University of Innsbruck E-Mail: [email protected]
Abstract
As social networking sites have become staples in everyday life an increasing number of people worldwide use social media as a source of news. To reach this audiences, news organizations and public service broadcasters have ventured on services such as Facebook, which in terms of news is by far the most important social networking site in many parts of Europe.
This poster presents an ongoing research project that explores the ways in which public service media from different European countries are delivering news on public Facebook Pages. In a first step, the Facebook Page of the Austrian news magazine “Zeit im Bild” is examined in a pilot study. The poster presents the project as work in progress and gives an overview of the planned corpus building process. The analysis is based on public data gathered from the public Facebook page operated by Austrian national broadcasting agency ORF (http://facebook.com/zeitimbild). The data are extracted using the public Facebook Graph API. The corpus contains all the posts and comments of the Facebook Pages as well as related metadata. No personally-identifiable information is collected.
The social media data are explored using the R software environment to identify and compare journalistic usage patterns and to visualize the interaction of Facebook users. This should provide an overview over the different forms of journalistic news content (i.e. types of posts) and the basic communicative practices that can be observed in the context of the Facebook Pages (i.e. number of comments, shares, likes and other “Reaction” types). To allow deeper insights an exploratory case-study approach is used. Drawing upon media linguistic research the focus is on the micro level of the media texts and their multimodal design. The in-depth analysis aims to characterize different forms of news reporting via Facebook and looks at the different usage of multimodal resources in the context of the Facebook posts and comments. This combination of qualitative and quantitative methods should allow a better understanding of how Facebook is used as a means of news distribution by public service media providers on a large scale and how technical affordances shape the design of news content and follow-up interactions. This knowledge is critical for the discussion of the emerging role of social media in the context of public opinion and political decision-making.
The graphic realization of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German WhatsApp messages
Simone Ueberwasser
University of Zurich [email protected]
Abstract
This Poster represents a corpus based study into /l/-vocalization in the German speaking part of Switzerland. Its main scientific objective is to show that isolated occurrences of /l/-vocalization can be found in speakers who do not originate in the geographical area for which this phenomena has traditionally been described. This result is relevant for the discussion of /l/-vocalization because the study does not look at the realization of the sound in specific words as they are produces in an artificial setting but rather at real data as it is written by informants in everyday WhatsApp communications and as such shows an extended use of the phenomena by a group of speakers hitherto ignored.
/l/-vocalization, i.e. the replacement of a lateral approximant [l] by the vowel [u] is a well described feature of some Swiss German dialects (GSW). Phonological (e.g. Haas (1983), who mentions a implicational scale of phonological factors that favor /l/-vocalization) and sociolinguistic (e.g. Christen (2001)) restrictions and promoters are well described. The Linguistic Atlas of German-Speaking
Switzerland(Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, 1962 to 2003), is the most renowned documentation of the GSW dialects representing
regional variation in linguistic features. It describes /l/-vocalization as a feature roughly to be found between Berne and Lucerne. A more recent study (Leemann et al., 2014) found /l/-vocalization to progress to “. . . southeasterly, southerly, and westerly directions, but with much less success to the north and northwest, where the equally influential dialectal areas of Basel and Z¨urich seem to exert opposing influences” (Leemann et al., 2014, 191).
A large scale multilingual corpus (617 chats, 5,5 Mio tokens) of authentic WhatsApp messages was compiled in 2014 at the University of Zurich (cf. Ueberwasser and Stark (in print) and www.whatsup-switzerland.ch). The 45 chats from this corpus that are in GSW and for which informants provided information about their home town today and when they were in 5th grade (±12 years old) were used for the study.
Focusing on the places where informants lived when in 5th grade, /l/-vocalization can, of course, be found in the expected area but also around Zurich and Basel in suburban places. However, in these areas, /l/-vocalization is not applied as consequently as in the core area but very sporadically. The tokens that are realized with /l/-vocalization follow different phonological patterns. Even though many of them come from the highest class in Haas’ implicational scale, not all of them do. On the other hand, the lexemes to which /l/-vocalization is applied outside the expected area are mostly very frequent and thus salient in the GSW subcorpus and often interjections. These and more results will be presented in the poster.
Keywords:Swiss German dialects, /l/-vocalization, dialect use in WhatsApp messages
References
Christen, H. (2001). Ein Dialektmarker auf Erfolgskurs: Die /l/-Vokalisierung in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz. Zeitschrift f¨ur Dialektologie und Linguistik, (1):16–26.
Haas, W. (1983). Vokalisierung in deutschen dialekten. In Werner Besch, et al., editors,Dialektologie: Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung. Vol II, pages 1111–1116. de Gruyter, Berlin.
Leemann, A., Kolly, M.-J., Werlen, I., Britain, D., and Studer-Joho, D. (2014). The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss
German.Language Variation and Change, 26(02):191–218.
Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz. (1962 to 2003). Francke, Bern/Basel.
Ueberwasser, S. and Stark, E. (in print). What’s up, Switzerland? A corpus-based research project in a multilingual country. Linguistik Online.