Search

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 paper argues for a special lexicographic treatment of the derivates of city and country names. "Normally", proper names are not part of a dictionary, they are only considered in the encyclopedia. Therefore, their derivates should not figure in the dictionary from a semantic point of view. In Swedish and French, the derivates of those proper names turn however out to be morphologically irregular. They should therefore be part of the dictionary. The paper compares their lexicographic treatment in Swedish and French dictionaries.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

International audience; This paper sets out the convergence between two approaches – a theoretical one and an applied one – aiming to tackle the problem of attributive adjective position in French. We show how the results of a corpus study contribute to the understanding of the issues faced by traditional descriptions designed for learners of French as a foreign language. This reflection leads us to create a learning progression that aims to give learners the keys to the linguistic skills that they lack. Even if the objectives of researchers in corpus linguistics and researchers in education are different, we think that the gap between usage and grammar requires learning sequences to be drawn up on the basis of current works based on corpora. This approach allows us to avoid learning sequences that either are unrealistic simplifications or necessarily non-exhaustive inventories.; Cet article expose la convergence de deux démarches de recherche, l'une en syntaxe, l'autre en didactique, pour examiner le problème posé par la disposition des termes dans la relation épithète. Il montre comment les résultats d’un travail sur corpus permettent de comprendre les impasses auxquelles sont confrontées les descriptions traditionnelles des ouvrages destinés à des apprenants en F.L.E. Cette analyse conjointe est le tremplin d'une progression didactique qui donne à l'apprenant allophone les clefs d'un usage qui lui fait défaut. En définitive, même si les objectifs du chercheur sur corpus et ceux du chercheur en didactique sont d’un autre ordre, les hiatus entre l’usage et la syntaxe nécessitent de s'appuyer sur les travauxactuels sur corpus pour élaborer des séquences d'apprentissage qui évitent aussi bien les simplifications illusoires que les inventaires à la recherche d'une impossible exhaustivité.

International audience; This article focuses on the role of corpus in language classroom, a tool that allows to identify syntactic and semantic properties of discourse markers that are not discussed in traditional grammar books. The use of the corpus could assist French Foreign Language learners to be familiar with a new kind of academic writing. This raises questions about the methodology of teaching/learning of discourse markers that we try to address in this paper.; Notre recherche s'inscrit dans la perspective de l'aide à l'écriture scientifique pour les étudiants non-natifs qui doivent rédiger un rapport de stage ou un mémoire en langue française. En effet, ces types d'écrits universitaires comportent des spécificités (structurelles et linguistiques) (Cavalla 2010: 154) et nécessitent d'être abordés en tant que tels. Notre intérêt porte essentiellement sur le lexique transdisciplinaire et spécifique dans les écrits scientifiques, et en particulier sur les séquences lexicalisées à fonction discursive (dans un premier temps, au premier chef, etc.) qui servent à structurer le discours et à organiser le texte. Ces unités lexicales revêtent différentes appellations comme particules énonciatives (Fernandez 1994), connecteurs logiques (souvent utilisés dans les méthodes de FLE), discursive markers en anglais ou marqueurs discursifs (désormais MD) en français (très en vogue actuellement). En français, ces MD ont fait l'objet de nombreuses recherches qui proposent des traitements linguistiques assez fins parmi lesquelles pourtant, pour autant (Anscombre 1983), en fait, de fait (Danjou-Flaux 1980), les marqueurs de structuration de la conversation et de la complétude (Auchlin 1981), etc. Ces descriptions théoriques fort intéressantes sont cependant peu exploitées par les enseignants de FLE et encore moins par les apprenants. Reconnaissons que ce public n'a pas pour objectif d'entrer dans les distinctions fines de ces unités lexicales, mais les apprenants-étudiants doivent les connaitre, car ils auront à les utiliser dans leurs écrits universitaires. Comme le public visé est constitué d'apprenants-étudiants de toutes les disciplines et que beaucoup ne sont pas linguistes, ils ne peuvent donc pas entrer dans des explications trop spécialisées ; c'est pourquoi, nous privilégions les explications non complexes au plan linguistique et donc didactisées.

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.

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.

Politeness has a major place in many languages, and is remarkably pervasive in some. Yet we rarely find respect as a morphosyntactic feature, alongside gender, person, number and case. I document this imbalance, and then ask why this is what we find. This paper was later published as a section of the book Features (2012). 338 pages. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107661080. http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6832255/?site_locale=en_GB Also in Linguistik 2012, 51 (1). Available online at: http://www.linguistik-online.de/51_12/corbett_a.html

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 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.

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 concept of name and naming is not just a tool for constructing identity; it is an important signification system in African cosmology. It is imbued with the people's perception of life and being. This explains why certain individuals who are discontented with their names either change them or adopt nicknames to reflect their sense of dignity, reinvented individuality and humanity. This paper explored nicknaming as a signification tool for identity reinvention from a socio-semiotic dimension. Data for the study was sampled purposively from students' halls of residence at the University of Ibadan and analysed using insights from socio-semiotic theory of sign. The use of irony in names was observed to be a common tool for reinvention, especially with those instances where the nicknames were given as derogatory labels to redesign the identities of the concerned personalities. It was observed also that others use nicknames to project a sense of reinvented self, especially in instances where the nicknames were the creations of the individuals concerned.

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 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.

In grammar and textbooks of German as a foreign language the German perfect tense (Perfekt) is mostly presented as an alternative to the preterite tense (Präteritum). However, the German perfect tense itself deserves greater attention due to its wide range of usages. This tense can mark events with reference points located either before, simultaneous with and even after the speech time. For Thai learners of German it has been established that difficulties in learning how to use the German perfect tense are not primarily concerned with problems of choosing between the perfect and the preterite but rather between the perfect tense and the present tense. This paper focuses on the aspect of "completeness", comparable to the perfective aspect, leading to different effects in the usage of the German perfect. Since German is mostly learned as a second foreign language after English, a contrastive analysis of similarities and differences between the perfect tenses in English and German have to be included in the analysis. In the conclusion, a possible description of the German perfect tense for learners of German as a foreign language is suggested.

This paper intends to show the importance of having linguistic instruments, principally semantic ones, for determining the meaning of words with the greatest precision and, consequently, managing to meticulously establish the different meanings of a dictionary's entry words. As an example, a new definition of the Spanish verb mezclar ('to mix') will b Since the beginning of the publication of the linguistic atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, SDS) in the early 1960s individual linguists collected contemporary material for comparison to investigate language change. However, due to time and money restrictions these studies were limited to small parts of the language area only. So far a description of tendencies concerning the entire Swiss German language area is missing. Based on an online-survey of 5600 informants this investigation is the first to present word geographic data covering (almost) the whole German-speaking Switzerland. Comparing GIS-maps of SDS and online data of the dialectal lexemes for freckles, onion and butterfly, language change over the last century becomes apparent, with striking convergence tendencies towards standard German, but also a Swiss German dialect expanding its range. Most of the dialect words mentioned in the SDS were preserved; some new were found. Thus, diversity of lexicon and creative language use are not endangered. Statistical analysis showed that younger speakers are more likely to deviate from the SDS. Less strong, but still significant were the influence of the parent's dialect and the duration of living in the dialect area, whereas gender had no influence.

Address forms constitute an integral part of Basotho sociolinguistic etiquette. They are regarded as a kind of emotional capital that may be invested in putting others at ease. They are indicators of deference, politeness and markers of social distance. (Fasold 1990, Akindele 1990, 1991, 1993) This paper examines the address forms used by the Basotho people. It analyzes and discusses the various types and the factors determining their use. The discussion of address forms in Sesotho focuses on First Name, Title plus First Name, Title plus Last Name, Nickname, Multiple Names, and Teknonym. Drawing data from semi-literate and literate urban and rural population of Maseru district of Lesotho, it was found that the commonest form of address used by the Basotho people is title plus first name. e.g. ntate Thabo (father Thabo), 'm'e Puleng (mother Puleng), ausi Maneo (sister Maneo), abuti Mahao (brother Mahao). It is used by close relations, associates, and familiar people in both formal and informal situations.

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.

Any variationist study of Ivory Coast French needs to take into account sociolinguistic considerations and systemic features of other contact languages. For instance, there is a specific usage of pour against which the interference hypothesis can easily be tested: FI: Le kaki que je porte présentement, c'est pour un bachelier qui me l'a laissé avant de partir en fac, cadeau. (Lafage 2003: 676). Avant de te moquer du linge de ta voisine, regarde si pour toi est propre.. In Ivory Coast French, pour (N/Pro) can display a variety of functions: it can be part of associative predications, it can stand for genitive phrases in an anaphoric construction, make reference to an object in relation with another and participate in various idiomatic expressions. This paper has a twofold objective. First, I argue that pour (N/Pro) constructions has to be analysed as an empty headed "associative" noun phrase. Second, I will show the relevance of extra- AND intersystemic factors in accounting for language variation. Incidentally, the use of pour (N/Pro) constructions seems to be conditioned by the availability of similar constructions in other Ivory Coast languages on the one hand, such as baoule (o liε) or dioula (à tá), and, cultural needs on the other.

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.

Georg Wenker, a librarian and a specialist in German Studies of the Marburg University initiated the Linguistic Atlas of the German Language, having started a distribution of a questionnaire composed of sentences with the most striking phonetic and grammar features of the German language. He sent it to elementary teachers who were to translate Wenker's sentences to the dialects they spoke. As a result of responses, dialect borders of the German language were defined - first within Germany, then in the other German-speaking states. In the 1930s those questionnaires, after some changes, got to Switzerland. Having doubts about the method chosen by the researcher and the reliability of the materials received, Wenker's questionnaires were subjected to strong criticism and set aside for a long time. However, Wenker's material is of great interest for researchers, including the Syntax of dialects. Syntactic phenomena are defined in this paper, the study of which became possible due to the questionnaires (by comparison with other sources). Also preliminary results of the analysis of the Swiss questionnaires were presented from the syntactic point of view.

This paper describes the results of research into linguistic politeness in German-speaking Switzerland (GSS) and into one type of politeness in particular, namely the speech acts of greeting and leave-taking denoted by the German verb grüssen.[1] German-speaking Swiss people adhere to strict conventions of polite behaviour which have been eroded over time in the English-speaking world. My research shows that speakers of Swiss German, both young and old, and from all walks of life, believe that it is important to retain their traditional politeness rituals, and that greetings formulae are especially important. Very few germanophone Swiss that people conform to polite greeting practices out of self-interest (as one of my informants suggested), rather they believe that politeness is important for social cohesion and a sign of respect and affection for one's fellow human beings.

Ein Korpus an Vorlesungstexten aus den Wirtschaftswissenschaften wird daraufhin untersucht, welche sprachlichen Mittel seitens des Textproduzenten eingesetzt werden, um die Rede für die Rezipienten verständlich zu gestalten. Die Untersuchung ist mit dem Ziel entstanden, ausländischen Studierenden, die ein Studium an deutschsprachigen Universitäten und Fachhochschulen aufnehmen wollen, Mittel an die Hand zu geben, Texte, mit denen sie häufig konfrontiert werden, möglichst gut zu verstehen. Um einer Vorlesung bewusst und effektiv folgen zu können, bietet das Wissen um Art, Bedeutung und Wirkungsweise der Kohärenz stiftenden sprachlichen Mittel eine Hilfestellung. Ausgehend von der Prämisse, dass der Fachsprachenunterricht DaF beim Spracherwerb das Fach mit seinen spezifischen Denk- und Mitteilungsstrukturen in den Mittelpunkt stellt (nicht sprachliche Strukturen an sich) (vgl dazu Buhlmann/Fearns 1989:87 und 91f), beschäftigt sich die Arbeit mit den thematischen Mitteln der Textkohärenz: den metakommunikativen Äußerungen, die die Textstruktur sichtbar machen und der Fachlexik. A selection of texts from lectures in economic studies is examined with the purpose to determine which linguistic means are being employed on behalf of the producer of the texts in order to render the speech comprehensible for the recipients. The aim of the investigation is to provide foreign students who want to begin a course at German speaking universities or polytechnics with a tool which helps them to understand as much as possible texts with which they are frequently confronted. In order to be able to consciously and effectively follow a lecture, the knowledge about the type, meaning and way of action of those means which foster coherence by way of linguistic methods, offers valuable help. Taking as a point of departure the fact that during language acquisition the specialized language teaching "German as foreign language" focuses on the specific structures of thought and communication and not on linguistic structures as such, the paper is concerned with the thematic means of text coherence: the meta-communicative expressions which visualize the structure of the text, and the terminology relevant to the specialization.