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This thematic issue collects a selection of the linguistic papers presented during the interdisciplinary conference Parità, genere, disabilità: la prospettiva giuridica e la prospettiva lingui-stica (‘Equality, gender, disability: the legal and linguistic perspective’) held in October 2021 at the University of Milan. The papers deal with the inclusive languages of social sustainability, and in particular, six focus on the topic “language and gender” and one on “language and disability”, mainly in German and Italian and partly in other languages. Both topics are analysed in the standard language and/or in specific domains of use (i. e., legal communication and institutional communication).

One of the most important goals of foreign language teaching is to enable students to use the target language in everyday situations. Developing lexical competence in foreign language learning can play an important role in achieving this goal. The aim of the present study is to call attention to the importance of teaching collocations in foreign language education. The first part of the paper gives an overview about collocations and collocational competence. In the second part of the paper, I would like to focus on principles of phraseology and foreign language teaching methodology that can be used for teaching collocations in the classroom.

Keen observers of Kenyan English usage will agree that idiomatic expressions such as put into consideration, rather than take into consideration, are certainly common in daily usage. The author of this paper set out to establish if that was indeed the case by having a sample of 122 respondents, all fourth-year university students, to choose between put and take. 77% of them chose put, which suggests that the expression put into consideration is indeed quite familiar to Kenyan English speakers. It was tested alongside another 19 idiomatic expressions. 17 out of the 20 were found to be familiar, though to varying degrees. But this familiarity was not reflected in corpus data from the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web-based English, where they were found to be rare. The same corpus data showed that this familiarity of the 20 expressions to Kenyan English speakers did not mean that they used them more frequently than their Standard International English counterparts. For example, the data showed that the “less familiar” take into consideration had more tokens in the Kenyan English components of the two corpora than the “more familiar” put into consideration. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that so-called Kenyan English idioms can still be claimed to be typical of Kenyan English, since they are practically absent from e. g. British English, its colonial ancestor.

This paper aims to present observations on the pragmaticalized use as well as the concomitant functions of the demonstrative este in Mexican Spanish. Este seems to serve an additional range of functions in Mexican Spanish in particular, but also in other Hispanic American varieties, as it has turned into a quite productive discourse marker that can be considered, among other things, as a hesitation element, an outline signal, and probably also as an evidentiality marker. The specific functional domains (especially with regard to possible evidential functions) will be illustrated in more detail in the paper using oral language data from the speaker community of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca de Juárez. The study also includes a sociolinguistically oriented quantitative analysis, the results of which will also be discussed in the context of language ideological attitudes towards este.

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts to open to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience offered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic devices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age. The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project “Museo poliglotta”, a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Brescia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. A number of observations lead to the conclusion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector.

In the introductory article to this special issue, the two editors first provide a brief insight into how it arose and then give an overview of the contents of the individual papers, all of which are dedicated to phraseography or metaphraseography. These two fields of linguistic research belong to both phraseology and (meta-)lexicography and deal with the inclusion of phrasemes in dictionaries and the corresponding practical and theoretical issues. The articles also have in common that they focus on various diatopic Romance varieties spoken in Italy (Genoese, Trentino, Piedmontese, Tuscan, regional Italian of Rome, Sardinian, Catalan of Alghero), Croatia (Istriot), Spain and Latin America (regional varieties of Spanish). Since the term phraseme is used in a broad sense in this publication, numerous different phraseological categories are discussed in the papers, including, for example, syntagmatic verbs and partially lexically filled constructions, in addition to more classical categories such as idioms, proverbs and collocations. Finally, it will be briefly argued why this special issue, which is inspired by the two research projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, can be regarded as particularly innovative.

This paper presents a pilot study of audioguides concerning paintings from museums in Italy, Germany and Denmark. The study combines an analysis of speech actions based on categories from the theory of Funktionale Pragmatik with a frame-oriented analysis of knowledge relevant for understanding the audioguide texts, which can be assessed from the formulation choices made by the authors. The focus of the paper is on building a descriptive and analytical tool to identify characteristics of German, Danish and Italian art audioguides. The aim of the study is to establish first results to be substantiated in future work also concerning the receiver modelling (Hörer:innen-Modellierung) in the investigated audioguides and furthermore to see whether intercultural differences are visible in the texts. The study shows that the same speech actions are present in audioguides from different cultures, but that they occur in different proportions according to the specific culture. Along similar lines, it was possible to create a consistent coding system concerning types of knowledge conveyed in the audioguides that enables us to assess and compare the results of analysing the texts. This analysis, too, indicates intercultural differences.

The general tendencies regarding the gender of nouns are dealt with in the paper with the specific aim of building a contrastive microtypology of German, Italian and English. In particular, up to six different types and functions of gender will be distinguished and will be tested against the background of empirical data drawn from the three languages. Interesting phenomena of convergence and divergence at all levels of the respective linguistic systems pop out from the contrastive analysis, starting from the phonological level up to the pragmatic and cognitive dimension.

This paper takes into account two objections often raised to those who foster the use of the feminine form of job titles when they are referred to women. The first objection is that the majority of job titles can only be in the unmarked masculine form and are not connected to the gender of the person referred to; the second objection is that feminist movements have only recently called for the use of feminine job titles, and this claim is unprecedented in the history of the Italian language. The study of some feminine job titles (avvocata, architetta, sindaca, ministra, deputata, direttrice, studentessa, dottoressa e professoressa) shows that they have always been present – albeit more or less frequently – during the whole history of the Italian language. In particular, the use of feminine forms was quite common between the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s, while they were replaced by unmarked masculine forms mostly in the second half of the 20th century.

This paper outlines the construction of the KOMMA corpus and the presentation and analysis of selected case studies. The paper contains written and oral data from young adults attending the final year of a German-language high school in South Tyrol. In addition to describing the data collection and the methods used, the paper will also go into more detail about the data processing (transcription, normalisation, lemmatisation and POS tagging). Finally, some research results illustrate the usability of the corpus, with selected case studies from the field of word formation and lexis being presented.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of interactional pragmatic markers in a multilingual corpus of child language in the Ladin valleys in South Tyrol (Italy). It has been argued that in contact-induced contexts speakers tend to prefer the set of elements of the pragmatically dominant language, in order to reduce the cognitive pressure they are exposed to, in particular in a minority language (cf. Matras 2000). Yet, very little is known about the use of pragmatic markers in child language, even though the pragmatic competence, i. e. the appropriate use of language as well as the proper realization of speech acts in a particular situational context, is one of the key competences children need to acquire during the language acquisition process. The present study was carried out within the sociolinguistic framework of the Ladin valleys, which is characterized by a varied multilingualism on the institutional level and in family contexts. The corpus contains approximately eight hours of spoken data from eight children aged three to six across the three official languages Ladin, German and Italian. This work aims at analysing the micro-functions of interactional pragmatic markers and at investigating how the use of these elements is linked to the linguistic and cognitive development of preschool children. It also contributes to the study of contact-induced phenomena that emerge in a multilingual context.

The present paper discusses necessary adaptations in research methodology to include Deaf Sign Language users in a survey on Sign Language interpreting. Prelingually Deaf Sign Language users have, on average, lower literacy levels than their hearing counterparts. Many of them disfavour reading and writing texts and prefer to be addressed with, and communicate in Sign Language. The present paper reports on a survey among hearing Sign Language interpreters and Deaf Sign Language users that included qualitative expert interviews and a questionnaire with multiple choice as well as free text answers. In total, the questionnaire was processed by 771 participants, 325 of whom are hearing Sign Language interpreters and 446 Deaf Sign Language users. The paper reports on how the data was collected among the Deaf participants including the use of Sign Language and Sign Language oriented Easy Language Plus in order to meet their communicative preferences. The paper is a contribution to the current efforts in Accessible Communication research to adapt methodology according to the participant’s communicative needs.

This paper deals with multimodal displays of non-affiliative stances and assessments in face-to-face triadic storytelling activities. Building on conversational analytical research that has highlighted the co-constructed nature of storytelling activities and the intersubjective nature of stance-taking, this paper takes a multimodal perspective and focusses on how interactants use language, prosody, gaze, and gestures to express stances that are non-affiliative to different degrees. The paper addresses two issues: We first concentrate on the ways that disaffiliative assessments and stances are communicated as multimodal packages before zooming in on the ways that storytellers and recipients deal with displays of disaffiliation. This includes both verbal and nonverbal strategies to highlight disaffiliation and interactional work to jointly mitigate it. By its focus on multimodal stance-taking in storytelling activities, the paper ties in with both the recently growing interest in the multimodal nature of stance-taking as well as recent pleas to revisit interactional storytelling from a multimodal perspective.

Reading is a highly complex cognitive process. From a neurobiological point of view, it involves at least six linguistic sub-competences including orthographic, semantic, syntactic, phonetic and prosodic competence. Each of these skills is required of the reader to extract different types of information from the text, ranging from the perceptual and the syntactic to the lexical and pragmasemantic one. Based on the main results of cognitive-oriented research on text and reading, this paper illustrates how prosodic competence, combined with formal coherence patterns, can be considered and employed as a reading strategy, enabling the reader to progressively grasp the meanings of a text. In the first part particular attention will be paid to the description of the syntax-prosody interface as well as of its function as a means of encoding of information structure in German. With regard to the teaching of German as a foreign language, the second part of the paper will present a method to train intonational reading. This approach aims to raise foreign language readers’ awareness of prosodic features of written texts and to introduce them to melodic patterns which can be encountered while reading. Such a practical training may prove to be advantageous, as the most typical and apparently “uncorrectable” errors committed by foreign language learners when speaking and reading German texts are almost always related to the domains of phonology and prosody.

Recent research on the impact and reception of science communication pointed out, that marginalized groups in society like people with mental or learning disabilities or people with limited language skills often remain unconsidered by conventional measures of communicating scientific content (Humm/Schrögel/Leßmöllmann 2020). Easy reading concepts might be a helpful approach to a more inclusive mode of science communication. The paper evaluates if German science institutions and universities offer easy reading versions on their websites to enable the above-mentioned groups to access fundamental scientific information. In a second step it analyses how these easy reading versions have been formally implemented and to what extent the requirements of the Federal Ordinance on Accessible Information Technology (BITV 2.0) have been followed. The paper aims to give a first overview on the efforts of scientific institutions to address marginalized groups and to point out deficits of these efforts.

This paper provides an overview of the varieties of Cisalpine Occitan. From a sociolinguistic perspective, these varieties may be regarded as both second-degree and endangered languages, though they have been involved into promotion policies for several decades. From a linguistic standpoint, the varieties of Cisalpine Occitan display features that can be traced back to an Alpine Occitan diasystem, though showing some structural similarities with Francoprovençal and Piedmontese. Some selected features of Cisalpine Occitan, belonging to different linguistic levels (phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary), are presented and discussed.

The work aims to provide a description of the sociolinguistic and linguistic reality of the hamlet of Timau in the municipality of Paluzza. In contrast to the other villages of the Municipality, the population of Timau has been speaking for centuries, alongside Italian and Friulian, the Timavese code, a Carinthian based variety that nevertheless displays distinctive linguistic characteristics at all levels. In the paper we will present the origins of the village, the sociolinguistic position of Timavese in the community’s repertoire, the similarities and differences between Timavese and Carinthian and the corpus and status planning created for this variety after its recognition by the national law 482/1999 (“Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche”), aimed at protecting the historical linguistic minorities recognized in the national territory.

Italy shows a multitude of languages and dialects bound to different areas, language communities, ethnicities and personal identities. Many of the historical minority languages of Italy are not known to everyone, not even to all Italians though living on the same territory. This special issue aims at describing such language varieties to be found in the Northern pat of Italy, dealing first of all with the history of a certain language variety. Each paper also describes the main linguistic charactericics, mainly at phonological, semantical and morphosyntactic level. Then some of the most important intiatives to preserve such valuable inheritage.

Research on regiolects commonly concentrates on phenomena of traditional dialectology. In his talk at the 6th IGDD congress in September 2018 Michael Elmentaler whatsoever plead to rather focus on characteristics of regiolects by themselves. As a scientific approach he mentioned regional phraseology. The following research project now focuses on the regional distribution of phrasemes and tries to find out whether participants are aware of these and which influence age has. Therefore 26 phrasemes, based on the Rheinisches Mitmachwörterbuch, an interactive online tool of the LVR-Institut für Landeskunde und Regionalgeschichte (ILR), that are not codified or coded „landschaftlich rheinisch/westmitteldeutsch“ in relevant lexicons are presented to participants. They then rated whether they knew and used these phrasemes or whether they were unknown to them. Moreover, participants were able to fill in variants of the idioms in question. First results from the study concerning awareness and age will be presented in this paper.

Language experiments have a long tradition in the field of dialectology to investigate phonological, lexical and syntactic variation. Methodologically, the repertoire ranges from written test procedures to standardized language production tests and interviews whereby different types of tasks (e. g. translation, picture-naming, evaluation tasks) are used. In order to investigate the variation and perception of morpho(phono)logical phenomena (e. g. the variation of the superlative dat schéinst/dat schéinsten/dat schéinstent Meedchen ‘the most beautiful girl’) in Luxembourgish, I developed a new test procedure, which is based on test procedures and tasks already used in other dialectological and variationist projects (e. g. Syntax Hessischer Dialekte (SyHD), cf. Fleischer/Lenz/Weiß 2015, Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland (SiN); cf. Elmentaler et al. 2015)). The development of a new method was indispensable, since firstly, it must be adapted to the analysis of morpho(phono)logical phenomena that are not linked to regional variation and secondly this test aims to analyse salience and pertinence, two relevant concepts within the scope of language perception and evaluation (cf. Purschke 2011), separately. This paper thus presents an experiment that aims to investigate the perception of morpho(phono)logical variation and its variants in Luxembourgish. The individual test procedures, a salience test, a specific form of scale-based test, a translation task and a supplementary questionnaire are described, contextualized and discussed in detail. The focus also lies on the special design of the test, which is able to ascertain the salience and pertinence of certain variants and to correlate them directly with the production of the variants and the self-evaluation of the individual participants.

Autonomous verbs in Irish are special verb forms incompatible with the surface realization of a subject. Previous studies have suggested to postulate empty categories such as pro, PRO or expletive pro to fill the subject position (cf. Stenson 1989; McCloskey 2007; Bondaruk/ Charzyńska-Wóicjk 2003), thus rejecting the idea that these verbs might be classified as completely subjectless. A series of syntactic tests bear out the hypothesis that, at least for Irish, these verbs behave as actually lacking a subject. I first suggest correlating this state of affairs to the fact that, with autonomous verbs, no argument role to be promoted to subject position is selected at the valency level, although it is “implied” in the unfolding of the event. Secondly, I argue that both valency reduction and syntactic non-realization of an argument role is driven by information structural constraints; notably, the focal nature of autonomous verbs (as advocated elsewhere, cf. Nolan 2012) causes the subject (together with the argument role it is associated with) to be informationally downgraded, thereby leading to its suppression in the sentence. The position held in this paper is that autonomous verbs of the Irish type epitomize an interesting phenomenon of semantic-pragmatic interface, with the pragmatic level of the utterance “mediating” between the semantic and the syntactic level; in such a perspective, the pragmatic (information structural) level of an utterance would determine either the number and type of argument roles a verb can take in a particular discourse context (cf. DuBois 1987; Goldberg 2006) and their syntactic encoding.

The paper aims to propose a reflection on the importance of German varieties in the preparation of interpreters. Like many other languages, German is classified as a pluricentric language, i. e. a language officially spoken in more than one centre or nation. This makes it a very variegated language that boasts a multitude of both standard and non-standard varieties. The task of interpreters who choose German as a foreign language is therefore to be able to understand and translate into another language what is spoken by native speakers of German, many of whom, according to the previous statement, often speak different varieties. To do this, the interpreters’ preparation must consider the inclusion of the different language varieties of both standard and non-standard German, especially at the level of auditory decoding, in order to facilitate the understanding of the message at a receptive level. Starting from the definition of a pluricentric language, this contribution will highlight the main difficulties of interpreters at the level of listening comprehension, most of which are found at the level of auditory decoding, before proposing training aimed at decoding the different varieties of standard and non-standard German realised through the use of new technologies.

The present work aims at showing the didactic potential of the novel Zweinhalb Störche: Roman einer Kindheit in Siebenbürgen, written in 2008 by the German-Romanian author Claudiu M. Florian, for multilingual learning in GFL classes. The paper focuses on the possible use of corpus-based learning tasks and consists of two parts: the first will introduce the main features of multilingual didactics and multilingual competence and the possible teaching approaches of inter- and transcultural literature through the use of corpora; the second will focus on the use of the novel to promote multilingual competence within the GFL classroom. In particular, specific tasks will be suggested to achieve a didactic surplus through the use of corpus compilation and analysis tools such as Sketch Engine.

The paper deals with the role of lexicographic resources in the South Tyrolean (i. e. the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy) educational context against the backdrop of legal provisions (Das neue Autonomiestatut 2019/1972) and the relevance of language education on the part of educational institutions (Rahmenrichtlinien DE, Rahmenrichtlinien IT), taking into account both normative requirements and their application in practice. The focus is on two questions that have been little researched so far, not only in the specific context but also internationally (cf. Abel 2022; Nied Curcio 2022): To what extent are lexicographic resources represented in the school framework guidelines? How are they actually used in schools? For the case study presented here, the South Tyrolean framework guidelines provided by the German and the Italian school boards at all levels of education for German and Italian as first (L1) and second (L2) languages, as well as for English as a foreign language (L3) were examined by means of a document analysis. In a second step, a questionnaire survey with language teachers at all school levels (German and Italian as L1/L2, English as L3; number of survey respondents: 644) determined the actual use of lexicographic resources.

Studies on the Linguistic Landscape (LL) have become a particularly prolific object of study and research in the last fifteen years. The most recent research perspective has led to new categorizations for the LL, which not only form the basis for further empirical research, but are also of great use in foreign language teaching (Malinowski/Maxim/Dubreil 2020). Indeed, working with the LL that is also interculturally specific fulfils one of the primary goals of foreign language teaching, as the close relationship between language and culture also promotes intercultural communicative competence. Our paper will examine in particular the great potential of this tool in the context of teaching German as a Foreign Language in Italy, in order to stimulate greater language awareness and linguistic reflection in the processes of learning and teaching German in which learners are involved. By means of the administration of didactic sheets prepared by us, we will consider the possibility of applying to a didactic context data on both the German language and culture, taken from the observation of the LL of Alto Adige/Südtirol and collected on several occasions within a corpus, the LLSÜDTIROL, which will be discussed below.

As already shown in a newly published article (Autelli/Caria 2022b), the phraseological studies on the Catalan of Alghero are still in their infancy, and there is an urgent need for documenting more phrasemes in this diatopic variety. One can already find some of them in dictionaries and amatorial collections. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the written sources and dictionaries of Algherese, then to analyse the terminology used in the latter in reference to phrasemes and, most importantly, to find out what kind of phrasemes are provided, trying to pinpoint their main morphosyntactic, semantic and cultural features.

This article aims to present a proposal for the lemmatisation of Hispanic phraseology in a digital multilingual phraseological dictionary. Indeed, in the current lexicographic panorama, bi- or multilingual electronic dictionaries capable of comprehensively presenting the phraseology of the different diatopic varieties of Spanish are still lacking. For this reason, within the framework of the Digital Multilingual Phraseological Dictionary (DFMD) project, currently being developed at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, a preliminary study illustrated in this paper has been carried out. This focuses on the inclusion of Spanish phraseology in a Spanish-Italian/ Italian-Spanish bilingual repertory. In the following chapters, I first outline the state of the art as regards the presence of Hispanic phraseology in existing digital lexicographic works (chapter 2), and then move on to the presentation of the elaborated phraseographic proposal: in particular, I will set out the parameters adopted for the selection of the phraseological corpus under investigation and its subsequent lemmatisation in the Venetian repertory (chapter 3). Subsequently, I will examine some examples of lexicographic entries in which the proposed methodology is applied (chapter 4). Finally, I will offer some points of re-thinking for possible future studies (chapter 5).

The paper is devoted to the analysis of partially lexically specified constructions in different diatopic varieties of Italian. These word combinations can be defined as constructions since they are pairings of form and meaning characterized by the presence of fixed and empty positions. The investigation examines examples of partially lexically specified (phrasal and sentence) constructions in Sardinian and in the regional Italian of Rome. The analysis shows that this combinatorial type is widespread within the national language as well as in local varieties. The phenomena which have been considered mainly concern: i) the presence of indigenous constructions in the local variety; ii) the presence of constructions modelled on the roof language; iii) the lexicalisation of forms in the local variety from roof language constructions, which radiate back as fixed sequences into the national language. The analysis also considers the lexicographic perspective and shows that these constructions are generally underrepresented in lexicographic tools, even though their single instantiations are often recorded in the corresponding entries.

In this paper, the treatment of phraseological elements in four bilingual dictionaries of Istriot varieties – Gallesanese, Vallese, and Rovignese – and Italian is analyzed. First, an overview of the sociolinguistic situation of Istriot in the complex linguistic reality of Croatian Istria is provided. This is followed by a concise outline of Istriot lexicography. In the empirical part, after describing the analyzed dictionaries, the research results of the treatment of phraseology in the latter are presented and discussed. Finally, some concluding remarks are made.

Dialect phraseography is, generally speaking, still in its early stage; however, it is booming with some of the first studies in this direction as far as some diatopic varieties of Italy are concerned (additionally to the articles in this special issue, cf. also those contained in Autelli/Konecny/Lusito 2023a). As to Genoese phraseography, it has been living great development thanks to the Genoese-Italian projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, whose lexicographic entries can be found in one single, freely accessible online dictionary. As the latter project shows some additional innovative features, those will be further investigated in this paper, paying particular attention, within the numerous innovations, to the new sources and metalinguistic information integrated in the dictionary, to the phonetic transcriptions of the phrasemes as well as to the criteria chosen for creating sample sentences containing selected phrasemes.

In this paper, it is proposed on the basis of data from German that some of the information-structural features encoded by the projections located in the clause-internal Split-CP domain in the Rizzian (1997) model are replicated in the so-called “outer left periphery”, i. e. in the area situated above ForceP. In doing this, I pursue a cartographic approach in which information structure is directly represented in the syntax by means of syntactic heads that project within the clausal left periphery. The main claim of the paper is that the outer left periphery (of German) includes dedicated projections for four classes of topics, namely so-called “Contrastive Hanging Topics”, “Aboutness Contrastive Topics”, “Familiar Hanging Topics” and “Frame-setting Hanging Topics”. The observations made in this paper pave the way for a comparison with other languages, as well as for the question of the universality of this clause-peripheral makeup.

Art communication is a functional and specialized form of social communication constituting the meaning of art. It includes museum communication, understood not only as a transfer of individual and social knowledge about exhibits, but also as an opportunity to encounter art. The museum is thus a learning place as well as a space for experiences, emotions and relational exchanges. This thematic issue deals with the role of language in museum communication concerning figurative art, in its relation both to other expression modes and to the target audiences with their different languages and cultures. Within this framework the active role of museum visitors in the reception of exhibited works, stimulated by the use of new technological formats, is discussed too. In particular, the papers focus on three main aspects: the interaction between iconic and verbal language, the need for a target-oriented (multimodal) museum communication, and the investigation of multilingual and culture-specific knowledge transmission strategies.

As young visitors represent “the museum audience of the future”, museums should be particularly committed to engaging children in museum experiences pursuing a child-oriented approach to art communication and education. The analysis of museum communication from a linguistic perspective seems thus a promising way of exploring the target-group-specificity of museum educational resources explicitly designed for addressing young audiences. Explanatory videos featured on museum websites which present the museum itself or masterpieces of its collections are examples of digital tools employed by museums to introduce children to art and encouraging them to become devoted visitors. The paper presents the findings of a case study of a sample of German and Italian museum explanatory videos for primary school children, aiming at analyzing the linguistic and multimodal strategies used by museums in order to transfer knowledge about art, artists and exhibitions in a child-centered explanatory style. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and to what extent these videos encourage a participatory, play-based access to art or enable an experience-oriented approach to art-related contents, as advocated by current trends in museum communication and education.

This paper aims to examine the strategies for conveying regional culture-bound terms in monolingual and bilingual (or multilingual) texts and chooses a type of museum for which such terms are particularly important: the folk museum. After a brief overview of this type of museum in Italy and Germany (section 2), section 3 deals with culture-bound terms, their classification and the strategies for introducing them in texts. Section 4 presents the empirical analysis carried out on a corpus of texts from the websites of 10 Italian and 10 German or Austrian folk museums. The use of realia was examined first in the monolingual, then in the multilingual museum communication.

The present article examines metalinguistic and metadiscursive reflections in the public discourse on climate change. The public thematisations of language play a crucial role in public discourses as they carry out strategic and action-orienting functions. The article investigates which expressions and whose language use are repeatedly the subject of metalinguistic reflections in the defined section of the discourse. In the process we also address the question of which positions and arguments are expressed or justified through the thematisation of language. Furthermore, the study investigates the metadiscursive reflections of the discourse participants, which are frequently connected with media criticism. The analysis focuses on a corpus of manually selected articles from German newspapers. In order to identify and examine the explicit thematisations of language, the paper adopts a methodological approach which combines corpus-linguistic tools with interpretive-hermeneutic analyses. The analysis reveals how the critical thematisation of the same linguistic phenomenon is in many cases used to justify conflicting positions in the discourse.

Personal names and naming practices are among the linguistic topics that have occupied scholarly attention from diverse fields: philosophy, history, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. This paper investigates personal names from a linguistic perspective. It examines Kemunasukuma personal names by focusing on their structural patterns and the morphological processes involved in their formation. The study followed a qualitative approach as it deals with textual data (personal names). Data was collected through interviews and documentary review, and morphological approaches were adopted in data analysis. Personal names were broken down into meaningful morphemes to trace their structural patterns as well as determine the word-formation processes involved. The findings indicate that Kemunasukuma personal names exhibit seven structural patterns that range from simple to complex. Also, the findings indicate that three word-formation processes: inflection, derivation, and compounding are productive and responsible for the formation of Kemunasukuma personal names. The structure of Kemunasukuma personal names not only points to the structure of the Sukuma language but also gives vital clues about their semantics.

This article is dedicated to the particle subclass of modal particles and their supposed function of indicating the social proximity between speakers. This assumption stems mostly from the reference to shared knowledge of modal particles. This marking of the relations between the speakers occurs on the one hand through a high frequency of modal particles in conversational situations characterised by proximity, and on the other hand through the occurrence of certain modal particles. This paper deals with an empirical test of these assumptions. For this purpose, a corpus of twenty-two conversations in two different settings was used, one setting characterised by a close relationship and the other by unfamiliarity and social distance between the speakers. Within these conversations the frequencies of modal particles were collected and analysed in terms of their quantity and distribution. The results of the case study show that it is not all modal particles for which a function as relational markers can be assumed. Only the two particles ja and eh occur more frequently in the conversations characterised by social proximity. In addition to this, other factors like age and gender are highlighted that may influence the distribution of modal particles in this case study.

Humanistic studies on medical causality from language studies have hardly explored how causality is constructed in medical referral materials, which is the research gap this study intends to fill. For data, forty completed National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) medical referral forms, comprising 842 words and medical signs, were purposively selected from a healthcare provider in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, and subjected to discourse analysis with insights from the causal coherence categories of Mann/Thompson’s (1987) Rhetorical Structure Theory. The paper identified two causal relations/structures – nonvolitional cause and nonvolitional result – in the data. Each structure reveals the primacy of diagnosis among the medical processes of diagnosing, investigating and treating or referring. The diagnosis proposition is primed as the consequence of pathophysiological causation in a diagnostic schema; while in the medical referral process, it is elevated as the causation for a medical referral, for instance for further specialist review and management, in a medical-referral schema. The construal of the semantic parameter of non-volition in the coherence relations is aided by the reality that illness is not intended, except caused by self-harm or suicide. The relations were signalled by four signal types, which are genre, semantic, syntactic, and semiotic; and six specific signals – mapping, lexical overlap, lexical chain, adverbials, semiotic overlap, and lexical-semiotic chain. These are implicit signals that complement the concise presentation of the medical processes. To conclude, this research provides the causal modeling of some medical processes, which highlights the prominence of diagnosis in medical referrals.

The paper discusses the role of metaphor in the name construction of sea creatures among Akan (Mfantse) people within the purview of onomasiology. The role of metaphor in the naming of sea creatures has been understudied. This paper is a step towards filling the gap by analyzing the role metaphor plays in constructing naming units for sea creatures. This study has a qualitative research design. Twelve (12) fishers were purposely sampled, three (3) each from four fishing towns: Anomabo, Apam, Sekondi (Sekunde) and Moree (Mowure). The data collection tool was a semi-structured interview. The paper finds that likeness between sea creatures and static and/or dynamic entities triggers names for sea creatures. It concludes that, metaphor is employed to achieve simpler forms for salient features, communicate non-codable salient features and condense multiple features in the quest to name sea creatures among the Mfantse people. Through these vital roles, a general metaphor Sea Creatures are Land Animals/Entities is realized. The encyclopedic knowledge, which the Mfantse people have about their environment is realized through their naming strategies. It is recommended that the linguistics of naming percepts in indigenous Akan occupations be explored further.

This study examines consonant mutation particularly in Esahie[1] and Nzema. The reason for the study arises from the mutuality in the two languages. Again, previous studies have superficially treated this subject in the separate languages. However, the subject of consonant mutation is common in the above languages, yet the prevailing characteristics of the phenomenon are similar and dissimilar in the languages. Thus, this study compares and contrast consonant mutation in the two related languages to establish a correlation. In this vein, it discusses the mutational pattern, directionalities and voicing. Data for this study are assembled from four native speakers of each of the languages and literature of the respective languages. The data are analysed within the purview of Distinctive Feature Theory. The study identifies evidence to the relational effect that, the phonological environments in which the various realizations of mutation occurs also results in a harmony system. However, they differ in their mutational domains. The featural agreement normally forges between the vowel-consonant. Again, it is observed in Nzema and Esahie that, the common feature responsible for mutation in the alternant pairs, [k/x] and [k/g] is [dorsal]; [d/l] and [d/n] is [coronal]; [ʨ/ɕ] is [+strident] and [b/m] is [labial]. In both languages, harmonic assimilation is bidirectional. [1] Esahie is also known as Sefwi, Sehwi, or Asahyue. In Ghana, the language is classified as part of the linguistic Akan group of the larger Akan dialects, even though it shares very close intelligibility with Nzema (a solely ethnographic Akan) than Twi and Mfantse (which are both linguistic and ethnographic Akan). Therefore, in this paper, we shall refer to both variants as separate languages.

By virtue of its status as a national language recognised by the princely institutions, Monegasque is the only Ligurian variety to have an officially regulated spelling system. The current writing norms, sanctioned by the Commission pour la langue monégasque, represent in essence the standardisation of the spelling choices introduced and developed in the last century by Louis Notari (1879–1961), the originator of literature in this language. This paper aims to illustrate the first proposal for the systematisation of Monegasque spelling, formulated between 1926 and 1927 within the Comité des traditions locales (ancestor of the current Comité national des traditions monégasques), an association established a few years earlier with the aim of protecting and safeguarding the linguistic and folkloric heritage of the Principality of Monaco. The proposal, while fairly naïve in terms of its approach and content, is a striking testimony to the first steps towards the linguistic analysis and representation of a variety which, until then, had not yet been codified and had known practically no written usage.

Through their discursive actions, parliamentarians have an impact on the public perception of societal issues. Drawing on the Discourse-Historical Approach of Critical Discourse Studies this paper strives to illuminate how persons, objects, or abstract things are discursively constructed as victims. The debate speeches relate to two cases of terrorism: The National Socialist Underground (NSU) and the ISIS attack at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin. After first identifying the types of victims in the data, the study then conducts a detailed analysis of the discursive resources that are used in the construction process. Furthermore, the victim constructions are interrogated in terms of their strategic political aims. Apart from linguistic means, different context levels play a crucial role in the construction. The examined victim constructions aimed for example at the sense of unity (Wir-Gefühl) and presenting the own party in a certain light. The study shows how the discursive construction of victims contributes to the construction of reality for the public and how they serve different kinds of strategic and political aims.

Hengeveld/Mackenzie (2008: 52) consider that the constructions with mas ‘but’ result from the combination of two Discursive Acts with different communicative statutes, there being a Nuclear Discursive Act, with greater communicative weight, and a Subsidiary Discursive Act, which will have a rhetorical function named “Concession”. This paper aims to investigate the various uses of mas ‘but’, according to Functional Discourse Grammar, in order to determine the pragmatic, semantic, and morphosyntactic properties of each case in real occurrences of Portuguese. The combination of linguistic units through mas ‘but’ always indicates interpersonal strategies, which are differentiated by the communicative intention of the speaker as well as reflected in the layer involved. However, mas maintains the capacity to attribute the most salient status of information to the unit it scopes or operates on. We identified four uses of mas ‘but’ in different layers: Move Operator in the Move layer, Emphasis Operator and Concession rhetorical function in the Discursive Act layer, and the Contrast pragmatic function in the Communicated Content layer.

This paper exposes the idea of humour as a strategy for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. By focusing on the Swiss federal council’s media conferences, it aims at evaluating specific linguistic and thematic features which constitute humour. The analysis highlights the importance of everyday topics in dealing with the coronavirus and shows that the humorous potentiality in the press conferences’ oral communications is specified by laughing expressions and even more so that the humorous interactions occur at specific moments.

This paper presents the application of a quantitative model for measuring the impact of manipulative implicit linguistic strategies on a small comparable corpus of Italian, German and French political discourses. The aim is to show the cross-linguistic applicability of the model, originally developed and put to test on Italian. Furthermore, the analysis allows a quantitative and qualitative comparison of the three comparable corpora: some statistical correlations and tendencies in the frequency and type of linguistic implicit strategies are presented and put in relation not only with the language, but also with the political orientation of the speaker and with other parameters (context, subject, rhetorical style). Results show that the model can be applied to multiple languages and that inter- and intra-linguistic tendencies in the use of manipulative implicit linguistic strategies can be appreciated.

The aim of this paper is to present a detailed analysis of the relevant material concerning lengthening of the Middle High German short accented vowels with a view to establishing the actual conditions under which this change operated. Special attention is given to the relevant, controversial developments in an open syllable, where lengthening is shown to have been regular not only before voiced consonants but also before the only available voiceless consonant, namely /t/. Apparent exceptions with a short vowel are shown to reflect phonological variants inherited from earlier stages of the language. The whole phenomenon of lengthening is discussed in a diachronic perspective which involves other changes, such as diphthongization, monophthongization, and shortening. Moreover, the conditioned mergers of the relevant short vowels with their long counterparts are presented in the wider context of the subsequent development of the Middle High German vowels, with special regard to the changes that affected /e/, /ɛ/, /æ/ and /e:/, /æ:/.

Verbal periphrases (VP) constitute a typological feature of Romance languages and they are especially frequent in the Iberoromanic languages. In the context of this paper, the aspectual verbal construction stare a + infinito and the modal VP volere + infinito will be “grasped in the concrete speech action” (Katelhön 2013: 237; my translation) in order to show how these two VPs are used as discourse-structuring elements in contemporary Italian (outline signals, turn-taking markers, hesitation phenomena etc.). Furthermore, formal and functional equivalents of the periphrastic discourse markers it. sta(mmi) a sentire and it. voglio dire will be analyzed in two Romance “sister languages”, namely French and Spanish, as well as in a typologically more distant language, namely German. The translation strategies chosen in the respective target languages will be examined with regard to the preservation or modification of pragmatic-discursive values inherent in the source language structure. For the present study, which is exclusively qualitative, the LIP corpus and the OPUS corpus (Tiedemann 2012, Italian), which is a collection of subtitles from a wide range of films in various languages, were used.

This paper analyses interactions between a host of a Swiss mountain destination and her guests. The conversations take place in a scenic gondola. The analysis is conducted in the format of an ethnographic case study and focuses on the interactants’ speech style. The case study constitutes a part of a larger, applied and interdisciplinary project of the Business School of the University of Applied Sciences of Lucerne. The aim of the main project is to specify what could be defined as “hospitality” in a touristic context and to develop tools to enhance hospitality at touristic destinations in Central Switzerland. The aim of the present ethnographic case study is to analyse interactions between hosts and their guests. It seeks to find communicative elements which let the guests perceive an inter-action as hospitable and to discuss if generic features of a “hospitable speech style” may be identified.

Narrating is a crucial activity in theatre rehearsals. Through this activity, narratives are performed, expanded, reinterpreted, or even completely improvised. The communicative practices used by theatre professionals to develop a play as a theatrical narrative have rarely been researched, both in linguistics and theatre studies. Therefore, this paper addresses how actors, directors, and other members of a theatre production collectively develop monologues as self-contained narratives within a play. The research focuses on how narrators and listeners, as an interactional ensemble, use multimodal actions to realize such monologues. Surprisingly, the co-narrators don’t appear to imagine their future audience but construct the narrations in situ with and for the present members. This observation especially becomes evident when mobile eye-tracking glasses measure the co-narrators’ gaze behavior. It shows that members of a theatre rehearsal perform different activities (e. g., improvising, reading, prompting, instructing, discussing, monitoring) with regard to local interactional requirements. This paper illustrates the procedures with which theatre-makers produce monologues as multimodal narratives and highlights the differences that distinguish such narratives in theatre from spontaneous everyday storytellings.

Europe is a unique framework of communication with similar issues discussed in different linguistic and cultural areas. This paper gives a detailed overview of a discourse linguistic project that analyses this multilingual discourse space. We focus on the issue of vaccination since this is a controversial issue in the media of all countries that are of interest for this study (Germany, Italy, France, UK). Methods from discourse, corpus and computer linguistics are used to identify the most relevant linguistic, argumentative, and emotional patterns in discourse. The paper discusses these methods in detail. We then show how these patterns are annotated in our corpora and how the different kinds of annotations can be analysed in correlation.