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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.

The particles schon and noch in German add an aspectual reading to events in different assertions. While schon tends to a perfective reading of an event, an imperfective reading appears with noch, hence both particles have a similar function on the event modification. Overtly, they are located unrestricted in the middle field of a German clause and can freely change their position towards temporal adverbs such as heute, jetzt, bald etc. It seems that syntax does not have an impact to order schon heute or heute schon. This variation is of main interest of the paper: Is there a linear restriction of adverbs and schon/noch, and does a change in the output cause a reinterpretation? The paper presents main assumptions on the word order of aspectual particles and temporal adverbs from the semantic and the syntactic perspective. An experimental study on prosodic factors will complete the overview and its preferences for the linearization of the sequences in question. The result is that common categorical grammar is not able to account for all possible outcomes with respect to contextual preferences. Therefore, a more flexible grammar concept is needed to build a usage-based concept on word order variation for these functional elements.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Cognitive linguistics pays particular attention to the interrelations between language, subjective conceptualisations and intersubjective manifestations of knowledge, providing descriptive tools for the analysis of how the choice of linguistic means is determined by individual, as well as by culture-specific conceptual patterns. In this paper we analyse the linguistic construal of Ukrainian Maidan activists in six German, Polish and Russian daily newspapers. The analysis focuses on culture-specific differences between the linguistic strategies used in the Western and Middle European media discourse in the EU member states, as well as the Eastern European discourse in Russia. The research is based on two theoretical frameworks: cognitive ethnolinguistics and cognitive grammar. Die im Rahmen der kognitiven Linguistik vorgenommene Forschung zu Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Sprache, subjektiven Konzeptualisierungen und intersubjektiven Denkmustern liefert ein geeignetes Werkzeug für die Analyse von sprachlichen Reflexen kulturspezifischer Sichtweisen, wie sie im Mediendiskurs zum Ausdruck kommen. Im vorliegenden Text unternehmen wir den Versuch, das Bild der Maidan-Aktivisten im deutschen, polnischen und russischen Diskurs innerhalb von sechs Tageszeitungen zu analysieren. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Identifikation von kulturspezifischen Unterschieden zwischen der sprachlichen Konstruktion vom Bild der Demonstranten, die für den west- sowie mitteleuropäischen Diskurs in den EU-Mitgliedstaaten und den osteuropäischen Diskurs in Russland charakteristisch ist. Die theoretische Grundlage für die vorliegende Analyse bilden zwei kognitive Ansätze: die kognitive Ethnolinguistik und die Kognitive Grammatik.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 present paper looks into an important aspect of textbooks for teaching German as a for-eign language: grammar exercises. The author analyses two Croatian textbooks for teaching German at primary school level: Applaus! 7 and Flink mit Deutsch 4. The first part investigates the relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge and shows that explicit knowledge has an important role in the development of grammar competence. Consequently, grammar exercises used for explicit grammar teaching must be incorporated into textbooks. The author elaborates on what types of grammar exercises are needed and how these exercises should be created so that learners can benefit from them. In addition, the first part comments on the role of chunks in the development of grammar competence. Finally, the author examines the role of receptive and productive skills in connection with grammar teach-ing. The second part addresses the textbook analysis in general. It refers to the previous research conducted in the field as well as to the criteria that can be drawn upon when describing the quality of teaching materials. In the third part, the results of the analysis of the two Croatian textbooks are presented. Both quantitative and qualitative data are commented on. This part also includes some information regarding the Croatian teaching situation so that potential readers not acquainted with it can better understand comments and suggestions provided by the author. On one side, the paper points to the strengths and weaknesses of the teaching materials in question. On the other side, the author provides some general comments on what a good text-book should contain in order to help foreign language learners develop their grammar compe-tence.

This paper focuses on the written interlanguage of German college students studying Spanish as a Foreign Language in four different levels (A2-C1). In order to observe the evolution of conceptual fluency, a total number of sixty participants wrote an essay about their Spanish studies without previous instruction on the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor (Lakoff/Johnson 1980). The metaphorical density index was measured with special attention paid to the differences and similarities between the German and Spanish semantic conceptual systems and the metaphors used in each stage of learning. The results show that the L1 plays a fundamental role in the typology of metaphors, while quantitative factors such as the metaphorical density index can also vary depending on the target language and the topics of the essays. Therefore, conventional metaphors play a fundamental role in foreign language learning, as the most significant examples in terms of lack of conceptual fluency have been caused by copying linguistic structures from conventional German metaphors into the target language.

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.

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 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 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.

The current paper is to report a study on modal auxiliaries as stance-taking devices applied in English linguistics research articles by native and Persian non-native writers. In doing so, 20 (10 in each group) research articles were selected. The corpora were detected for the occurrences of modal auxiliaries both mechanically and functionally. The obtained data was analyzed and the frequency and proportionate distribution of the individual modals with respect to each other were determined. The results uncovered some similarities and differences between the two groups of writers. Both groups of writers used modal verbs in the epistemic functions more than their deontic ones. Moreover, they preferred hedging strategies to boosting ones. Native writers, however, used modal verbs far more frequently than nonnative ones. The proportion of modal verbs did not follow a similar pattern in the two groups of texts. The findings offered some implications for English language education system contributors including material developers, lecturers, teachers and researchers. The interpretations and implications of the study were discussed with respect to the obtained results.

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.

It is a common place in the phraseodidactic research that collocational fluency is a significant factor of language fluency. Nevertheless, formulaic language is not focused systematically in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and in learning materials for German as a foreign language. The lack of transparency and fragmentary treatment of set phrases have a negative impact over the development of collocational fluency.The present paper focuses on the extent that students of German Language and Literature at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens master high-frequency and common set phrases of German based on a questionnaire survey conducted. The results of the survey are discussed in terms of the deficiencies of institutional guidelines and learning materials. In line with this, proposals are formulated for the improvement of the institutional framework and the teaching of set phrases.

Three possible constructions of adverbially complemented noun phrases are attested in Swiss German. In (1), the indefinite article is doubled, whereas in (2) and (3) the article appears only once; it precedes or follows the adverb, respectively: (1) Also d' Susi wär e ganz e liebi Frau für de Markus! So the Susi would_be Art really Art lovely wife for the Markus! 'Susi would be a really lovely wife for Markus!' (2) Also d' Susi wär ganz e liebi Frau für de Markus! So the Susi would_be really Art lovely wife for the Markus! 'Susi would be a really lovely wife for Markus!' (3) Also d' Susi wär e ganz liebi Frau für de Markus! So the Susi would_be Art really lovely wife for the Markus! 'Susi would be a really lovely wife for Markus!' Doubling of the indefinite article is quite often mentioned in dialectological literature. Unfortunately there is nothing to be found about regional differences, frequency or possible contexts for a doubling in most standard works of Swiss German dialectology. The present paper now fills in some of these gaps in research on the adverbially complemented noun phrase in Swiss German: In a quantitative analysis will be shown that the construction with the article between adverb and adjective (2) is the one given the highest acceptance and preference rates by the informants. Furthermore the paper also shows that the doubling-construction (1) is more prominent in some Swiss German speaking-areas than in others. An apparent time analysis reveals ongoing language change and, last but not least, it shows that sociolinguistic parameters have an impact on the adverbially complemented noun phrase as well.

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.

The basic prerequisite for using any language is the willingness of the speaker to follow the rules of the game. Socially defined norms of language use then tend to set the limits within which one can express oneself using this language. Whether these norms set the speaker free or whether they act as constraints in a free expression of Self, is a question that will be raised in this article. Using examples from Hindi, the paper highlights the role of such norms of language use in perpetuating gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes get constructed as part of a broader process of social differentiation but the site of this construction is to a large extent the normal everyday discourse. A normal classroom discussion amongst university students in New Delhi thus shows how deep rooted such stereotypes are and how effectively they get perpetuated through language and linguistic norms in Indian society. The basic premise in this paper is that meanings are context-specific, they are not fixed and they get created in discourse. But since language use is one thread in social fabric, it serves as an instrument to construct and perpetuate gender stereotypes. The paper is more of an essay on issues that became obvious about gender stereotypes during two classroom discussions. It should not therefore be taken as a study into the deeper aspects of gender representation in Hindi.

This paper surveys the incidence of sexism in the structure and use of English, and compares it with corresponding aspects of Yoruba. Subsequently, it examines the areas in which, due to the co-existence of the two languages in southwestern Nigeria, the languages influence one another with regard to sexism. The paper shows that while Yoruba is not sexist in some respects in which English is, English imposes sexism on the language. It shows also areas in which sexism existing independently in both languages reinforce one another. Finally, it shows how sexism in Standard English seems to have been eliminated in the formation of Nigerian Pidgin English which derives from the contact between English and Yoruba.

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

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.

In this paper, we examine new trends in Yorùbá personal names that are first names among Yorùbá Christians. The data used include data drawn from previous studies on Yorùbá personal names, the lists of names of the candidates of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board of Nigeria the lists of staff of three Nigerian universities, some attendance registers of pupils in nursery, primary and secondary schools as well as participant observation. We show that the European or established Churches and the newly founded autochthonous Nigerian Churches have different influences on Yorùbá naming system and tradition-based Yorùbá personal or first names. We also indicate that, at present, there is a complete cultural shift from the use of tradition-based Yorùbá personal names as first names to the use of biblical or Christian names and that this new dimension is as a result of the influence of western culture or civilization and the newly founded churches in Nigeria. We further show that the activities that are shrouded in fanaticism, flavours, modernisation and especially names that endear the Nigerian believers to one another are meant to prove that the newly founded autochthonous Nigerian churches understand the Bible teachings better than the European churches and that name modification or name change is inevitable when there is acculturation.

Spatial scenes are identical in the world languages. However, cultures may diverge in profiling spatial scenes (Levinson 2003). This paper selects for study the prepositions in and on in English and their Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) counterparts fi and 3ala, arguing that MSA and English seem to diverge in the spatial configurations and meanings of these prepositions. The sub-schemas of CONTAINMENT (in-ness) in MSA are found to partially overlap with those of English, with the other sub-schemas being taken care of by SUPPORT (on-ness) and PUNCTUALITY (point-ness). Such differences classify MSA more as a CONTAINMENT-based language than English, which seems to prefer SUPPORT and PUNCTUALITY. However, English and MSA seem to converge in their metaphoric conceptualizations of states owing to conceptual embodiment (Lakoff 1987). The article discusses the implications of such findings for spatial cognition and cultural cognition and EFL/ESL writing and translating.

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.

This paper attempts to demonstrate that academic research depends, to a certain degree, on the language in which it is conducted. The reason for this is that European languages have, due to their typological differences, different histories of linguistic expansion (Sprachausbau). As can be shown for German and English, the purpose of naming the object of investigation in academic research is served by linguistic devices of very different nature. This may lead to different conceptions of the object of research and thus impact on the course of investigation.

This study undertakes a comparative analysis of the numeral systems of Igala, Yoruba, English and German. An essential part of data collation for the study comprises compilation of comparative wordlists of Ígálà, Yoruba, German and English numeral systems in addition to the writer's personal observation and knowledge of the systems. The investigation reveals that the complexity of deriving especially non-basic numerals in the languages involves three predominant arithmetic processes of addition, subtraction (Yoruba in particular) and multiplication in addition to certain grammatical processes, especially vowel elision, clipping, compounding and so on. In addition, the summary of the quasi constraints or derivational patterns for the languages reveals that whereas German and English maintain very similar patterns because of their very close affinity as sisters from the same parent, it is not so with Ígálà and Yoruba even though both belong to the same language family. Incorporating insights from optimality theory, the paper argues that even though numeracy and the constraints that ensure well-formedness of numerals are somewhat universal, parametric variations abound. The actual patterning of the sequences of the derivational processes in individual languages may be very similar but definitely not the same, no matter how closely related the languages concerned may be. If not, they would cease to represent core grammars of different languages.

In this paper I would like to present the emotionality and emotions in German proverbs on the example of proverbs with the component anger. I am focused not on theoretical considerations about the proverb but on the analysis of the collected language material. The component anger is one of the highly productive proverbial components, it has been found in over four hundred units. It should be noted that most of the proverbs feature the negative effects of this emotion. The analysis of the material allowed for the extraction of nine main groups which show how anger is perceived and described in German proverbs. For example: anger blinds people, makes them lose self-control and brings about serious consequences. Although currently proverbs are often negatively labelled as simple wisdom of ordinary people, I think that they have not entirely lost their social and educational content.

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.

Claims about productivity of a given affix are often made categorically without any empirical evidence. This paper deals with the question of derivational productivity in a German variety spoken in Switzerland. Although there are a few studies regarding German suffixes and their productivity, it does not exist any study for this special variation of German. Four German suffixes (-nis, -heit/-keit/-igkeit, -ung and -sal) should be explored in a diachronic way. The question explored is whether there are changes in productivity of these suffixes during time. There are several possibilities of measuring morphological productivity, by counting frequencies (token and types) and to use probabilistic models. Both methods should be applied in this study. By using the Schweizer Textkorpus it is possible to examine a period of hundred years (1900–2000). It can be shown that there is a morphological change during the 20th century in this German variety. Some of these suffixes become more productive whereas other suffixes lose their efficiency of building new words.

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.

Bisang and Sonaiya (1999) call the high tone syllable (the HTS) in Yorùbá language "an operator which actualises or validates the relationship between a predicate and a subject within a state of affairs". This paper shows that this view is faulty because it makes wrong predictions concerning the element in the language.

This paper discusses understanding, misunderstanding and not-understanding of German dialect expressions. Reactions indicating understanding, misunderstanding and not-understanding in discourse are listed and examples from a medical corpus, analysing the reactions of non-dialect speakers talking to dialect speakers, are discussed.