Dirk SiepmannUniversität Osnabrück | UOS · Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Dirk Siepmann
Professor
About
89
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65,172
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431
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Introduction
Dirk Siepmann is a full professor of English as a second language in the Institute of English and American Studies at Osnabrueck University, Germany. He has 25 years of experience in applied linguistics and language teaching, with extensive background in translation, lexicography and academic writing.
Additional affiliations
March 2006 - present
Publications
Publications (89)
This article takes a doubly contrastive approach to spoken academic language. On the one hand, it explores genre differences between spoken and written academic English and French; on the other, it considers divergences between spoken academic discourse in the two languages. The corpora used for this purpose were purpose-built on the basis of YouTu...
Das Werk bietet deutschsprachigen Studierenden und Wissenschaftler*innen, die wissenschaftliche Texte auf Englisch verfassen müssen, Unterstützung. Auch bei der Textrevision und im Englischunterricht für Fortgeschrittene leistet es Hilfestellung. Die Ausgabe wurde gründlich überarbeitet, aktualisiert und erweitert und enthält u.a. Hinweise zur Verw...
This chapter examines those parts of The Lord of the Rings which are written as a third-person narrative. Most of the time the narrator presents the point of view of a group of characters, usually hobbits, or a single character: Frodo, Sam, Pippin or Merry, or, to a far lesser extent, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas and Éowyn. In limiting the point of view...
This chapter summarizes our attempts to show that the language and style of The Lord of the Rings do indeed firmly place this novel within the tradition of English literary history in general and the tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel-writing in particular. The aspects which warrant incorporating The Lord of the Rings into the can...
This corpus-based study of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings sheds new light on a number of aspects of Tolkien’s style that have gone unnoticed in previous scholarship. Using a variety of corpus-linguistic tools and approaches, such as the key word method and the computation of key n-grams and collocations, we show how the style of The Lord of the Ri...
Drawing on a corpus which separates dialogue and narrative sections in The Lord of the Rings, the present chapter explores the most common syntactic n-grams (i.e. sequences of syntactic tags) in the narrative section. Using the imaginative prose section of the PHRASEOROM corpus (post-war fiction) and the British National Corpus as a reference, we e...
This chapter is devoted to an analysis of the direct speech used by the eight main characters (Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas), combining linguistic analysis with literary interpretation. Generally, the language used in the direct-speech parts is marked by archaisms which mix with modern words and usages. Among the c...
Speeches are one of the features which link The Lord of the Rings to ancient epic poetry as well as to early modern romance. “Deliberative speeches” in the sense of ancient rhetoric are found at the “Council of Elrond” and in some other passages. A second category of speech, like Bilbo’s initial birthday speech, could be classified as “epideictic”....
A large part of the narrative information of The Lord of the Rings is conveyed to the reader in 45–50 stories told by 23 storytellers. This chapter examines the various usages of storytelling as well as their literary antecedents.One group of stories concerns recent events which happen simultaneously with the main plotline conveyed by the third-per...
This chapter argues that in mixing prose and verse, the novel follows the practice of ancient and early modern romance as well as nineteenth-century children’s fiction. All of the (more than 60) poems are sung or recited by one of the characters and fulfil a specific function within the narrative. Some of the poems tell mythological stories and con...
The Lord of the Rings contains numerous descriptions of landscape and nature. The chapter delineates three different functions of landscape description (including plants, seasons and weather): they magically influence the hobbits’ journeys, they mirror the characters’ states of mind and they celebrate the English countryside. These three functions...
This book takes a fresh look at Tolkien’s literary artistry from the points of view of both linguistics and literary history, with the aim of shedding light on the literary techniques used in The Lord of the Rings. The authors study Tolkien’s use of words, style, narrative techniques, rhetoric and symbolism to highlight his status as literary artis...
A new channel on the humanities and social sciences on YouTube (only available in German for the time being).
In this chapter we survey previous research and present the methodology employed in the present book. We begin by outlining work done in stylistics (e.g. Barthes 1966; Leech and Short 2007), corpus stylistics (Stubbs 2005; Fischer-Starcke 2010; Mahlberg 2013) and “textométrie” (textometry, Brunet 1981) to characterize the style used by various auth...
This chapter summarizes our main results and sketches the perspectives for a productive future research in digital humanities they have opened.
The article explores references to the consumption of alcohol and tobacco in English and French fiction since the 1950s from a corpus-stylistic and corpus-driven vantage point. The extraction of Recurrent Lexico-syntactic Trees (RLTs) related to alcohol and tobacco consumption from a corpus containing texts of five different literary genres (crime,...
In this contribution we take a keyword approach (Scott and Tribble in Textual Patterns: Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2006) to exploring the part key “descriptive” adverbs play in the creation of literariness (литepaтypнocть, Jakobson 1921) in English novels compared with their functional equivalents in...
Combining traditional methods with state-of-the-art corpus analysis, this article discusses problems associated with the translation of general academic lexis from German into English. In particular, it offers a more nuanced view on the often-made claim that there are ‘major differences’ between the two languages, many of which are said to stem fro...
En se basant sur un corpus d'articles de revue d'environ 115 millions de mots, la présente étude propose une vue d'ensemble de l'évolution de la langue de certaines sciences sociales et humaines (anthropologie, études classiques et littéraires, psychologie, sciences économiques, sciences religieuses, géographie) sur la période 1950-2000. Sont pris...
Three video series on translation:
Series I
1) Learning English with Pros German-English Translation
A Simple Introduction (38.01) https://youtu.be/BeXOc6w2vok
2) Learning English with Pros German-English Translation I (Part A)
Types of Equivalence (24.07) https://youtu.be/3HEIiBA4fa4
3) Learning English with Pros German-English Translation I (Par...
This article presents three lists of the most common phrasemes in present-day spoken and written French. The lists can be found at the following URL:
https://kw.uni-paderborn.de/institut-fuer-romanistik/prof-dr-christoph-buergel/forschung/
Wortschatz verstehen, erklären, lernen "Wortschatz verstehen, erklären, lernen" - mit diesem Titel widmet sich dieses Heft einem Themenbereich, der zwar zu den traditionellen Handlungsfeldern der Französischdidaktik gehört, doch seit geraumer Zeit kaum neue Anregungen erfahren hat. Diese Vernachlässigung der Wortschatzdidaktik überrascht umso mehr...
A Grammar of Spoken and Written French offers a new and authentic approach to French grammar. Based on a representative collection of texts, it covers the full breadth and depth of present-day French. Rather than considering grammatical phenomena in isolation, it takes full account of the ways in which they combine with lexical items and are used i...
A Grammar of Spoken and Written French (German title: Grammatik des gesprochenen und geschriebenen Französisch) offers a new and authentic approach to French grammar. Based on a representative collection of texts, it covers the full breadth and depth of present-day French. Rather than considering grammatical phenomena in isolation, it takes full ac...
This edited book represents the first cohesive attempt to describe the literary genres of late-twentieth-century fiction in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing on the PhraseoRom international project on the phraseology of contemporary novels, the contributed chapters combine literary studies with corpus linguistics to analyse fantasy, rom...
French translation of: Das Corpus de référence du français contemporain und sein Einsatz in der Grammatikographie am Beispiel des Präpositionsgebrauchs., in (2016): Christoph Bürgel & Dirk Siepmann, Sprachwissenschaft und Fremdsprachendidaktik: Zum Verhältnis von sprachlichen Mitteln und Kompetenzentwicklung, Baltmannsweiler: Schneider.
This paper looks at the cross-linguistic complexity of two fiction-specific English-language constructions involving descriptive key words, viz. (a) depictive constructions and (b) reaction object constructions (ROCs). The English constructions in question were subjected to a detailed, corpus-based analysis in terms of their lexical realizations an...
The current state of French teaching in Germany
Cet article porte sur le Corpus de référence du français contemporain (ci-après abrégé en CRFC), un nouveau corpus qui, tout en présentant une taille considérable, vise, dans sa conception, à un équilibre en termes de genres textuels. La première version du corpus, qui sera enrichi au fur et à mesure de la disponibilité de nouveaux documents, compt...
This study is an exploratory investigation into phraseological items specific to the fiction section of the Corpus de référence du français contemporain and to a large corpus of English-language post-war novels. Its overall aim is three-fold: first, to show how the subjective impression of “literariness” arising from fictional works is at least par...
The Corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC) is a new purpose-built genre-diverse corpus for investigating modern French. The 310-million-word corpus is the first
collection of French to incorporate a substantial amount of spontaneous speech (approx. 30 m words) and ‘pseudo-spoken’ data
(approx. 125 m words); it is evenly divided between...
Cette contribution, basée sur le corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC), a pour objectif de relancer le débat sur la grammaire pédagogique en proposant une approche lexico-grammaticale des usages effectifs du subjonctif. On établit d’abord une liste de critères qui pourraient guider les auteurs de grammaires pédagogiques. Ensuite, on p...
This study is an exploratory investigation into lexico-grammatical items specific to a large corpus of English-language post-war novels, as compared to corpora of conversation, news and academic English. Its overall aim is threefold: first, to show how the subjective impression of ‘literariness’ arising from fictional works is at least partly based...
Starting from the observation that traditional lexicography has tended to rely on corpora of written text, the present article argues that this might be to the detriment of covering the commonest colloquial lexical units which carry the main burden of everyday conversation. Using a new reference corpus of French (Corpus de référence du français con...
Cette contribution, basée sur le corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC), a pour objectif de relancer le débat sur la grammaire pédagogique en proposant une approche lexico-grammaticale des usages effectifs du subjonctif. On établit d'abord une liste de critères qui pourraient guider les auteurs de grammaires pédagogiques. Ensuite, on p...
Le corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC ; Siepmann et Bürgel 2014) est le premier corpus de français échantillonné en genres. Dans sa version actuelle, il comporte 310 millions de mots et couvre l’essentiel des usages du français contemporain sur une période comprise entre 1945 et 2014. Ce corpus se distingue des corpus existants sur...
This paper is one of several corpus-based investigations into semantic differences between English, German and French collocations of emotion nouns. Underlying these investigations is the question to what extent, if any, collocational meaning can be relayed intact from one language to another. Collocations were classified by semantic criteria, and...
This book offers practical advice and guidance to German-speaking undergraduates and academics who aspire to write in English. It also provides valuable assistance to editors, examiners and teachers who conduct English courses for intermediate or advanced students. It consists of four modules and is rounded off with a subject index and a glossary....
This article takes issue with Franz Josef Hausmann’s assumption that contrastive lexicology must confine itself to a very limited vocabulary area, namely semantically autonomous (‘autosemantic’ in his terminology) lexemes such as chien or dormir. Using the example of the French adjective sauvage and its German equivalents, the author shows that eve...
The production of learners' dictionaries raises a number of specific problems regarding the treatment of collocations and examples. It has been claimed, among other things, that example sentences should not be based exclusively on collocations. The present article argues that a clear distinction must be drawn between collocations and examples, and...
This article discusses collocation from the perspective of the foreign language learner and the pedagogical lexicographer. The author starts by pointing out a number of difficulties inherent in current definitions of collocation, such as the alleged binary character of collocations and the alleged differences in semantic weight between collocationa...
This article provides a critical overview of recent research on cross-cultural divergences between English, French and German academic writing, demonstrating its relevance to translation. The author starts by discussing Galtung's notion of culture-specific intellectual styles. He then explores the relationship between composition teaching and writi...
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Armand Colin / Dunod. © Armand Colin / Dunod. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscr...
This article discusses collocation from the perspective of the foreign language learner and the pedagogical lexicographer. The author starts by pointing out a number of difficulties inherent in current definitions of collocation, such as the alleged binary character of collocations and the alleged differences in semantic weight between collocationa...
The present article starts from a broad definition of collocations as holistic lexico-grammatical or semantic units (see Part
I for full details), asking how such units can be adequately represented in bilingual and monolingual encoding dictionaries.
It is found that an onomasiological approach to dictionary making is better suited to this task tha...
This article attempts to synthesise recent advances in collocational theory into a coherent framework for lexicological theory
and lexicographic practice. By posing a number of fundamental questions related to the definition of collocation, it critically
reviews frequency-based, semantic and pragmatic approaches to collocation. It is found, among o...
Les constructions participiales du type ‹ verbe/nom/adjectif + comme + participe › semblent avoir été négligées par les grammairiens du français. Le présent article vise à combler cette lacune en fournissant une description approfondie de tous les types de constructions possibles. Il s'avère que le syntagme en cause est susceptible d'interprétation...
Le présent article a pour but de problématiser et d'affiner la notion de « collocation ». Dans un premier temps, on montre que la frontière entre collocations et locutions est plus mince qu'on ne l'admet généralement. D'une part, en effet, le figement des locutions s'avère tout relatif ; d'autre part, on constate que les collocations connaissent el...
The present paper discusses new evidence on zero article use with abstract English noun phrases using a corpus-based approach. In particular, it investigates the role played by lexical and textual features of the linguistic environment in determining article use. It is found that lexico-grammatical determinants of zero article use can be classified...
This article looks at a particular type of routine formula, called `second-level discourse marker' (SLDM), which falls within the scope of what is sometimes termed `procedural vocabulary'. Having defined and exemplified the notion, I set up a structural typology of SLDMs. I then proceed to discuss the possibility of structural equivalence between E...
Projects
Projects (3)
Le principal objectif du projet PhraseoRomest d’élaborer, dans une démarche inductive corpus-driven, une typologie structurelle et fonctionnelle des constructions lexico-syntaxiques spécifiques au discours romanesque francophone, anglophone et germanophone du XXe siècle.
New corpus-based and genre-sensitive grammar(s) of French, to be published in English and German, 2016-2026
The chief goal of this project is to set up a corpus-driven structural and functional typology of lexico-syntactic constructions in English, French and German 20th century novels. This typology will be used for two types of comparison:
a) a comparison between high literature and popular fiction (French paralittérature, German Trivialliteratur; science fiction; detective fiction; romance fiction);
b) a comparison between the stylistic practices found in different literary traditions.
The project is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together linguists and literary scholars and integrating phraseology, stylistics, genre theory, corpus linguistics and natural language processing. Both in terms of its research focus (phraseology in the novel) and its methodology (corpus-driven linguistics), it falls within the larger domain of the digital humanities.
