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Both in the academic literature as well in everyday life, the concepts “authenticity” and “norm” are used, but seldom explicitly defined. What is more, at first sight they might not even be regarded as linked. Synoptically considering the findings of three studies on various aspects of authenticity in relation to German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS), the paper explores how both concepts are connected. It will be shown that there are a number of linguistic and para-linguistic features that are perceived as indexical of authentic signing by deaf DGS signers. Drawing on the conceptual distinction between “standard language” (Standardsprache) and “high language” (Hochsprache) introduced by Gloy (1993), it will be argued that whilst these DGS features can be ascribed normative character corresponding to “high language”, these are not to be confused with “standard DGS”. Apart from newly introducing the concept of “norms of authenticity” (Authentizitätsnormen) in DGS, the paper offers new perspectives in that it will be demonstrated on the basis of sign language data that “standard language” and “high language” may – but in no way necessarily have to – correspond to the same linguistic realizations.

This paper focuses on so called syntactic projection phenomena in the German language. This term from the German Gesprächsforschung is used to define the fact that an utterance or part of it foreshadows another one. This paper aims at pointing out how such projection phenomena are consciously exploited for rhethorical purposes. This will be observed on the basis of excerpts from the Stuttgart 21 mediation talks. The linguistic analysis carried out in this paper will focus on syntactic projection phenomena involving the use of causal adverbial connectives deshalb and deswegen.

In Romance, epistemic sentence adverbs expressing certainty often reduce the truth value of the proposition. Examples such as Fr. sûrement and Sp. seguramente convey probability and even doubt rather than certainty. This phenomenon, called epistemic mitigation, is the topic of this paper. It will be shown that the intuitive first glance impression of epistemic mitigation masks a bundle of other factors: subjectivization, inferential mitigation, politeness, “better language”, and style. Italian is shown to keep to baseline subjectivization, while French, Portuguese, and Spanish tend to develop further inferential mitigation. The paper presents “ten facts” that explain the interplay of these factors at the levels of function and culture, and in both synchrony and diachrony. The paper thereby proposes a complex synthesis. Further empirical investigation will be required to test the facts and arguments presented.

Construction Grammar and research on phraseology have both commenced as purely synchronically oriented subfields of linguistics and are nowadays only starting to gain a historical dimension. Both disciplines put such units of language in the center of their research that I address in the present paper as formulaic patterns. The paper aims to discuss the possibilities and limits of multifold interactions between the two subfields of linguistics with regard to historical formulaic language. An overview of the state of the art in the field of diachronic Construction Grammar (Section 2) is followed by reflections on historical phraseology that can already partially offer some answers to the questions posed by the Construction grammar only now (cf. Section 3). The case studies (Section 4) provide an empirical basis for the preceding theoretical considerations and are based on the data of the Research Group HiFoS at the University of Trier. The data consist of about 32.000 fully annotated formulaic patterns from historical German texts since the beginning of the written tradition in the 8th century to 1650.

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.

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.

In 2014, the official risk advice in the UK regarding birth setting was altered given scientific evidence that for low-risk groups, home births are safer than hospital births. As hospital births were previously the de facto recommendation, and pregnant women in the UK now need to consider their birth setting options carefully, many go online, seeking advice about birth setting options from their peers. In this paper, I investigate how the hospital birth setting is constructed on an online forum where women seek advice on the relative merits of various birth settings, analysing posters’ constructions of the hospital birth setting using Foucauldian discourse analysis. Findings reveal that the hospital birth setting is characterised either as the best and safest place to ensure safe delivery due to on-site biomedical experts and technology, or it is constructed as dehumanising, involving unnecessary intervention-related risks to mother and baby. The majority of the threads are critical of the hospital birth setting. Besides these findings, this paper contributes methodologically to the study of birth settings as it adopts a cultural approach supported by discourse analysis, illustrating the metapragmatic context within which birth setting decisions are made. As women’s perspectives on the birth setting issue are in focus, findings regarding women’s satisfaction with the various options are valuable for healthcare professionals who support women with birth setting decisions, as well as obstetric and maternity practitioners in the hospital setting. The extent of posters’ critique of the hospital birth setting suggests the need for further research.

The relation between Swiss German dialects and Standard German has been subject to public and scholarly debates for over 100 years. Among the most frequently discussed points are the appropriateness of spoken Standard German in different contexts and the attitudes of Swiss people towards the two varieties. This paper summarises the results of a completed research project (Oberholzer in Vorb.), which surveyed language use and language attitudes in Swit-zerland for a specific group of speakers: pastors and priests working in German-speaking Switzerland. The paper shows how pastors and priests make use of the diglossic situation and the possibility to code-switch in Sunday services. The use of Standard German emerges as an important communicative resource in German-speaking Switzerland. In addition, real language use and intended language use match to a high degree; this shows the degree of language awareness of this particular group in a diglossic situation. Furthermore, a relatively new approach – the assumption that several mental models of High German coexist – helps to show differentiated language attitudes and to contradict some of the most common stereotypes regarding Standard German in German-speaking Switzerland. The attitudes towards Standard German in this study are significantly more positive than those observed in previous studies.

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.

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.

This paper explores Nigerian media’s deployment of modality on editorials on security challenges in Nigeria. The study examines how such impress on the ideological position of the media on the security issues in Nigeria. The study relates to how well Nigerian newspaper organisations attempted to reveal or mask security cases across different regions of the country through modal options. The editorials were sourced from The Punch and The Guardian (South-Western region), Vanguard and The Sun (East) and Leadership and Daily Trust (Northern Region) between 2014 and 2016. The frequencies and percentages of occurrences of these modality markers were examined and their implications were interpreted to reflect the attitudes and dispositions of the newspapers to security issues. Our findings show that the six newspapers expressed unbiased concerns over the Boko-Haram Insurgency whether or not the newspaper is situated in the northern region. However, the fact that certain security issues emanated from particular regions also prompted the kinds of modal markers employed by specific newspapers representing such regions. The Sun’s choices of modal indirectly expressed support for their plights and protests of the pro-Biafra agitators. The Punch’s choices of modal verbs portrayed President Buhari as sharing some ethnic affinity with herders.

In this paper, I study various manifestations of the grammatical category gender in address-related forms, above all in second person pronouns. It will be shown that its use is intricately connected with politeness – either because the gendered pronouns of address are themselves polite forms or because they can, under certain circumstances, convey nuances of social gender and concomitant connotations. The languages studied include, among others, Japanese, Arabic and other Semitic languages, as well as historical and dialectal varieties of German and Italian.

In rural speech communities, when speakers refer to persons, their family of origin is omnipresent, not only by passing on the name of the family patriarch, but also in the serialization of surname and first name and in the grammatical structures of reference forms (der Müller Peter, s Müllers Peter). This paper portrays the diachronic development of reference forms and elaborates on their preservation in synchronic reference systems. Furthermore, it explores a referent’s linguistic categorization into social groups and shows that different grammatical structures foreground certain distinctions, which can also overlap. In rural villages, inofficial house names, derived from the patriarch’s first name or profession, are still in use. When an individual marries into another house, the reference to this person can change accordingly.

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of a lesser known part of the written production of German writer and artist Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916–1991). The insight into his two speeches, delivered in English and self-translated into German, has two aims. First, to analyze their most peculiar linguistic features. Second, to highlight Hildesheimer’s linguistic awareness and his extensive activity with languages and with their variations. Thanks to his bilingualism, he used to explore language variations and often realized some in a very peculiar way. The features highlighted in the analysis concern above all literal equivalents, the translation of foreign and loan words, of metaphors and idioms. This aims to emphasize Hildesheimer’s ability to deal with languages and their qualities.

In this paper we will investigate the nature of deverbal nominals across languages. Deverbal nouns are typically classified according to their word-formation model: affixation and conver-sion. Our study will compare the word formation of deverbal nominals in Slavic (Croatian, Slovenian and Polish) and Romance languages (Italian, French and Spanish) in order to show (i) that affixation corresponds to a specific mode of morphological operations and (ii) that the differences and similarities between deverbal nominals of these two language families follow from the properties of the base verbs. Furthermore, our analysis will try to shed some light on the distinction between nouns and verbs. The paper comprises three major thematic parts. The first part briefly reviews the basic notions and theoretical assumptions of Generative Grammar regarding word formation. We have especially tried to explain those notions that we draw from Distributed Morphology. This part further exposes the theoretical framework that is used in this paper. In the second part, deverbal nominals in Slavic languages are analysed and de-scribed. We primarily investigate the Slavic languages, since in these languages morphology plays a larger role in the construction of deverbal nouns. The third part contains an investiga-tion of the phrasal structure of nominalizations across the Romance languages. We close the work with a general conclusion about the behaviour of deverbal nouns in these two groups of languages. We concentrate mainly on the differences between the phrasal architecture of nom-inalizations and correspondent verbal constructions.

Under the assumption of an individually grammatical semantics of word-formation types, this paper deals with the development of determinative compounding in the history of German from an inner-morphological perspective. Diachronically, the former research observed that German nouns have become “longer”, i. e. more complex (firstly been formulated by Wurzel 1996). Additionally, some morphological restrictions within nominal compounding have been documented for historical stages of German, but some of them cannot be attested in present-day German. This suggests a formally and semantically motivated, inner-morphological change which can be described in terms of grammaticalization theory. For this purpose, previ-ous results from historical word-formation and semantics will be combined with new observa-tions on morphological discontinuities in the history of German, especially by focussing on morphological restrictions from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Since this approach comprises various linguistic phenomena (such as the diachronic development of part of speeches, (de-)referencialization, definiteness etc.) and since morphological restrictions have merely not been documented empirically – neither for present-day nor for historical stages of German, the paper aims at sketching the most prominent lines of development from a theoreti-cal perspective, also by contrasting them with results from language typology, variational lin-guistics, and semantics. Additionally, the paper provides morpho-syntactical prospects for further theoretical and empirical research on historical morphology, also by conceiving word-internal language change as an integral part of the dynamics of morpho-syntactic structuring.

This paper examines everyday linguistic creativity and humour in Facebook status updates. Analysis of the updates, collected in 2011 from 60 UK users, shows how people achieve particular humorous tones through creative combinations of lexis and syntax, adding reinforcements such as innovative punctuation to tighten the construction of the update. The linguistic features they use are not in themselves novel, but the creativity lies in the individuals' effective selection and use of them. The language is often playful, but the whole performance has a serious purpose: people invite a sympathetic perspective on themselves. Humour, particularly self-deprecation, is used to construct a personal narrative and thus perform their identity. In short, the paper celebrates the capacity of ordinary people to seize opportunities for using language skilfully and creatively to represent themselves and their lives.

How are the concepts of charisma and authenticity jointly constructed in discourse, linked to each other, weighed against each other, played out – in order to build a social or (social) media identity of politicians and other public figures? This paper discusses these questions from a discourse and conversational linguistic perspective. Therefore, particular attention is paid to the self-attribution of charisma and the discursive negotiation of authenticity in connection with the former German Minister of Defense Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg. As an example, sequences from a talk show will be analyzed, which illustrate that the constructed (or demanded) authenticity can be categorized into three interdependent types: person-related (i), situation-related (ii) and ideal (iii) authenticity. Finally, it is postulated that the negotiation of an appropriate form of authenticity is also a question of power.

This paper examines conversational data of German everyday narratives in audiovisual footage of face-to-face encounters and in log files of Facebook’s instant messenger. The qualitative analysis is focused on the interjection boah as a means of narrative activity, paying special attention to its multimodal form and its media dependent functionality. The preliminary findings show that boah is used to signal to the communication partner the utterer’s noticing of something unexpected: be it an observed object or event, a communicative action, or a recalled memory. On a phonetical level, it is possible to distinguish two forms of boah: a marked form and an unmarked form. Which of these two forms is instantiated in interaction depends on the intensity of unexpectedness (or the enactment of unexpectedness). In everyday narratives, the marked form is often found to be expressed by the recipient. In contrast to the face-to-face data, our instant messenger data shows that, here, almost without exception boah is only used by the storyteller. This conspicuous finding can be explained by the specific temporality of instant messaging which results from the structural media conditions that instant messengers or e. g. internet relay chats similarly impose on the use of communicative means like interjections. We finally discuss how this dialectic relation between communicative function and mediality prompts further analyses of other communicative means, for example, the pattern of everyday narratives itself.

The issue of a bilingual advantage on executive functions has been a hotbed for research and debate. Brazilian studies with the minority language Hunsrückisch have failed to replicate the finding of a bilingual advantage found in international studies with majority languages. This raises the question of whether the reasons behind the discrepant results are related to the language’s minority status. The goal of this paper was to investigate the bilingual advantage on executive functions in studies with minority languages. This is a literature review focusing on state of the art literature on bilingualism and executive functions; as well as a qualitative analysis of the selected corpus in order to tackle the following questions: (1) is there evidence of a bilingual advantage in empirical studies involving minority languages? (2) are there common underlying causes for the presence or absence of the bilingual advantage? (3) can factors pertaining to the language’s minority status be linked to the presence or absence of a bilingual advantage? The analysis revealed that studies form a highly variable group, with mixed results regarding the bilingual advantage, as well as inconsistent controlling of social, cognitive and linguistic factors, as well as different sample sizes. As such, it was not possible to isolate which factors are responsible for the inconsistent results across studies. It is hoped this study will provide an overview that can serve as common ground for future studies involving the issue of a bilingual advantage with speakers of minority languages.

The starting point of this paper is the observation of an unequal frequency of the additive particle auch in German as compared to the paucity of its French counterpart aussi, in L1 and L2 developmental data as well as in adult native speakers' production, which leads to an investigation of the reasons for the observed difference in language use. The paper brings together findings on the structure and discourse integration of utterances containing additive particles (translation equivalents of also) in written sources from French and German and in oral production data from speakers of French and Italian, German and Dutch. Next to data from native speakers, developmental data from learners of French and German (as L1 and L2) are shown to be relevant sources of information about the integration of the optional particles into utterances and at the discourse level. The developmental data reveal a difference between Romance and Germanic languages, concerning not only the frequency of additive particles, but also their interaction with early markers of assertion: auch/ook function as precursors of the assertive value, in competition with the expression of assertion through finiteness, whereas no such interaction is attested for aussi/anche. A comparison of native speakers' preferential choices concerning the information unit highlighted to enhance discourse cohesion confirms the differences between the two language families: speakers of Germanic languages preferentially use particles and Verum Focus, i. e. anaphoric links operating on the assertion value of the relevant utterances, whereas speakers of Romance languages choose anaphoric links operating on the utterance's descriptive content (entities and predicate). Although additive particles across languages share a similar basic meaning, only the Germanic ones are integrated in a system of assertion-related items that push their speakers to apply a discourse perspective oriented towards a comparison of assertions.

The goal of this paper is to offer a cross-linguistic analysis of the most commonly occurring additive focus adverbs used in Italian, French and English – namely anche, aussi and also – on the basis of a corpus of written texts. The corpus used in this paper consists of comparable online news in Italian, French and English amounting to approximately 750000 words. In line with previous findings, our results show that there are important quantitative and qualitative differences between It. anche, Fr. aussi and E. also. These items differ not only in their overall frequency of use but also in the specific syntactic configurations in which they occur when they associate with the Subject of a canonical sentence. These differences are partly enhanced by the fact that this paper concentrates on a non-prototypical configuration, i. e. on the cases in which the canonical Subject coincides with a new entity while the Predicate is maintained.

The way linguistic messages are “packaged” in political discourse often reflects evidentially-based criteria and, notably, the intention of the politician to make his epistemic commitment more or less manifest in relation to the type of content proffered to the receiver. The present paper analyzes the evidential function of presupposition and assertion (apud Masia 2017) in a corpus of English, French and Italian political speeches, with the aim of highlighting how these units of information structure are strategically resorted to by politicians to modulate their commitment to more or less challengeable types of content. Data show that more challengeable content types (i. e. attacks and self-praises) are likely to be encoded as presupposition, which reduces the speaker’s commitment to their truth; in contrast, less challengeable content types (i. e. neutral/informative and stance-taking) are more likely to be asserted, with the speaker showing stronger commitment to their truth.

This paper is a contrastive analysis which explores how the English Hollywood film titles are translated into German and Thai. The purpose of the study is to answer the following questions: 1) What is the difference between the length of the film titles in the original English version and in their German and Thai translation; 2) Which translation methods can be found in the translation of the Hollywood film titles into German and Thai?; 3) Which constructions can be found in the translated film titles in German and in Thai in comparison to the original ones? The study is based on a corpus of 900 film titles including 300 of Hollywood film titles and their translation in German and Thai. It is found that the length of the film titles is between one and twelve words. While film titles in both European languages contain mostly two words, the use of four-word titles occurs most frequently in the Thai translation. 10 translation strategies are found in total. In German, the original English titles are mostly kept. In contrast to German, the titles are mostly totally changed in Thai. Regarding the structure of the film titles, there are totally 7 categories. Nominal phrase is the most frequently found construction of film titles in all these three analyzed languages.

The dissertation project Regionale Sprache als Identitätsmarker. Zur Konstruktion sozialer Bedeutung bei Hamburger Fußballfans ‘Regional language as identity marker. The construction of social meaning among football fans in Hamburg’ examines different practices of identity construction of fans from the two football clubs FC St. Pauli and Hamburger Sportverein (HSV). By analysing a group interview with HSV fans, this paper investigates the potential of identification with regional language. Identity constructions can be identified in the following three aspects: (a) the conceptualisation of the local substandard, (b) the speakers’ positioning concerning the use of the local substandard and (c) language attitudes.

This paper addresses how morphosyntactic variation stemming from the Alemannic regional variety is perceived, evaluated, and judged in written and spoken language. Based on data from a questionnaire and speeded grammaticality judgments, this study examines which grammatical variants are salient to the listener as a function of speaker accent (regional vs. standard) and listener background (students from different school types and cities). The results show that, in addition to the regional morphosyntax, regional accent co-determines grammaticality judgements, in particular for naive listeners. Expert listener (students of language and literature) judgements are less affected by speaker accent, and appear to follow their subjective normative expectations concerning the prescriptive syntax usage. The most normative judgments on both syntactic and phonological levels were observed for dialectal variants within a group of high school students, despite being active users of the Alemannic variety. This result is a likely consequence of an explicit discard of dialect usage during classroom interactions.

The aim of the present paper is twofold: first, to introduce the problem represented by socalled "Verb-Second (V2) relative clauses" in German, a phenomenon which occurs exclusively in spoken language, thereby recapitulating the arguments put forth in the literature for their paratactic categorization in light of Den Besten's (1983) assumptions on the structural properties of V2 (e.g. Gärtner 2001, 2002; Den Dikken 2005; Endriss/Gärtner 2005); in the second place, to propose an alternative analysis based on the following postulates: (i) such constructions, which are generally classified as belonging to "noncanonical" phenomena of spoken German, are neither to be ascribed to a deficient syntactic planning nor can they be defined as "false relatives" (cf. Ravetto 2006), but are rather part of a specific syntactic pattern with speaker-oriented implications that is directly related to the syntax-speaker's attitude interface; (ii) these structures display features shared by both asyndetically coordinated clauses (e.g. their word-order and, in principle, the surface form of the d-element introducing them) and standard relative constructions, but a paratactic analysis in classical terms (namely one in which it is assumed that clause1 and clause2 are two conjuncts of a coordinative pattern playing the same syntactic role) does not explain most of the distributional properties that "V2 relative clauses" exhibit. The conclusions of the analysis proposed in this paper rest upon evidence of prosodic, syntactic and semantic-pragmatic nature.

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, it aspires to discuss some general considerations regarding the treatment of word-forming elements in a bilingual dictionary. It is argued that not few lexicographic decisions are to be made rather independently of fluctuating linguistic postulates and that the user aspect and the function of the respective dictionary should be paid special attention to. Second, the paper examines the quantity and quality of the information provided on affixes in two German-Czech dictionaries. The analysis focuses on the entry components terminology, spelling, pronunciation, input and output units, sense distinction, translation equivalents, examples, cross-references, usage labels and productivity as well as on selectional criteria and information on affixes in the outside matter. The analysis reveals that the dictionaries under scrutiny show considerable weaknesses with respect to the information provided. Third, the paper briefly describes the treatment of the German prefix/circumfix Ge-...(-e) in the emerging Large German-Czech Academic Dictionary, an output of a project pursued at the Institute of Germanic Studies, Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles University in Prague. It is shown how contrastive analysis can be supplemented by a corpus-based view using new corpus-linguistic tools.

In this paper, we investigate the form, salient patterns and core functions of word-level total reduplication in Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Using a multi-genre corpus of 469 million words, we extract total reduplication (TR) candidates into an SQL database, manually filter them, and perform concordance search to identify the patterns and functions. Data analysis reveals nine patterns and eleven functions of TR and compares their relative frequency in each variety. The functions of TR are mapped into two broad categories: morphological and semantic/pragmatic. Results show an interesting variation in terms of top functions being favored by the two varieties. While TR is favored by CA to express serial ordering, MSA is noticed to favor it to express intensification. The empirical findings of this study provide a reliable quantification of the status of TR in CA and MSA which is rather difficult to obtain by theoretical means: on the one hand, TR in Arabic is not as productive as in other languages such as Indonesian. On the other hand, it is more common in CA than in MSA because the latter usually resorts to using loose phrases to express the same concepts expressed by TR in CA.

This paper examines transparent and non-transparent diminutive forms in Akan and the range of meanings associated with each group, as presented in Appah/Amfo (2011). It takes the discussion of Akan diminutives a step further by showing that some of the meanings communicated by transparent diminutive forms are dependent on the context, including the semantic properties of the base to which the diminutive morpheme is attached. In addition, it demonstrates that even though the non-transparent diminutive forms communicate diminu-tive meanings and contain what appears to be the Akan diminutive morpheme, synchronical-ly they are formally unanalyzable since the putative diminutive morpheme cannot be deline-ated from the base. Also, it is argued that these forms have come from a lexicalization pro-cess that resulted in the reanalysis of the base+diminutive morpheme as a single unanalyza-ble unit. It is observed that the process of lexicalization could have been facilitated by a number of factors, including the loss of the bases from the language, which meant that the putative base could only be found in the context of their diminutive use. Finally, the lexical-ization process is schematized using formalism from Construction Morphology.

In this paper we propose to examine and contrast the functioning of five adverbs in contemporary French (sérieusement and honnêtement) and Spanish (honestamente, seriamente and en serio). Our aim is threefold:– To verify the different uses of honnêtement and sérieusement in French, and to compare them with the uses of honestamente, seriamente and en serio in Spanish.– To justify the existence of these uses in terms of their different properties.– To examine the origin and historical evolution of these uses and to explain their common origin as a result of a process of subjectification.

This paper investigates the history of - mente parlando , a construction that can be used in modern Italian either as a style disjunct (e. g. rigorosamente parlando ‘strictly speaking’) or as a domain adverbial (e. g. economicamente parlando ‘economically speaking’). This functional difference will be accounted for synchronically as a case of constructional polysemy, with different semantic types of adjectives (mainly relational vs non-relational) occurring in the - mente slot leading to a different reading of the whole construction. Diachronically, the constructional polysemy appears to be the result of a metonymic shift from the older STYLE reading to the newer DOMAIN interpretation. A corpus-based investigation will analyze the syntactic, pragmatic and discursive conditions from which the different uses arose. While both variants are attested from the 14 th century on, a massive expansion of domain adverbials formed by - mente parlando is observed only in the first half of the 19 th century, a tendency which can be explained as a new fashion for “rationalist” discourse organization and which corresponds to similar evolutions described for 19 th -century English, French and Spanish.

The aim of this paper is to establish how the French adverb visiblement has evolved, and to find the most accurate translations of this adverb in Spanish. Dictionaries tend to give literal translations, whereby visiblement is translated as visiblemente. A diachronic analysis of this adverb will enable us to see whether they are indeed false-friends. In Old French and in Pre-classical French, it was used as a clause element adverb, before being used as a disjunct adverb from the 17th century onwards. Eventually, it goes on to appear by itself, or, accompanying an affirmative, like oui, in the 20th century. We will demonstrate that the adverb undergoes a process of pragmaticalisation as described by Dostie (2004), with the adverb becoming more subjective, going from a literal sense, to a disjunct or pragmatic adverb. Nevertheless, in Spanish, since Old Spanish until nowadays, there are almost no examples other than its use as a clause element adverb. That’s the reason why we cannot propose a literal translation of the adverb.

This paper will address the predicative nature of manner adverb(ial)s and of three types of sentence adverbs (subject-oriented, modal, and evaluative) in Italian. Predication often becomes overt by means of morphological correlates. Is it possible to find any such evidence with invariable adverbs? To unveil their predicative nature, a procedure will be suggested in which two sentences, one with a -mente adverb, the other with its cognate adjective (a) share the content morphemes (identity of the signifiant) and (b) entail each other (identity of the signifié as regards semantic roles). A number of such pairs will be discussed, examples of which include: Intelligentemente, Leo intervenne ‘Cleverly, Leo intervened’ and Leo fu intelligente a intervenire ‘Leo was clever to intervene’. We aim to ascertain if the argument structure of the adjective and the semantic role(s) which it assigns can shed light on the very same properties of the cognate adverb.

In this paper evidential and modal adverbs will be studied, such as French apparemment , evidemment , visiblement , Italian apparentemente , evidentemente , ovviamente , and Spanish aparentemente , evidentemente and visiblemente . The development of their signification will be discussed, including German adverbs like offensichtlich . In these means of expression, the functional-semantic categories evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of insecurity concerning the transmitted information. Then adverbials with a special structure (preposition + article + nominal form of a verb) will be analysed, and we will examine if they behave in the same way.

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.

This paper examines the forms and functions of address terms employed among staff members and the language ideologies that inform the use of these address forms in a southwestern Nigerian university. The study is guided by Anchimbe’s (2011a) categorisation of address forms, and theories on language ideologies. The data are collected through participant-observation, oral and written interviews, and these are analysed qualitatively. The analysis reveals that forms of address used in the university include academic titles, official titles, kinship terms, social titles, nicknames, first names, surnames, and different combinations of these address forms. The address terms are derived from English, Yoruba, Nigerian Pidgin and other indigenous Nigerian languages. The address forms are informed by postmodernist and functionalist language ideologies which are influenced by cultural ideologies where interactants’ cultures play significant roles in the choice of address terms.

International audience; Ausgangspunkt und Problemstellung Ziel des Aufsatzes ist es, bestimmte caused-motion-Konstruktionen auf ihre Idiomatizität hin zu prüfen und ihre Anbindung an die Phraseologie kritisch zu hinterfragen. Vor diesem Hinter-grund lässt sich die Untersuchung theoretisch-methodologisch zwischen drei Forschungstradi-tionen verorten. Dem Schwerpunkt dieses thematischen Heftes entsprechend, wird an erster Stelle die Konstruk-tionsgrammatik in ihrer Goldbergschen Prägung (Goldberg 1995, 2006) bemüht: Es soll die These exemplifiziert werden, nach der hinter den ausdrucksseitig sehr unterschiedlichen Mög-lichkeiten, im Deutschen Kausativität auszudrücken, eine gemeinsame abstrakte Struktur vor-liegt, die konstruktionsgrammatisch und zum Teil idiomatisch-phraseologisch gedeutet werden kann. Diese Arbeit reiht sich auch in gewisser Hinsicht in die ‚traditionelle' Forschung zur Idiomati-zität (Burger 1973; Burger/Buhofer/Sialm 1982; Fleischer 1997; Burger 2010; Burger/Dobro-vol'skij/Kühn/Norrick 2007) ein, mit ihren drei graduell aufgefassten Definitionskriterien vor-geformter Strukturen:; This paper aims to analyze German caused-motion constructions such as jn aus dem Bett klingeln from both a phraseological and constructional perspective. Section 1 shows how the traditional definition of phraseologisms is nowadays challenged by new developments in construction grammar, especially within Goldberg’s framework. Section 2 focuses on the various possibilities existing in German to express causativity and proposes a continuum from mere morphological signs to the constructions under consideration here. Section 3 exemplifies the cognitive inscription of these causative constructions through the underlying frame semantic level. In section 4 we finally argue that several aspects of these structures, such as lexical constraint, figuration, and productivity suggest that some kinds of constructions should be integrated, at least peripherally, into the phraseological system of the given language.

The paper at hand presents the results of a substudy from a 3-year research project carried out by the Bern University of Teacher Education, investigating how student teachers in their 1st semester deal with the content of other students’ texts when writing peer text feedback without guidance. In this study six future teachers were asked to substantiate their comments in retrospective verbalizations (see Linnemann 2017: 339) immediately after having written their text feedback. The transcriptions of the verbalizations were evaluated through thematic qualitative text analysis (see Kuckartz 2012). Whilst the result presentation is mainly category based, some case related results are also singled out, with a view to deriving observations for higher education teaching.

People with disabilities often live in local communities primarily made up of people without disabilities: in the absence of a geographic community of people with disabilities, the internet becomes a valuable tool for connecting individuals across both local and global contexts. The power of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to allow individuals to interact both locally and globally has been well-studied in linguistics (e. g. Baron 2008; Page 2012), and this work has included the discourse of e-health (e. g. Hamilton 1998; Locher 2006, 2013) and the online discourse of people with disabilities (Al Zidjaly 2011, 2015). Less research has been done, however, on the implications of online discourse for understanding people with disabilities as a linguistic community.This paper argues that the community of people with disabilities can be viewed from a linguistic perspective as an imagined community of practice: an imagined community, because members recognize their common belonging even if they do not interact locally (Anderson 1983); a community of practice, because members use recognizable, if not identical, disability practices and engage in shared sense-making (Eckert 2006; Eckert/McConnell-Ginet 1992). This understanding of the community of people with disabilities is evidenced in online blogs by wheelchair users.A close discourse analysis of the blog posts shows shared sense-making around disability practices, even though individual bloggers’ practices may vary according to their specific strategies for accommodation. In their posts, the bloggers construct their disability identities in terms of practice and imagine themselves to belong to a community that is distinguished by disability practice. The analysis reveals shared sense-making: in particular, the way that the bloggers position themselves in opposition to the societal discourse that people with disabilities are an inspiration to people without them. In this way, the bloggers demonstrate their membership within an imagined community of practice made up of people with disabilities.

In folk linguistic studies people provide information about their perception and evaluation of languages and their speakers. In so doing, they use different strategies of verbalization. Frequently, they conceptualize space, boundaries, and crossings in drawing on mental concepts as metaphors and metonymies. This paper shows, based on a study on language attitudes in German-speaking Switzerland, the strategies laypeople use to organize their mental (language) spaces. For this purpose, I shall discuss recent data, collected via questionnaires and interviews, which illustrate how language attitudes are conceptualized and verbalized through metaphors and metonymies, and how the relationship between language and speaker is established through the process of indexicalization and iconization.

The current paper is an attempt at providing an ethnographic description of Tanzanian Ngoni access rituals (greetings) considering verbal and visual aspects of these communicative rou-tines. Three methods of data collection were used, namely: role-play, semi-structured inter-view, and observation. The role-plays were used in order to see how the Ngoni apply their knowledge of this kind of access ritual still acquired in the course of growing up in their communities. Role-plays were recorded with a digital camcorder after the interviews had tak-en place. Semi-structured interviews were meant to provide insights into diachronic develop-ments such as how the expression of politeness through greetings may have changed. Obser-vation method was meant to capture behavioural patterns shown during greeting exchanges and notes were taken immediately thereafter. The main findings are that due to pervasive con-tact between Ngoni and Swahili, greetings tend to be brief today and there is a widespread use of code-switching by all age groups. The tendency to prefer Swahili is viewed by older mem-bers of the community as lack of respect whereas the younger generations regard the use of Swahili as more appropriate and as a reflection of social changes that have been taking place in the community.

This paper presents a lexical commentary of the map 363 (the) door published in vol. 2 of the Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Lorraine Romane.Our analysis shows that the Lorraine area is characterized by the preservation of the Old and Middle French binomial porte ‘great door, gate’/huis ‘small door’– west of Lorraine – heus –the rest of the area –; the type heus, particular to the Lorraine region, goes back to a Latin *OSTIUM akin to O:STIUM used in written Classical Latin. Heus

The present investigation explores the language definitions (i. e. the language ontologies) that have emerged in the field of sociolinguistics. In general, it examines three types of sociolin-guistic studies: Labovian sociolinguistics (Labov 1972), the Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz/Hymes 1964) and Conversation Analysis (Sacks 1992). Firstly, it offers an account on the ontology of language developed by Chomskyian linguistics (1986) which is used as a starting point to contrast the three sociolinguistics’ language ontologies. Then, the paper pre-sents Labov’s ontology of language (Labov 1977), the criticism that it has faced and examines proposals that aim to integrate social facts and linguistic structure. With regard to the Ethnog-raphy of Communication, accounts about its ontology of language (Hymes 1974, 1986) and its ontology of culture (Sapir 1921; Hymes 1972) are presented and a possible explanation about the relationship between language and culture is offered. With respect to Conversation Analysis, its ontology of language is presented (Ochs et al. 1996) as well as its analytic in-sight and an account about grammar as an interactional resource is given. The final section proposes that, for these three types of sociolinguistics, “language” is a social, functional and behavioural entity which is socially and behaviourally structured. “Language” transmits social meanings, reflects the social order and expresses the identity of its speakers.

This paper investigates the translation of pejoratives referring to persons. The corpus is comprised of literary dialogues in the collection of short stories about the First World War by Miroslav Krleža. The dialogues describe the relationship between officers and soldiers. Soldiers are not well prepared for the war and are the trigger of officers’ anger. Therefore, the dialogues are rich with emotionally loaded outbursts resulting in swearwords. Swearwords relate to the intellect and skills of soldiers, and can be divided into absolute and relative pejoratives. Absolute pejoratives refer to the words that carry the negative meaning as the basis, whereas relative pejoratives are those that gain the negative meaning in a certain context. They derive from names of occupations and zoonyms. The analysis comprises the emotional embedment of swearwords, their metaphoric character and the strategies of translation from the Croatian into the German language.

Focusing on the social situation of German Sign Language (DGS) and their users, the article explores to what extent Ammon’s model of social forces that determine what is standard in language can also be applied to visual spatial languages. The paper demonstrates that Am-mon’s model is implicitly modality bound and as such cannot fully account for the situation of DGS-using community which largely consists of L2-signers. Although an alternative mod-el is not explicitly offered, the author shows that the model of social forces will need to be extended in order to be modality independent, i.e. applicable to both spoken and signed lan-guages and their communities.

Mey’s (2001) action-theoretic societal pragmatics known as pragmatic act theory nurtures the idea that the explanatory movement in pragmatic theories should go from the outside in (i. e. from actual situational contexts into prior contexts encoded in the utterances used). Kecskes’s (2010, 2013) socio-cognitive approach challenges Mey’s position, and argues that the explan-atory movement should go in both directions: from the outside in and from the inside out. To challenge Mey’s view and to nurture his own position, Kecskes resorts to a dialectical socio-cognitive perspective on human communication (Kecskes 2003, 2008), and uses situation-bound utterances as evidence to support his theory. In this paper, I will provide an overview of both theories and argue in favor of Mey’s position.

Academic discourse relies on a common register that reaches across disciplinary boundaries. This so-called common language of academia includes terms denoting common objects and actions of academic work in the fields of knowing, understanding and learning, of perceiving and observing, of designing and devising as well as of writing and speaking in their many different forms. In German academic discourse, this common register is highly figurative, often creating problems in bilingual contexts as well as during students’ acquisition of academic discourse. This paper presents an ongoing project to identify, describe and categorize the lexical dimension of this common language of academia by means of corpus-linguistic analyses. It presents operators to distinguish said register from non-academic German as well as discipline-specific discourse. Following these filtering procedures, the figurativity of the identified items is discussed in terms of their spatial-haptic, optical-visual, mental-cognitive and acoustic-linguistic character. Prominent cases of ambiguity, when specific lexical items can be used and read as expressing two figurative aspects, are also identified.