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This paper examines graphemic and lexical borrowings in Twi for Academic Purposes (TAP). Textbooks written in Asante Twi by some renowned scholars in the language constituted the dataset for this study. The textbooks were read and all instances of anglicisms or English features borrowed into Twi were collected. The borrowed-features were identified by drawing on our native speaker and scholarly competencies. The dataset was analyzed by drawing on Clyne’s (1977) Borrowing Typology and Haugen’s (1950) Borrowability Scale. Three key findings emerged from the analysis. First, the study yielded that in TAP two letters (, and ) are borrowed towards empowering Asante Twi to enable it to account for words that contain these letters. Second, at the lexical level, it was found that the borrowed words were either integrated or adapted into Asante Twi linguistic environment. The final point was that all the lexical items realized were nominals affirming the primacy of noun on borrowability scales. The findings have implications for developing Ghanaian languages for academic purposes.

Phraseological studies are prospering, as there have been many important publications over the last years. However, while most researchers date phraseology studies back to Charles Bally (1909), they have a long tradition that has been ignored for years. Indeed, the term phraseology has been found in lots of works dating back centuries, even in the title of works going back to the 16th century (cf. also Autelli 2021a, 2021b). The main goals of this paper are to illustrate the concept of phraseology throughout the years and to investigate some of the works found, as they do not all look alike and still play an important role for terminology, phraseography and phraseodidactics. In particular, some of the most significant bilingual works (from the 19th and 20th century) based on French and Italian so-called “phraseologiae” (that contain terms such as “phraséologie” or “fraseologia” in the title of the works) will be analysed, as there are significantly more of them than in other languages.

Coordination has commonly been treated as a grammatical process of connecting clauses, in which an equipollence relation may occur between the units involved. The purpose of this paper is to show how a discourse-functional theory understands coordination, relating it to the levels and layers proposed in the model of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld/Mackenzie 2008). We propose that coordination in Portuguese, as a morphosyntactic phenomenon, results from the double action of the Interpersonal and Representational Levels: the relations of addition and alternativity (expressed by e and ou respectively) result not only from parallelism at the Interpersonal Level but also from operations at the Representational Level that make use of notions found in logic. The adversative relation expressed by mas, however, is shown to be identical to the additive one at the Representational Level, differing only at the Interpersonal Level, where it requires the rhetorical function Concession to be assigned to a dependent Discourse Act.

The article presents findings on how German-speaking expatriates in China use the multi-functional messaging application WeChat. The paper is structured as follows: After the introduction (1.), in which the societal relevance of WeChat and its potential for sociolinguistic research is addressed, the current state of research is presented (2.). Subsequently, the main features of WeChat are explained (3.). After that, the method used to acquire the data on China-based German speakers’ WeChat usage is described (4.): Between Nov. 2018 and April 2019, an online survey was conducted, and answered by 208 individuals. The answers provided form the basis of the results, which are presented in the fifth section. The last section (6.) contextualizes the findings and discusses perspectives for further research. After the bibliography, an appendix is given. It provides the link to the publicly available dataset on which the presented research is based.

This study, based on a corpus of 20 Dutch and 20 German scientific journal articles, looks at how authors of German and Dutch research papers use nouns referring to persons. This investi-gation shows that although the two West Germanic languages are typologically similar due to their geographic proximity the two languages can vary a lot in terms of the abstraction (e. g. Lehrkräfte, Personen; leerkrachten, personen) and specification (e. g. Lehrerinnen und Lehrer; leraressen en leraren) of both grammatical gender and biological sex in academic articles. As a result it can be observed that Dutch authors prefer generic masculine personal nous whereas German authors tend to use more alternative forms, especially in recent times. The result contributes not only to a deeper understanding of personal nouns in academic articles but also to a clearer understanding of where and why there are differences between German and Dutch.

This conversation-analytic paper investigates the multimodal design and interactional functions of the connective et puis après (‘and then after that’) in a French-language corpus of video-recorded collaborative storytellings. Two similar, yet different, sequential positions are investigated: the juncture between subsequent story episodes and the space between extended side sequences and the return to the story-in-progress. Such juncture positions constitute recognizable moments at which both members of the telling party, i. e., the current teller and the co-teller, must determine the topic of the next story episode as well as its delivery. Thus, juncture positions provide a perspicuous setting for the analysis of how tellership is negotiated and how topic progression is achieved. The connective et puis après appears to be a resource for current tellers to establish spaces for coparticipation at juncture positions, closing prior talk and projecting continuation. The multimodal analysis shows that both its prosodic design and co-occurring changes of the embodied participation framework contribute to opening interactive turn spaces and to making telling-specific next actions relevant.

The paper is concerned with codeswitching in transmodal WhatsApp messenger chats. Based on a corpus of text and audio postings from a group of German-Lebanese cousins that is complemented by ethnographic interviews, the study shows that language alternations can be associated with particular metapragmatic or indexical functions in the different modalities. In audio postings, switching between German and Arabic contextualises varying discourse relations. Also, the cousins use Arabic discourse markers (such as ya'ne, ‘it means’) frequently to structure their talk. In contrast, when they switch to Arabic in their text-postings – using Arabizi, a CMC-register in the Arabic-speaking world – this recurrently establishes a playful or ironic frame for ritual teasings. The final section discusses these transmodal and multilingual practices as multi-layered identity positionings vis-à-vis a monolingual society, their multilingual family and networked communities.

It is well known that linguistic variants play a key role in the acquisition of language skills in the first, second or foreign language as well as in writing and translation processes and in general in communicative interactions. Thus, a major research goal is the systematic investigation of intra- and interlinguistic variation. Due to its complexity, its qualitative-quantitative analysis continues to be a challenging issue, but it seems to become more and more feasible thanks to both the possibility of compiling very large corpora and the availability of high-performing corpus-linguistic tools. The paper discusses a corpus-linguistic pilot study concerning the use of besser, am besten and das Beste as pragmatic markers in a cross-linguistic perspective. In particular, the analysis focusses on selected superlative and comparative constructions on the left periphery used for expressing advice. The data basis consists mainly of German and Italian comparable very large web corpora and, to a lesser extent, of bilingual sentence pairs drawn from parallel corpora. As will be shown, even restricting the analysis to a very small segment of microvariation, in both languages the modal constructions appear to be characterized by the combination of numerous overlapping and interplaying variants and by different tendencies in language use.

The largest and most important urban centres in Germany, Berlin and the Ruhr metropolitan area, share a very similar socio-historical and linguistic past. The vernaculars spoken in these regions are both High German varieties that have developed on Low German substratum. Thus, both varieties have emerged from a language-shift situation and have preserved a number of Low German features. Moreover, both varieties have lost in prestige during the process of massive immigration during the period of industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century. In such contexts, processes of “dialect levelling” are to be expected. Then as now both the Ruhr area and Berlin are hotspots of urban multilingualism and national and international mobility. This lends both linguistic settings a special dynamics and innovative potential. In the light of these parallels it is promising to compare linguistic structures of these varieties in order to gauge whether similar conditions yield similar linguistic developments. In this paper we investigate two syntactic phenomena which are highly salient both in the Berlin dialect and in Ruhr German. Using corpus data of spoken language we compare frequencies and formal features of (i) preposition-determiner cliticisation, and (ii) split pronominal adverbs in both varieties. As an overall result it can be stated that both phenomena show up more pronouncedly and more straigtforwardly in Ruhr German than in the Berlin dialect; thus it can be surmised that the latter follows the same path as the former, but has not yet reached the “final destination”.

In the study presented in this paper the use of a specific linguistic non-standard feature of German by 100 speakers representing three generations was analysed. The speakers originate from 25 different locations within the Middle Franconian dialect formation covering the middle-western parts of Germany. The feature analysed is the realisation of the Standard German phoneme /r/ as a voiceless velar or uvular fricative [x, χ] when following a short vowel and preceding a coronal obstruent. The comparison of how frequently the speakers use [χ] in different communicative contexts results in the observation of three types of speakers (i. e., [χ] users): The first type are dialect speakers mostly of the older generation (60 years and above) who use the variant in a traditional manner, namely when aiming at producing their best way to pronounce Standard German. According to these speakers [χ] forms part of the Standard German pronunciation norm. The second type is mainly represented by middle aged speakers (45–55 years) who use the feature in nearly all communicative contexts except when they have a dialect competency and are asked to produce their “strongest dialect”. Finally, the third type of speakers are mainly young people (17–23 years) who do not have any dialect competence. These speakers only use [χ] when they are asked to produce their “strongest dialect” and/or when they are talking to friends. On the basis of these results it is argued that, between these types of speakers and the generations they represent, a re-evaluation of the feature has taken place that may be classified as enregisterment, because speakers of the third type seem to use [χ] indexically in order to signal familiarity with their interlocutors on a interpersonal-social level.

Language change is generally regarded as change of linguistic items or of the language system. In this sense it might be described and explained by the observation of varying use and evaluation of language. Developments concerning the conditions of use and the characteristics of evaluation are rarely regarded as cases of language change itself. Recently, however, there seems to be a shift towards a wider understanding of language change, distinguishing change of structure, use and evaluation. This shift is accompanied by the distinction of subjective and objective language data. Studies that combine objective and subjective data enable a comprehensive view of the characteristics and causes of language change. The present paper uses data from speakers of two different age groups from the Grafschaft Bentheim district on the German-Dutch border to illustrate the mutual dependency of structural and evaluative language change. The investigation will be carried out in an apparent-time-analysis based on a translation tasks (as a type of objective data) and semantic differentials (subjective data). Although the attested differences between the age groups turned out to be comparatively small, there are correlations between the results regarding subjective and objective data to be stated.

In this paper, we explore the geolinguistic relationship between urban and rural areas through the conceptualisation and modeling of spatial topologies. Geolinguistic topologies concern the structure of the mutual linguistic relationship between localities. They can be defined either deductively or on the basis of empirical data and represent the linguistic similarities or distances between localities. We operationalise and apply several such topological models to Austrian data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA), a linguistic atlas documenting colloquial German using crowd-sourcing methods. The results are evaluated on the basis of statistical examination and of visualisations of the topological relationships predicted by the models. It is confirmed that linguistic similarity is determined both by geographical distance and by the distribution of population, but the exact relationship is complex: Not only do smaller geographic distances on the one hand and higher population numbers on the other hand bring about increased linguistic similarity; the relevance of these two factors for linguistic similarity varies with population size, too, such that linguistic relationships between cities are determined more by their size and less by their distance, while for smaller locations the opposite is true. Hence, no single topological model can be identified as superior; instead, the individual models emphasise different aspects of the linguistic relationship between urban and regional language usage.

This paper investigates discursive structures of spoken language in formal and informal communication settings (almost 62 hours of recorded time) of urban speakers in Austria’s two biggest cities Vienna and Graz and their surroundings. We focus on so-called bipartite “Operator-Skopus-Strukturen” (‘operator-scope-structures’), examining their pragmatic and discourse organising function within specific conversational situations. Our main aim is to offer in-depth analyses of these structures by characterising the mental and communicative status of such utterances. Starting out with a discussion of characteristics of spoken language research, especially by arguing for the replacement of the grammatical concept of sentences with the interactional concept of turn-constructional units, we address the phenomenon of discourse markers and Operator-Skopus-Strukturen in particular. This is followed by the description of our data set and the subsequent analyses and discussion of the selected examples. According to our findings, Operator-Skopus-Strukturen appear in both conversational settings and among all groups of speakers. We demonstrate that all speakers use the structures with the same pragmatic function of giving information to their conversation partner on how to interpret and understand the message behind the utterance. Within this scope, the speaker’s intention can vary depending on the conversation partner, the topic of the conversation or the situation.

In this paper, I investigate if phraseodidactic approaches can be transferred to grammar and vocabulary training in foreign language lessons to the same extent. Taking a usage-based approaches to foreign and second language didactics, it is shown that phraseologisms can be subjected to structural semantic analyses in foreign language lessons for learners to develop (i) phraseological language awareness and (ii) adequate phraseological language skills. On the basis of the analyses and the recommendations for basic and advanced phraseological vocabulary, a new approach of pragmatic-semantic construction didactics is introduced.