Research in front of the curtain
We present our current research projects.
SFB Language between redundancy and deficiency
Significant progress has been made in the field of artificial intelligence in recent years, which has also been widely discussed in public. ChatGPT, for example, appears to use language very similarly to humans. In view of these developments, the question arises as to what distinguishes humans from machines in the field of cognition. The traditional definition of humans as 'talking animals' goes back to Aristotle: it is our ability to speak that distinguishes us from all other beings and enables us to develop complex social, cultural and political structures. But in the age of talking machines, we have to ask ourselves whether language can still be considered a unique characteristic of humans. One possible answer is that the way the latest generation of AI handles language is actually similar to human language processing: both are stochastic systems. The difference between them could merely be in the strength of the connection to other cognitive areas such as perception or the motor system-an area in which humans have a clear advantage over AI.
The SFB "Language between Redundancy and Deficiency" pursues a different perspective, which is supported by a wealth of results from formal grammatical language research: Language is at its core a symbolic rule-based system that is unique to human cognition and similar to logic as well as mathematics. Syntax, the core of grammar, is a purely symbolic system, which makes human language fundamentally different from the "language" of AI. However, human language ability is interwoven with a probabilistic cognitive system - a system that is guided more by experience and probability patterns than by fixed rules. This increases its adaptability to cognitive, social, cultural and political contexts. The embedding of language in the general cognitive system can be modeled theoretically by flexible rules that allow linguistic operations to function in situations that deviate from their precise definitions, either by a lack of information (deficiency) or by an excess (redundancy).
Building on the important tradition of formal linguistics in Austria, the SFB brings together experts from the Universities of Graz, Vienna and Salzburg who work closely together to investigate how the linguistic system is adapted to its cognitive environment. The focus is on two core phenomena of the context-dependent use of language, namely pronouns and ellipsis. Pronouns enable the reuse of already introduced meanings without explicit syntactic encoding, while ellipsis enables the reuse of linguistic forms - such as sounds, characters or gestures - without actual articulation. In investigating these phenomena, the SFB uses current methods of empirical linguistics, such as psycholinguistic experiments or corpus studies, but also mathematical formalisms. The theory of language between redundancy and deficiency to be developed within the framework of the SFB, in which symbolic and probabilistic systems are harmonized, has the potential to open up groundbreaking perspectives for the cognitive sciences.
Duration: 01.03.2024-29.02.2028
Project management: Univ.-Prof. Dr. phil. Edgar Onea
E-mail: edgar.onea-gaspar(at)uni-graz.at
Phone: +43 316 380-2633
Funding body: FWF
You will soon find more information about the project on the project website.
Vienna and Graz - cities and their influential force
The FWF-funded CRC "German in Austria (Deutsch in Österreich - DiÖ). Variation - Contact - Perception" is a joint humanities project in which, for the first time, five institutes throughout Austria are jointly involved in researching and documenting German in Austria ("DiÖ"). Graz forms the sub-project 04, "Vienna and Graz: Cities and their Influencial Force".
The focus of PP04 is on language use in the cities of Vienna and Graz as well as in the surrounding communities. Using systematic quantitative and qualitative analyses, data from speakers of different age groups will be examined in order to gain an insight into the complexity of language in urban areas and at the same time to gain indications of a possible linguistic influence on agglomeration areas. Recordings of speakers in different speaking situations will be used as the data basis for the intended grammatical and phonetic/phonological analyses. Among other things, the following variationist and sociolinguistic questions will be answered: How is language use constituted in the city and what differences can be identified between Vienna and Graz and the respective surrounding communities? What correlations with non-linguistic factors can be determined? To what extent do different speech situations and contexts affect the individual choice of variants in urban centers? Can an urban influence on surrounding communities also be proven linguistically or is it even the other way around?
Duration: 01.2016-06.2025
Project management: Univ.-Prof. Dr. phil. Arne Ziegler
E-mail: arne.ziegler(at)uni-graz.at
Phone: +43 316 380-8165
Project staff: Nina Bercko, BA MA, Mag.a phil. Stefanie Edler, Bakk. phil., Ann Kathrin Fischer, BA BA MA, Kristina Herbert, BA MA, Nina Kleczkowski, BA MA, Teresa Monsberger, BA BA MA, Georg Oberdorfer, Bakk. phil. MA, Dragana Rakočević, MA, Gerrit Silvia Tscheru, BA BA MA, Maria Voit, BA
Student assistants:Lisa Handler, BA, Lisa Höllebauer, Elena Koreschnig, BA, David Samitsch, Veronika Schiefer, Lena Stückler, BA
Funded by: FWF
Further information on the project can be found on the project website.
The erotic and the aesthetic
Suspense is an important aesthetic feature of literary texts, which in many cases contributes to the success of these texts. Suspense is a psychological experience of the reader that is triggered by the text. It is therefore a literary effect.
Writers have a partly intuitive understanding of tension and have mastered techniques with which tension can be created and intensified. In a literary text, in contrast to a film, for example, the only tool available for this is language. The aim of the project is to explore the connection between the language of a literary text and the effect of suspense.
To this end, a distinction must first be made between linguistic content and linguistic form. Linguistic content is what is told. Linguistic forms represent how the story is told. The relationship between content and form is not symmetrical. The same content can be presented in different forms. For example, the two sentences "The dog barks at Maria" and "Maria is barked at by the dog" communicate the same content. However, the same form cannot communicate different content. In this respect, the form is never completely independent of the communicated content.
In the project, we are particularly interested in the role of form in the creation of suspense. In other words, there may be inherently exciting and inherently unexciting events. It is not our aim to differentiate between these. But an event or a series of events can be told more or less excitingly. We are interested in what narrative techniques ensure that the tension experienced by the reader becomes stronger.
Our hypothesis is that suspense depends on the evocation and probability of answering questions. A suspenseful text ensures that the reader asks certain decision questions that are important to the reader, but which are only answered by the text with a certain delay, so that the probability of a positive and negative answer fluctuates in the course of the text. We are interested in three questions: Which questions are suitable for creating suspense? How exactly does a suspenseful text delay the answer? What are the precise linguistic formulations and characteristics that ensure that certain questions become important to the reader?
To find this out, we compare the linguistic and content structure of exciting and less exciting literary texts and conduct experiments in which we measure exactly how the experience of suspense changes when we make minimal changes in the text that are limited to the linguistic form.
In this way, we hope to make the intuitive knowledge of writers (partially) transparent with scientific precision.
Duration: 02.2021-02.2024
Project management:
Univ.- Prof. Dr. phil. Edgar Onea
Email: edgar.onea-gaspar(at)uni-graz.at
Phone: +43 316 380-2633
Prof. Dr. Tilmann Köppe
Email: tilmann.koeppe(at)phil.uni-goettingen.de
Phone: +49 551 39-29542
Funding body: FWF and DFG
Further information on the project can be found on the project website.
Between modality and tense
Studies on the uses of modal verbs and preteritopresentia in Old High German
The dissertation project deals with modal verbs and preteritopresentia in Old High German. These will be examined in relation to their different uses and a typology of modal verb uses will be created. Subsequently, characteristics will be developed which can be seen as indicators or counter-indicators for certain types of usage. On the basis of these indicators and counter-indicators, the allocation of individual evidence points and the typology as such will ultimately be re-evaluated and made intersubjectively verifiable.
Duration: 07.2022-06.2025
Project management: Philipp Pfeifer, BA
E-mail: philipp.pfeifer(at)uni-graz.at
Phone: +43 316 380-8179
Funded by: Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)
