rearrangement of abstract features, regardless of their presence in the L1. published

Recent polling failures highlight that election polls are prone to biases that the margin of error customarily reported with polls does not capture. However, such systematic errors are difficult to assess against the background noise of sampling variance. Shirani-Mehr et al. (2018) developed a hierarchical Bayesian model to disentangle random and systematic errors in poll estimates of two-party vote shares at the election level. The method can inform realistic assessments of poll accuracy. We adapt the model to multiparty elections and improve its temporal flexibility. We then estimate bias and variance in 5,240 German national election polls, 1994–2021. Our analysis suggests that the average absolute election-day bias per party was about 1.5 percentage points, ranging from 0.9 for the Greens to 3.2 for the Christian Democrats. The estimated variance is, on average, about twice as large as that implied by usual margins of error. We find little evidence of house or mode effects. Common biases indicate industry effects due to similar methodological problems. The Supplementary Material provides additional results for 1,751 regional election polls. published

The wealth of text data generated by social media has enabled new kinds of analysis of emotions with language models. These models are often trained on small and costly datasets of text annotations produced by readers who guess the emotions expressed by others in social media posts. This affects the quality of emotion identification methods due to training data size limitations and noise in the production of labels used in model development. We present LEIA, a model for emotion identification in text that has been trained on a dataset of more than 6 million posts with self-annotated emotion labels for happiness, affection, sadness, anger, and fear. LEIA is based on a word masking method that enhances the learning of emotion words during model pre-training. LEIA achieves macro-F1 values of approximately 73 on three in-domain test datasets, outperforming other supervised and unsupervised methods in a strong benchmark that shows that LEIA generalizes across posts, users, and time periods. We further perform an out-of-domain evaluation on five different datasets of social media and other sources, showing LEIA’s robust performance across media, data collection methods, and annotation schemes. Our results show that LEIA generalizes its classification of anger, happiness, and sadness beyond the domain it was trained on. LEIA can be applied in future research to provide better identification of emotions in text from the perspective of the writer. published

Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, various governments supported the creation of memorial museums of political violence during state socialism. While much scholarly attention has been given to Hungary’s House of Terror and the Baltic museums of occupations, this article examines the contrasting situation in Southeastern Europe, where state actors were generally absent and which witnessed relatively belated and overwhelmingly bottom-up processes. The article analyses the particularity of political prisons as ‘difficult heritage’. It scrutinizes the commonalities and entanglements between the memorialization of political prisons in three Southeastern European countries marked by distinctive trajectories both during and after communism: Albania (Spaç), Romania (Sighet and Piteşti), and Croatia (Goli Otok). The article shows how in the absence of state-level policies to address transitional justice, activism surrounding difficult heritage memorialization has aimed to fill the gap. It also argues that the relationship between site memorialization in Southeastern Europe and the wider European models is doubly constitutive: first, the memorialization of Sighet in 1990s Romania borrowed approaches from Western European Holocaust memorialization, then shaped a European wide set of best practices; second, a wave of new memorial initiatives after 2010 in Southeastern Europe was connected to the Europeanization of memory and transnational engagements. published

Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing futures in the present or preventing them from materializing. Consequently, the relationship between politics and time encompasses a broad spectrum of phenomena and processes that cry out for historicization. In our introduction to this History and Theory theme issue on chronopolitics, we argue that the concept of chronopolitics makes it possible to do this and, in the process, to move the operation of rethinking historical temporalities from the periphery toward the center of historiographical attention as well as to engage in a dialogue with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. To this end, we propose a broad concept of chronopolitics by discussing existing definitions, by distinguishing between three central dimensions of chronopolitics (the time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time), and by systematizing possible approaches to studying chronopolitics. published

We identify a tonal contour in Turkish that expresses universal quantification. We show that the distribution of this contour is restricted to noun phrases modified by relative clauses and that it expresses universal quantification over situations rather than over individuals. We describe the prosodic structure of the contour, unexpected from the perspective of the phonology of Turkish intonation, and identify it as a tonal morpheme. We define it, and provide a compositional analysis of the sentences that contain it.

AbstractDuring the 1970s, feminist activists reappropriated the figure of the witch in various ways as a symbol of alterity, political radicalism, feminist revolt or victimhood, or the presentation of subversive (healing or bodily) knowledge. The article investigates these witch constructions with a focus on its experiential foundations drawing on appropriations in Western Germany within a larger transatlantic history. First, it provides a brief overview of witch discourses in the 1970s, highlighting radical feminist, health-political and artistic milieus, based on representative Western European journals and movement literature. The article emphasizes the variety of witch images and its epistemic foci, showing that however different these approaches may appear, they all created women’s alterity. Second, the article examines alternative practices of knowledge production, focusing on health guides and advice literature, as well as on approaches to experience in consciousness-raising groups. This section demonstrates how witch discourses both enabled the movement’s knowledge empowerment, but were also part of complex boundary work within the milieus, such as in the debates about the relationship between experiential knowledge and theory. The last section shows how closely and in what ways spiritualist approaches were linked to this boundary work. The article argues that feminist milieus constituted themselves within the framework of feminist epistemologies against and within established knowledge cultures, thereby drawing further boundaries within the movement. In analyzing the “evidence of experience” (Scott) produced by witch discourses its overarching aim is to demonstrate that their historical relevance initially laid in its standpoint-creating character.

Germany is considered a lauded land of music: outstanding composers, celebrated performers and famous orchestras exert great international appeal. Since the 19th century, the foundation of this reputation has been the broad mass of musicians who sat in orchestra pits, played in ensembles for dances or provided the musical background in silent movie theatres. Martin Rempe traces their lives and working worlds, including their struggle for economic improvement and societal recognition. His detailed portrait of the profession ‘from below’ sheds new light on German musical life in the modern era. published