This dataset contains corpus statistical calculations that were used to investigate patterns of linguistic place-making in the German language. Patterns are defined here primarily as typical words and word combinations (collected as ngrams and collocations). Those were obtained from a text corpus specifically created for this analysis (not published). The text corpus has a size of 2,630,095 tokens and contains only texts in which one or more geographical places form the main topic. It turned out that these are primarily texts from tourism contexts. The corpus therefore includes 34 travel guides, 145 texts from place/travel blogs, 65 journalistic texts and 73 (city) marketing texts. The analyses were carried out with #LancsBox.
Initial analyses quickly made it clear that patterns that refer specifically to places can only be distinguished from other patterns if the corpus is semantically annotated. In this annotation process, nouns that refer to places were tagged (German: Placebezeichnungen, therefore abbreviated as PB). This makes it possible to evaluate their frequency and distribution in the corpus. On the other hand, it is possible to calculate their collocations. In other words: It is possible to calculate which words typically appear together with which words. Detailed analyses were then carried out for words with which place-referring nouns collocate particularly intensively (so-called collocation profiles). In this way, typical usage contexts can be determined and patterns of place-making can be identified.
The dataset contains data on the frequency, distribution and typical collocations of place-referring nouns, as well as the collocation profiles of words that collocate particularly frequently with place-referring nouns. The analysis and the resulting conclusions on the patterns of linguistic place-making can be found in the related publication.
Abstract of the related publication: Places are geographical areas or spots that are meaningful to people. The members of a discourse community can clearly identify places and name certain characteristics. The process of place-making, which has been theorized in sociology and geography, is thus – viewed from a linguistic perspective - a process of knowledge transfer: if people know something about a geographical area or spot, it becomes a place for them. This knowledge is negotiated and communicated linguistically in discourses.
The study deals with the questions of (a) which knowledge is relevant in place-making processes and (b) how it is verbalized. To answer these questions, linguistic patterns are collected in a representative corpus. In this process, common nouns that refer to places (so-called Placebezeichnungen) play a special role - both in terms of content and methodology. They are semantically annotated and form the anchor points of collocation analyses.
LancsBox (see http:// corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/index.php), 6.0