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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.

This paper discusses the relation between newer approaches of intercultural rhetoric research (and specifically its distinction between “big” and “small” cultures) and the academic literacies approach which assumes that local institutional and individual biographic factors influence decisively the development of an individual academic writing competence. Based on this discussion it claims that the “research article” does not constitute a single genre but rather a genre colony consisting of members (genres) which differ according to linguistic, disciplinary, institutional and individual affiliations and status of writers and which are connected through a system of family resemblances. This claim is exemplified through a qualitative case study of two German academic texts, a “professional” published paper and a students’ seminar paper. By applying a multi-level text analysis combining genre analysis and rhetorical structure analysis, it is shown that although the two texts exhibit several similarities in terms of their genre structure, their rhetorical macro- and micro-structures differ significantly. These results are interpreted as a corollary of the different institutional and hierarchical positions of the authors and as a single-case support for the initial claim of the paper.

This paper is concerned with the origin of the so-called Old High German primary umlaut. Even if this question has long been discussed, debate on this subject is still open. It seems however that scholars, though not agreeing with each other, mostly accept the standard theory's assumption of the existence of two kinds of short e in Old High German, of which the one derived from an umlauted germ. */a/ is taken to be higher than the one derived directly from germ. */e/, usually denoted by 〈ë〉 in handbooks and grammars. While thinking that there is indeed no reason to doubt that German had at a certain time set up a phonological opposition between, respectively, [e] and [ε], the apparent phonetic paradox of the rise of the former and more closed vowel starting from an ancient very open [a] still remains: how could [a] develop into [e] without running across the [ε]? This paper gives a new phonetic solution to this problem, which is able to account for such enfants terribles as OHG thanchandi/thenkendi (< germ. *þankijanđ-), both found in the same manuscript.

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.

This paper sets out to study pragmatic strategies of diagnostic news delivery in Nigerian hospitals, an area that has received extremely little attention in the linguistic literature. It ultimately aims to see how these strategies are similar to or are different from those used in Western hospitals, especially as studied by Maynard (1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1992, 2003, 2004). The hospitals sampled were stratified into teaching, state-government owned and private hospitals, and a random selection of five hospitals from each group was made. Data were collected through tape recordings, and personal observation of hospital interactions. The analysis of data was based on insights from Levinson's (1979) notion of activity type and Maynard's (1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1992, 2003, 2004) devices of diagnostic news delivery. The findings reveal that three strategies are used to declare diagnostic news. Two of these are the main strategies identified by Maynard, namely asserting the condition and citing the evidence, but the third, mitigating the blunt news through veils and hedges, is largely peculiar to Nigerian hospitals. The paper concludes that a study of pragmatic strategies of diagnostic news delivery contributes to a better understanding of hospital interactions, and provides insights into doctors' verbal outputs in diagnostic meetings.

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 present paper offers a comparative presentation of the possibilities and limits of five of the most important large digital corpora on present day German which are currently publicly available (Leipzig, DWDS, COSMAS, COSMAS tagged and TIGER). The aim of this article is to put at the researcher's disposal a comprehensive survey of the possibilities for using automatic search devices in the fields of lexicology, morphology, word formation and syntax. Special attention is given to the comparison of the performance and user friendliness of the proposed search options and analysis tools (lemmatisation, cooccurrence analysis, etc.). The information given in this paper is condensed in several comparative synopses which are individually understandable to a reader who does not want to have recourse to the full text.

Investigating and teaching collocations. The starting point of the paper is the observation that foreign language learners translate collocations literally from their L1. Collocations are conceived here as phrasal units which can be placed between free word groups and idioms. The paper focuses on metaphoric collocations, i.e. with polysemic collocator. In this type of collocation the collocator is used in a metaphoric meaning, while it appears in denotative meaning in free word groups. Contrasting types of collocation are presented in a model. Data from empirical research show that foreign language learners of a certain level regard metaphoric collocations as marked and transfer them less often than non-metaphoric collocations. The paper supports the need for pointing out the significance of collocations even for beginners.

Although Swiss dialects of German are widely used in everyday communication, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of transcribed spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for dialectological, historical and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source, and summarise a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to stimulate the use of the corpus for dialectological research.

Whereas in Standard High German (SHG) there is only one comparative particle, in Swiss German Dialects (SGD) different lexemes may fulfill the function of a comparative particle: (1) SHG: Sie ist grösser als ich SGD: Si isch grösser als / as / weder / wan / wie ig 'She is bigger than me' The present paper describes the geographical distribution of the comparative particles in the Swiss German area in contexts such as (1). Whereas in some small areas only one comparative particle is found, in the rest of the Swiss German speaking area several competing variants coexist. The data are taken from the third questionnaire of the Syntactic Atlas of Swiss German Dialects, where three different comparative constructions have been investigated. A sociolinguistic analysis of the data reveals differences in the use of the particles: On the one hand, older people tend to use only one comparative particle, whereas younger people show a higher degree of variation. Moreover, older people tend to use the particle weder, in contrast to younger people who tend to use the particle wie. On the other hand, higher educated people use more than one comparative particle, whereas less educated people tend to use one variant only. The analysis of two other constructions also shortly mentioned in the paper shows that syntactic factors have an impact on variant selection, too.

This paper turns Post-Foucauldian discourse linguistics upside down to explore the situatedness of discourses as their material possibility condition. In order to do so I firstly clarify Foucault's notion of discourse oscillating between the poles of macro (knowledge order) and micro (material event). In a second step recent media discourse analysis is discussed as an attempt to understand "la matérialité de l'énoncé" (Foucault 1969: 135) as a possibility condition of discourses. In a third step I propose an approach that conceptualizes the possibility conditions of communicational acting systematically between media technologies and communicative genres. The media linguistic notion of Forms of Communication (cf. Domke 2010a; Holly 2011a; Meiler 2013a) promisingly conceptualizes these conditions as enabling communication, hence discourse in situ. Following this, in a fourth step three generic examples are analyzed from the related position of semiological pragmatics (cf. Jäger 2008; Rehbein 2001). By these three examples (taken from a corpus of communication in public space) the paper demonstrates how different Forms of Communication shape specific possibilities to communicate different types of discursive knowledge (and vice versa): verified, temporarily relevant, and contested knowledge. It is also worked out in which way the production conditions of each Form of Communication determine how accessible a discourse is. In this respect, public space and mass media appear to be remarkably opposed to one another.

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.

This paper is a contrastive description of the causal grammatical structures mentioned in five grammar books of German and four grammar books of Italian. The study is inspired by the results of a previous empirical research upon the causal connectors denn, weil, da in German and perché, poiché, siccome in Italian, which has demonstrated that there are many similarities, but without any complete correspondence between the analyzed German and Italian grammatical structures. The purpose of this work is to verify if this thesis holds true not only for a limited number of connectors, but also for the whole system of German and Italian causal structures. The study is based upon a broad concept of causality, seen as the question about "why and with which purpose do events und states happen and verify". It focuses not only on the grammatical structures which are traditionally defined causal, but also on final and conditional structures. The results of the research are summarized at the end of the paper with the expectation that they will be helpful to the didactic transmission of the German causal structures with Italian learners.

The present paper deals with the problem of the pragmatic equivalence between the German and the Polish modal particles. The author focuses on two pairs of particles, which have got an identical invariant meaning, such as the German particle aber and the Polish particle ale(ż) or the German particle ja and the Polish particle no. The correspondence and the no-correspondence of the use of this particles in the same sentence and situations context is considered with reference to their invariant meaning and to the position of the Polish particles in the sentence. The paper shows, that the pragmatic no-equivalence can result from the difference in the positions of the particles in German and Polish. The position of the Polish modal particles can be identical to the position of their homonyms in opposite to the German. The fact means that the position of the modal particles in Polish doesn't have a function of the categorization for speech parts, but it can influence on a semantic-pragmatic extension of the modal function of the particle.

This paper discusses the semantic content of syntactic dependencies. We assume that syntactic dependencies play a central role in the process of semantic interpretation. They are defined as selective functions on word denotations. Among their properties, special attention will be paid to their ability to make interpretation co-compositional and incremental. To describe the semantic properties of dependencies, the paper will be focused on two particular linguistic tasks: word sense disambiguation and attachment resolution. The second task will be performed using a strategy based on automatic acquisition from corpora.

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.

This investigation aims to outline the contribution that Romanic languages had to the finalization of the configuration of the modern Macedonian language, both in terms of common language and of technical terms. More specifically, the paper aims: 1) to identify Romanic idioms that have influenced to some extent the Macedonian language, either indirectly (through another language such as French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese) or directly (through Romanian – Dacoromanian and Aromanian, or through Meglenoromanian); 2) to show the specific historic context and the means through which various elements from the Romanic linguistic sphere were imported into Macedonian; 3) to evaluate the quantitative share of loans (in vocabulary and terminology); 4) to indicate the areas of activity that have been affected by the infiltration of Romanic lexical items.Even if loans from Romanic languages are not very frequent in the common standard language, the Macedonian language being relatively conservative and refractory with regards to non-Slavic influences, these are perceived as a sign of emancipation and modernity, in contrast to the old Turkish basis, the existence of the Romanic lexical and terminological basis also illustrating the tendency for this language to differentiate itself from its two Slavic neighbors, the Bulgarian and the Serbian languages. At the same time, the infusion of Romanic words and terms has contributed significantly to the “modernization” of the Macedonian language, particularly with regards to its meta-dialectal unification and to its coming closer to major languages of great circulation and great cultural prestige.

Based on where and how phonological rules apply, studies in Lexical Phonology (Mohanan 1986; Kiparsky 1985; Pulleyblank 1986; etc.) distinguish between two levels in the phonology; namely, lexical and post-lexical. At the post-lexical level, the various phonological rules normally require particular domains, without which they fail to apply. The question that follows is where and how we define these domains. Considering Akan Noun-Noun and Noun-Adjective phrasal word (compound) constructions in prosodic phonology (Selkirk 1986, Nespor and Vogel 1986 and Hayes 1989; etc.), this paper touches on some aspects of the prosody-syntax interface on the idea that the domain of a post-lexical rule is drawn from the prosodic component, an intermediate phase of interface analysis. The rules that come to bear are tonal (i.e. H-Deletion, H-Insertion and Boundary assimilation) and segmental (i.e. Prefix deletion and Diphthong simplification) ones that apply on the dictates of particular prosodic domain attainment. Thus, this paper argues that the syntactic structure influences these phonological rules, but indirectly through the prosodic structure (Inkelas 1989). Finally, the paper claims that with the prosodic domains occurrences are better defined and accounted for.

The genitive singular of the weak masculine nouns appears in three non-standard variations in addition to the standard suffix -(e)n: one variation is case augmenting (des Bär-en-s), one is stem affixing (des Polizist-s) and one lacks a case suffix (des Patient-Ø). Linguists as well as language critics have focussed mainly on the stem affixing genitive while more or less ignor¬ing the two other non-standard variations. This paper presents a corpus-based investigation regarding frequency and contexts of all three variations, also considering the diachronic back¬ground and the implications the results might have for predicting the further development of the declension class of the weak masculine nouns.

In the present paper, on the one hand, an analysis of agreement and number markers allows us to understand the disintegrated nature of the nominal classification system in the Dadjiriwale language. It turnes out that these markers show a rather phonological than grammatical agreement: While the singular is marked by a zero morpheme, it is difficult to identify "binary gender markers" or "ordered pairs". Rather, the notions of gender and noun classification become intertwined in the language. On the other hand, -sι and -ny ὶ are the plural suffixes of the noun class [+human], while the suffixes -jé and -bhó are those of the class [–human]; but furthermore, they denote divisible, and indivisible things respectively. Additionally, and analogous to the suffix-bhó, the markers -pέlώ and -kl ё́ divide objects into the group of round objects and the group of elongated objects. Finally, it is shown that the relationship established between the notion of noun classes and the notion of deixis is far from being synonymous or opposing, and that it uncovers the semantic values of the modal suffixes -sι and -nyὶ in the context of utterance: In speech, they evoke exophoric and homophoric deictic values and recall instances of interlocution and delocution.

This paper describes the Self Access Centre (SAC) at the Universidad de Quintana Roo and presents the research support for the model in terms of mass-customization. The SAC with its systems, materials, activities and tutor support may be described as offering mass-customized language education. Tutor support is conceived in systemic terms as mass-customization, but as provider of professional advice in support of students' own learning projects and facilitator of feedback in productive skills, tutor support is highly individualized. However, the mass-customization element makes individualization efficient and achievable.

In a chat discourse it is not always clear who is chatting with whom; automatic discourse analysis is especially problematic. It is important to identify the users' nicknames in the written discourse to find out the receivers of the chat messages. But the linguistic possibilities in nickname creation, and also of using them in the discourse, are various. To study how nicknames are created and used in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), logs of 13 channels consisting of 8937 public chat messages and 7936 unique nicknames were analyzed in detail. The paper shows, among other things, the basic structure of IRC nicknames, of which parts-of-speech group nicknames are compounded, and which parts-of-speech of a nickname are omitted within the chat discourse. This knowledge leads to a better prediction as to whether there is a link between a current logged-in user and the examined word in discourse, which can be a shortened or creatively changed form of a nickname.

This paper analyzes the formation of authors' pseudonyms in the English, German, French, Italian and Spanish versions of the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. 694 semi-randomly collected Wikipedia usernames ("nicknames") are checked against traditional classifications of pseudonyms and compared to a semi-randomly collected corpus of 607 pseudonyms of English, German, French, Italian and Spanish writers of the 18th and 19th centuries (who published, at least in part, non-fictional works). The main results of the diachronic comparison are the following: (1) Qualitatively, typical modern phenomena are the replacement of letters by similar-looking special characters (called leetspeak, e. g. Serg!o for Sergio), the use of abstract nouns, the use of non-standard forms, deacronymization (e. g. when a Spanish Wikipedian's initials FG become Efegé), and the formation of nicknames from Wikipedia pseudonyms on users' discussion pages ("nick-nicknames"). (2) Qualitatively, typical historical phenomena are the use of symbols not easily representable on modern (Latin) keyboards (e. g. musical notes and Greek letters). (3) Quantitatively, there is a clear decrease in the use of Latin elements in pseudonyms. A cross-linguistic comparison of Wikipedia nicknames leads to the following characteristic features of the different Wikipedia communities: (a) English Wikipedia nicknames show the highest amount of non-onymic elements and numbers and the lowest amount of nicknames with foreign elements. (b) French-speaking Wikipedians use the lowest amount of numbers in their nicknames and are the least informative as regards telling the motivation behind their usernames. (c) Italian-speaking Wikipedians are the most open to tell about the motivation behind their usernames, use relatively few non-onymic elements in their nicknames, but are very productive as to forming nicknicknames. (d) Spanish-speaking Wikipedians use relatively few appellative lexemes, are the most reserved as to using foreign elements, but use clippings relatively often and are very productive as to forming nicknicknames. (e) German-speaking Wikipedians are most open to using foreign elements.

In the past years a large number of electronic text corpora for German have been created due to the increased availability of electronic resources. Appropriate filtering of lexical material in these corpora is a particular challenge for computational lexicography since machine readable lexicons alone are insufficient for systematic classification. In this paper we show – on the basis of the corpora of the DWDS – how lexical knowledge can be classified in a more fine-grained way with morphological and shallow syntactic parsing methods. One result of this analysis is that the number of different lemmas contained in the corpora exceeds the number of different headwords of current large monolingual German dictionaries by several times.

This study presents the results of the author's research project called Olomouc Corpus of Spoken Czech (OCSC). The paper is focused on the state and partial phases of constructing the corpora, its methodology and annotation. Within the OCSC we use so called dual system of transcription, which means (1) an orthographic one with the purpose of linguistic (morpho-logical) analysis and tagging and (2) a phonetic version of transcript which consists of three layers of the text: first the real transcription and further various types of the metatexts as a second and third layer, including communication aspects of the texts. The criteria of selection of speakers are also listed here and the highly important statistical analysis of the sociolin-guistic categories (gender, age, type of education, types of recordings) is presented as well. This analysis can serve as a base for a partial correction of possible non-balance among those sociolinguistic parameters. The annotation rules and principles are mentioned at the end of this study.

The current standard account of Hausa deixis claims that Hausa has a linear person-based system with the following four locative adverbs and their interpretations: nân 'here', nan 'there near you', cân 'there away from you and me', and can 'over there away from you and me'. This paper shows that in fact one may need two separate deictic systems for Hausa to account for all relevant data. The first system is based on distance with a primary proximal vs. distal contrast. The distance system however also embeds a person subsystem, with one adverb in particular referring to the hearer (second person) position. The second deictic system in Hausa is based on visibility, with a primary contrast between an area comfortably visible and an area visible only with some difficulties. Indeed, in the visibility system, five adverbs range the entire visible area in front of the speaker, from the foreground up to the extreme visible area at the horizon.

This paper examines the persuasive strategies of advertising herbal medicine in southwestern Nigeria. With recourse to the rhetorical model of analysis, the article identifies and discusses the propaganda techniques/rhetorical strategies in the discourse relative to the herbal medical practitioners' ideological perception of trying to project modern-day herbal healing in Africa as an alternative to that of the failing synthetic drugs of western medical practice. Although the social practice of advertising herbal medicine is culturally based, this study reveals that there are no significant culture-specific strategies of advertising in the data sampled, as the communicative strategies generally fit in with the prefabricated style of advertising discourse. In view of the fact that the advertising genre like other areas of public life is a site of struggle over meaning, the study takes a critical look at the instances of the advertisers' tendency to abuse meaning in language by making certain advertising claims which there is no objective evidence to back up.

This paper deals with the semantic structures of the Event -ízo derivatives in Modern Greek, appearing in the syntactic frames NPi __ NP and NP __ . The present analysis incorporates a version of Ray Jackendoff's conceptual semantics (1983, 1990, 1992). Special attention is paid to the semantic under-determination of word-formation rules. Semantic fields, conceptual functions, formation rules, and mechanisms/rules involved in -ízo derivation are presented. A principled account of various ambiguous structures is also provided. In the last part, the conceptual structures in -ízo derivation are finally laid down and the question of keeping these structures minimal while extending the semantic fields is once more addressed.

Morphematic reorientation of German orthography takes place in conformity with a general law in the history of writing. Alphabetic writing systems, being necessarily phonographic, tend to develop towards the encoding of non-phonetic units. The emergence of morphematic elements in German is preceeded by the evolution of word-separation by regular spaces which had been adopted throughout Europe by the end of the 13th century. Based on a corpus containing 157 High German texts (late 15th to late 18th centuries), this paper will demonstrate that morphematic reorientation of German orthography can be explained neither as an invisible-hand-process nor as the outcome of prescriptive grammar, but as the result of interaction between orthograpic norm and usage. Three cases will be considered in detail:(1) Graphic assimilation of allomorphic plosive variation emerges as early as the 12th century, reflecting regional final devoicing. By the early 17th century, the rule governing orthographic reprensentation of final devoicing in present-day German is fully adopted in usage. Its morphematic reinterpretation does not follow before the end of the 17th century.(2) Morphematic graphic representation of [a]-Umlaut emerges during the 14th century in Upper Germany as a phonetic reflex of open [e]. It is recommended by Middle German grammarians since the 1560s, with explicit mention of morphological factors. Around 1700 the writing rule imposes itself in usage.(3) The use of double consonant letters occuring in final positions of 'graphic' syllables ( according to ) rests inhibited until the 18th century, in particular to prevent tri- or tessaragraphs (, ). It is the influence of Adelung's grammar which leads to the final adaption of the present-day rule.

This paper illustrates the usefulness of natural language processing (NLP) tools for computer assisted language learning (CALL) through the presentation of three NLP tools integrated within a CALL software for French. These tools are (i) a sentence structure viewer; (ii) an error diagnosis system; and (iii) a conjugation tool. The sentence structure viewer helps language learners grasp the structure of a sentence, by providing lexical and grammatical information. This information is derived from a deep syntactic analysis. Two different outputs are presented. The error diagnosis system is composed of a spell checker, a grammar checker, and a coherence checker. The spell checker makes use of alpha-codes, phonological reinterpretation, and some ad hoc rules to provide correction proposals. The grammar checker employs constraint relaxation and phonological reinterpretation as diagnosis techniques. The coherence checker compares the underlying "semantic" structures of a stored answer and of the learners' input to detect semantic discrepancies. The conjugation tool is a resource with enhanced capabilities when put on an electronic format, enabling searches from inflected and ambiguous verb forms.

The pharmaceutical industry is characterised by its success and strong stability in the international market even in times of crisis. That is to say that the pharmaceutical field could be an attractive source of employment for future translators and interpreters whose expertise, interest and knowledge are focused on medicine. This is the reason why it is extremely important to have a basic background of the medical field. In short, this paper pursues two goals: firstly, we study the main characteristics of the patient information leaflets (PILs) in French and Spanish; and lastly, we offer some didactic suggestions for the training of medical translators.

English neoclassical compounds rely on a distinct vocabulary stock and present morphological features which raise a number of theoretical questions. Generalisations about neoclassical compounds are also problematic because the output is by no means homogeneous, that is, defining features of neoclassical compounds sometimes co-exist with features that are not prototypical of these formations. The paper looks at neoclassical compounds with a view to exploring patterns of morphological behaviour and development in this class of compounds. The approach is both synchronic and diachronic: it researches whether the morphological behaviour of recently formed compounds is different from that of earlier compounds and, if so, in which respects. This is assessed on data from the BNC with respect to some of the features that are cited in the literature as defining properties of neoclassical compounds, specifically, their internal configuration, the occurrence or not of a linking vowel, and their productivity.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The present paper investigates a type of broad-subject construction in Egyptian Arabic in which an adjective or participial structurally qualifies the head noun (or subject) but logically qualifies a subsequent noun, as in ir-raagil [il-ħilwiin banaat-u] 'the man the beautiful.PL his daughters'. This Adjectival Relative Construction is interesting in that it incorporates properties of both relative clauses and adjectival phrases. I evaluate the main analytical approaches in the literature and conclude that it must be analyzed as a hybrid type of nominal modifier that has adjectival and relative characteristics. Binding to the head noun is accomplished through a semantically motivated resumptive pronoun.

In this paper I argue that the psychological notion of salience should be kept strictly apart from its causes and effects (on language change or language accommodation). I further argue that we should distinguish between physiological, cognitive and sociolinguistic factors contributing to salience. Finally, it is argued that salience based on social stereotyping is the best predictor of change and accommodation, but needs to be supported by the right evaluation of the salient feature in order to have an effect.

The paper focuses on distribution and correlation of semantic features distinguished within scope of predication analysis, viz. causative, agentive, inchoative, egressive, continuative, and stative features. Causative possessive constructions are taken to be basic while the other ones are derived from them by omission of appropriate semantic features. The structure of causative possessive sentences is described in terms of componential analysis.

Over the past ten to fifteen years, web-based methods of sociological research have emerged alongside classical methods such as interviews, observations and experiments, and linguistic research is increasingly relying upon them as well. This paper provides an overview of three web-based approaches, i.e. online surveys, crowd-sourcing and web-based corpus analyses. Examples from specific projects serve to reflect upon these methods, address their potential and limitations, and make a critical appraisal. Internet-based empirical research produces vast and highly diverse quantities of (speaker-based or textual) data, presenting linguistic research with new opportunities and challenges. New procedures are required to make effective use of these resources.

This paper discusses pivotal theoretical and methodological problems of historical corpus linguistics. In two case studies from Swedish language history, the development of the epistemic adverb kanske and the group genitive respectively, it illustrates how the use of qualitative method in addition to corpus investigation can contribute to understanding grammatical change.

International audience; In this paper, we present a foreign language learning approach inviting the learner to reflect on the linguistic system. We define "the reflecting learner" as a thinking being who decides to engage in thinking rather than following the teacher's invitation to reflect on his or her performed action. After describing our references (the theory of enunciative operations, the conceptualisation approach, etc.), we give an overview of the main questions which must be answered when designing a learning scenario including language reflection activities. These questions are related, for instance, to the choice of learning objectives and materials and to the choice of metalinguistic terms. The last part of the article presents and analyzes the main characteristics of two recent scenarios, in order to show how a reflective approach can be implemented. In these scenarios, the use of technologies, in particular of an online forum or of online corpora, plays a positive role.; Dans cet article, nous présentons une approche en didactique des langues étrangères, offrant à l'apprenant l'occasion de réfléchir sur le système de la langue. Après avoir précisé les références sur lesquelles nous nous appuyons (théorie des opérations énonciatives, conceptualisation, etc.), nous passons en revue les questions essentielles qui se posent pour une telle entreprise, entre autres : quels objectifs, quels supports, quel métalangage ? Pour finir, nous montrons par des exemples récents de mise en œuvre d'une approche réflexive le rôle positif que peuvent avoir les technologies, en particulier le recours au forum ou aux corpus numériques.

This paper discusses nineteenth-century metalinguistic discussions of Low German, an authochthonous of Northern Germany, which, having lost its status as a written language suitable for formal discourse during the Early Modern period, has since been reduced to the spoken domain. During the nineteenth century the language was on the verge of enjoying a revival, with original poetry being published and extensive discussions as to whether Low German ought to play a role in formal education. As this article shows, this discussion was intense and controversial. Comparing the views of Klaus Groth, the leading proponent of Low German in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the internal debates amongst school teachers - hitherto never discussed by the scholarly literature – this article demonstrates the intellectual and ideological split felt by these educational practioners in their views of Low German: on the one hand, they recognise the cultural value of Low German as the historical language of the North and the native language of the pupils they teach, on the other hand they agree with each other that the language of education and science, as well as national unity, can only be High German. We hope to show with our discussion not only how very similar modern thinking on the use of Low German is to these historical discussions but also how the status and perception of many regional and minority languages across the world has been subject to the same or very similar thoughts and pressures.

Mass Customization and Learner Autonomy: A Mexican PerspectiveMaría Elena Llaven Nucamendi (Cozumel) AbstractCustomization of services or products fundamentally involves choices being made by the cus-tomer. This paper explores the conception of learner autonomy in language learning and its relationship to the capacity of students to make choices about their own education as a pre-requisite for implementing mass customization in learning support. A study of the impedi-ments to learner autonomy in a Mexican context indicates some of the conceptual and cultural issues that should be addressed in implementing mass customization in language learning.

Critical Participatory Looping (CPL) (cf. Falout and Murphey 2010; Murphey and Falout 2010) involves returning processed data from surveys or assignments back to students for further reflection and analysis in small groups. CPL affords dialogical interaction among class members (including the teacher), which can encourage them all as agents developing their own self-determination through action—otherwise known as agencing (cf. Murphey 2010, Nelson and Murphey, 2011). In this paper we first describe the kinds of customization that invite agency, then for CPL provide three examples of teaching and researching with it, theorize on its processes and potential, and discuss its correlates with other domains and mass customization.

The use of designations used for men and women has been discussed in German (as well as in other languages) very controversally since the seventies. Language use has been challenged by feminist linguists and some propositions have been supported by various regulatory interventions. In German, the most critical issue – the avoidance of generically used masculine forms – has been documented quite thoroughly as regards the individual phenomena (creation and use of personal nouns, alternative pronouns, strategies to avoid generically used masculine forms, etc.), but the actual extent of language use is still unknown so far and has given rise to very diverse appreciations: Whereas some experts reckon that alternative uses are achieving acceptance, others believe that there is stagnation or even a decrease of "nonsexist language". In this paper we will discuss an explorative study, in which we have looked for evidence for a series of more or less conventional feminine personal nouns in two language corpora: on the one hand the new Schweizer Textkorpus and on the other the public collections that can be queried via COSMAS II. The analysis of the results show specific advantages and disadvantages of each corpus and poses some questions about future explorations in the field of linguistic equal treatment of women and men.

This paper deals with the question of which search strategies are adapted to corpus analysis when trying to point out textual phenomena such as, for instance, indirect and direct speech. My study investigates the quantity and the various forms of direct and indirect speech used to make references to others' research. It draws upon the corpus of the German originals published in the Annali di Sociologia from 1991 to 2002, a journal edited in German and Italian (originals and translations in both languages) by the University of Trento, Italy.

HyperHamlet is a database of allusions to and quotations from Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation as a joint venture between the Departments of English and German Philology, and the Image and Media Lab at the University of Basel. The compilation of a corpus, whose aim it is to document the "Shakespeare phenomenon", is intricate on more than one level: the desired transdisciplinary approach between linguistics, literary and cultural studies entails data selection from a vast variety of sources; the pragmatic nature of intertextual traces, i.e. their dependence on and subordination to new contexts, further adds to formal heterogeneity. This is not only a challenge for annotation, but also for data selection. As the recognition of intertextual traces is more often than not based on intuition, this paper analyses the criteria which underlie intuition so that it can be operationalised for scholarly corpus compilation. An analogue to the pragmatic model of ostensive-inferential communication with its three constitutive parts of speaker's meaning, sentence meaning and hearer's meaning has been used for analytical heuristics. Authorial intent – in a concrete as well as in an abstract historical sense – origin and specific encyclopaedic knowledge have been found to be the basic assumptions underlying data selection, while quantitative factors provide supporting evidence.

This paper compares the output of two translation tasks. In an attempt to find out the extent to which students of translation can translate Arabic contextualized collocations into English properly, two conflicting views about carrying out a translation task are tested. The first holds that avoiding the use of a dictionary in test sessions, though not in translation classes, would save time and yield better translation products, whereas the second contends that recourse to a dictionary is unavoidable at any translation task, including tests. The two opposing views have their corollary in a similar dispute which has already been settled in favour of the mental lexicon rather than the dictionary (cf. Rangelova/Echeandia 2001). The results of this study defeat the first claim and run counter to Rangelova/Echeandia's findings, though obtained from qualitatively a different test setting.

The aim of this paper is to provide a more accurate typological classification of Modern Greek. The verb in MG shows many polysynthetic traits, such as noun and adverb incorporation into the verbal complex, a large inventory of bound morphemes, pronominal marking of objects, many potential slots before the verbal head, nonconfigurational syntax, etc. On the basis of these traits, MG has similarities with polysynthetic languages such as Abkhaz, Cayuga, Chukchi, Mohawk, Nahuatl, a.o. I will show that the abundance of similar patterns between MG and polysynthesis point to the evolution of a new system away from the traditional dependent-marking strategy and simple synthesis towards head-marking and polysynthesis. Finally, I will point to the risk of undertaking a direct comparison of different language systems by discussing the pronominal head-marking strategies in MG and the North American languages.

This paper sets out to study the ironical effects related to morphological, rhetorical and macro-structural cues of the novel by N. Kazantzakis's Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός (1951), and then to examine the degree of their transposition in the French and English translations, carried out by Saunier (1959 La dernière tentation du Christ) and by Bien (1960 The Last Temptation of Christ) respectively. Initially, from a theoretical point of view some definitions of irony as a thought and rhetorical figure are reviewed, while a particular attention is drawn to the theoretical insights of literary irony, in relation to Kazantzakis's work and life. From an analytical, enunciative perspective, this article will endeavour to locate, classify and analyze some techniques of ironization brought into play by Kazantzakis, with a view to comparing them with their transposition in the translated texts. The study privileges a pragmatico-textual approach, which embraces the theoretical background of enunciative polyphony.

The language of written business communication is characterised by the extensive use of phraseology, not only in terms of collocations and idiomatic expressions, but also of standard phrases in prototypical business genres. In any case, the phraseological information should be included in business dictionaries (in the following referred to as BDs) in accordance with the planned dictionary functions. Hence, the selection and presentation of the phraseological information should be decided by the lexicographer on the basis of the user needs alone and not on the recommendations of the phraseological literature about lexicographical practice. In this paper, I will firstly explain why lexicography and phraseology, although closely associated in a large number of studies, are quite different disciplines, and how their shared interest for dictionary practice in general is based on radically different views. I will then discuss the dictionary functions of BDs and focus on a number of concepts featuring extensive phraseological solutions to show and argue that dealing with phraseology in BDs should always keep focus on dictionary functions.

The translation of technical documents is no longer a process to be tackled once the source text has been produced elsewhere in the corporation or institution. Instead, translation and intercultural issues are taken into account prior to the production of the technical source-text which, most frequently, gains a dynamic feature. From this standpoint, one might think that the translator loses the leading role against the technical writer, who would become the key intercultural communicator for the global marketplace. However, as it has happened to other stakeholders in the multilingual documentation chain, the translator is no longer empty-handed and is gradually developing some technologically-driven competencies that allow them to expand their battle area and contribute to knowledge transfer in our society. This paper provides an overview of the latest workflow patterns leading to multilingual technical documentation production and management, their ideal circumstances and problems, as well as deriving consequences for higher education degree programmes in translation and technical communication.