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The study describes Italian functional equivalents of the pronominal adverb dabei on the basis of InterCorp parallel corpora. The multifunctionality of German deictic-based pronominal adverbs, in particular of dabei, suggests such interlingual analyses. The present one confirms the wide range of options to translate dabei: verbal phrases (many with gerundio), very different and more or less lexicalised prepositional phrases in adverbial (only sporadic in conjunctive) function, especially with in and con as head, adverbs (most of them connective adverbs), lexical and syntactic additions, reformulations, (pseudo-)cleft sentences. Moreover, new insights into the correlations between several parameters for analysis have been gained, among them the following ones: dabei in Vorfeld-position is often rendered with marked syntactic constructions mostly conveying concession; dabei in Mittelfeld, on the other hand, seems to favour rendering through prepositional phrases. With reference to verbal phrases, gerundio mainly goes along with temporal dabei, sometimes with further pragmatic nuances in the interpretation, whereas finite modes translate local dabei. Finally, the tendency to make the reading of dabei explicit can be observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on addressing practice through kinship terms in Persian, one strategy to express linguistic politeness as required by tæ'arof. The analysis is based on a big and self-collected corpus of chat conversations by Persian speakers and on the Dortmunder chat corpus, release version (Plauder part), for the comparison with German. The data investigated in the present paper show evidence that, in a pro-drop language such as Persian, addressing the interlocutor explicitly in 1:1 conversations goes along with specific pragmatic goals (to demonstrate respect and esteem, to introduce the topic after small-talk, to thank or ask for something, to mitigate face threatening acts). Moreover, emotional expressions are found to be frequently used, even by and among men as opposed to what stated in the literature, as well as kinship terms to address non-relatives. As for the analysed issue, German speakers clearly differ in their linguistic behaviour from Persian ones. In particular, kinship terms occur seldom as addressing strategy and together with not mitigated criticism. Indeed, German speakers are expected to prefer other politeness strategies (negative ones, which go along with German culture of distance). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This explorative study sheds light on article usage in German academic texts by French and Italian university (including Ph. D.) students. Given the differences between and among Romance and Germanic language systems, one might expect deviations in article usage in L2 German; in particular, speakers of Romance languages would seem likely to overgeneralise articles in their German language production. Contrary to these hypotheses, the corpora of learner varieties investigated in the present paper do not show evidence of overrepresentation and overgeneralisation of German articles, not even in generic sentences. In fact, articles tend to be underrepresented, as L2 learners often omit articles that are required in L1 German. Potential explanations of these findings are provided, giving rise to further research questions and desiderata. The latter include empirical studies on L1 German article usage in bilingual areas such as South Tirol, the use of articles in translations, and comparisons of article usage between L1 German and the L2 varieties of learners whose L1 does not have grammaticalised articles. Such studies should apply qualitative (i. e. semantic and pragmatic) as well as quantitative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]