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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.

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

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

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 is based on results of the research project National stereotypes and marketing strategies in the intercultural Danish-German communication (SMiK). In the SMiK-project, we define stereotypes as linguistically and culturally determined patterns of thinking and behaving. Such patterns affect intercultural interactions and they should therefore be taken into consideration in the teaching of foreign languages and in intercultural communication. In the SMiK-project we have developed guidelines for the adequate intercultural interaction in the German-Danish business communication. Those guidelines are based on empirical studies on German-Danish national stereotypes. In this paper, we will discuss the theoretical and methodological approach to the compilation of these guidelines and their background in studies on intercultural communication and in the Sprachkritik-paradigm (a linguistically founded critical-reflecting appraisal of language use) will be described. We hereby focus on the concepts of ‘Weltansichten’ as conceptualizations of the world, cultural awareness and functional adequacy in the intercultural communication. Finally, we give examples for the implementation of the results from an analyses of interview data in guidelines for Danish-German business communication.

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 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.

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

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

This paper 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.

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

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.

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

This paper examines the functions of stories in an online peer-to-peer advice forum on pregnancy and parenting, particularly drawing attention to how parents as advice-givers use stories in health-related discussions. The analysis shows that stories are multi-functional, serving to establish rapport with advice-seekers, give and support advice, express and substantiate agreement or disagreement. The results add to the current scholarship by showing that response stories can be used to give etiological (causal) assessments of others’ health issues, thus delivering a diagnostic opinion.

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 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.

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

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

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

This paper looks at animal-based metaphors used by the written media in order to convey negative messages about the relationship of women with food. By analyzing a corpus of met-aphors extracted from different sorts of publications, which include newspapers and maga-zines, this article tries to shed some light on how such figurative usages together with their visual representation may contribute to women's body dissatisfaction, thin ideal internalization and disordered eating.

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.

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.

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.

The syntactic rules of today's High German are generally thought to have crystallized during the 18th century. One can therefore expect that during that time the processes of grammaticalization had a particular influence on doubtful cases in the usage of language. The syntactic development varied from region to region and was accompanied by theoretical controversies. One of the controversial issues was word order. The debates focused primarily on the order in verbal complexes and on the possibility of extraposing simple components and dependent clauses. This paper is based on the assumption that the theoretical controversies in some way reflected the doubtful cases in the usage of language. In order to identify the actual variants, the theoretical controversies will be outlined first. Then the analysis will focus on whether and how these variants were used in a corpus of 18th century texts. The objective is to determine the language-internal, sociological, and geographical factors of the variants' usage and thus to model the situations in which the doubtful cases ocurred. In conclusion, the following issues will be discussed: the relationship between the doubtful cases and diachronic language developments, the language-external factors of the doubtful cases, and the approach of language theorists to doubtful cases.

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.

The object of investigation in this paper is the linguistic conception of salience by focusing its still predominantly essentialistic, only in modest approaches constructivistic, modelling. This indicates one of the most basic methodological desiderata of linguistics: the discussion and revision of its systemic foundation. Therefore, the aim of this article is to initiate a decidedly constructivist discussion of linguistic salience, and its adaption and transformation, respectively. This could result in an exponentiated connectivity of (post-)modern constructivistic sociolinguistics to advanced self-referential autopoietic positions of systems theory.

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

The question of how we can define salience, what properties it includes and how we can quantify it have been discussed widely over the past thirty years but we still have more questions than answers about this phenomenon, e. g. not only how salience arises, but also how we can define it. However, despite the lack of a clear definition, salience is often taken into account as an explanatory factor in language change. The scientific discourse on salience has in most cases revolved around phonetic features, while hardly any variables on other linguistic levels have been investigated in terms of their salience. Hence, one goal of this paper is to argue for an expanded view of salience in the sociolinguistic context. This article investigates the variation and change of two groups of variables in Carlisle, an urban speech community in the north west of England. I analyse the variable (th) and in particular the replacement of /θ/ with [f] which is widely known as th-fronting. The use of three discourse markers is also examined. Both groups of features will then be discussed in the light of sociolinguistic salience.

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

It is habitual for graduating students of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, to roll out the drums the very day they finish writing their final examination. Characteristic of such a ritualistic exercise, among other things, are the brand names the students coin for themselves from their original names. This study focuses on the creative rewriting of the names on such an occasion and examines the linguistic habits exhibited therein. It analyses the phonological/graphematic features that mark the rewritng of the names and discusses the sociolinguistic implications for the phenomena of social identity construction and language contact situation. Data for the study was sourced mainly through participant-observation technique with a supplemment of an oral interview conducted for some of the subjects between year 2007 and 2009. The data was selected through a purposive random sampling technique which yielded fifty names that were considered representative of the respelling conventions. The paper employs mainly Hempenstall's (2003) Phonological Sensitivity Skills to analyse the linguistic practices in the reconfigured names and then applies Tajfel's and Turner's (1979) Social Identity Theory to explain how it is that people develop a sense of membership and belonging in particular groups. The article reveals that the deviant orthographic conventions are a major fallout of youth culture with great influence from computer-mediated communication. It also shows that their linguistic experimentation foray in the discourse greatly undermines the orthographic system of the indigenous language (Yoruba) and the cultural values embedded in the original names.

Terminology is strengthening its foundations as a sub-discipline through reflections on its principles and methodologies by entrenching the study of its principal object, to wit the term (Boulanger et L'Homme 1991). Thus, a constellation of theories and innovative methods have been suggested by contributors such as Temmerman (2000) who opts for a sociocognitive approach by applying the tenets of cognitive semantics to ontologies in the life sciences; Cabré (1998, 2000) who isolates the polyhedric nature of the term; Diki-Kidiri (1999, 2000) whose treatment of the cultural dimensions of the term are especially pertinent to less described languages; and Kageura (1995) whose semantic treatise delineates the boundaries of "conceptology". Collectively, these works apprehend the term contre-jour, in particular as a unit of comprehension in relation to its immediate environment, in contradistinction to its traditional definition which in the classical mould considers a term as contextually stripped of its textual or discursive value. In sequel of recent theoretical trends therefore, this paper represents our initial theoretical attempt to put into relief semasiological and onomasiological approaches to the term/concept association, in order to shed additional light on their possible complementarity with respect to both lexicographical and terminographical definitions of the term.

Short messages are used widely for the micro-coordination of appointments and meetings among friends – which also entails managing cancellations in writing. Based on a corpus of 63 text message dialogues, the paper sets out to describe different patterns: Rejections of invitations ("Verabredungsablehnungen") are distinguishable from cancellations of pre-confirmed appointments ("Absagen") in their turn-internal composition. Following a dialogic approach to text messaging, the author also discusses if and in how far the conversation-analytic notion of "preference" can be applied to quasi-synchronous written dialogues. It is argued that rejections of invitations show certain features of dispreference (e.g. delay, hedging, good news exits); cancellations of pre-confirmed appointments, however, lack some of these features, as the point of reference (i.e. the day and time of the appointment) has to be re-established first.

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

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.

Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Bildungswissenschaften 29 (2007) 2, S. 181-207, In diesem Beitrag wird die Frage gestellt, inwiefern in der gymnasialen Ausbildung in der Entwicklung von überfachlichen Kompetenzen sowohl profil- wie auch geschlechtsspezifische Effekte in Abhängigkeit des Lernkontextes (Maturitätsprofile) sichtbar werden. Die präsentierten Ergebnisse basieren auf einer 2x2 univariaten multifaktoriellen Kovarianzanalyse. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Maturitätsprofile als Institutionalisierung schulischer Ausbildungen in einem bedeutsamen Zusammenhang stehen mit der Entwicklung der überfachlichen Kompetenzen der Schüler/innen. Interaktionseffekte lassen sich in einzelnen Kompetenzdimensionen identifizieren und verweisen in den meisten Fällen darauf, dass sich männliche Jugendlichen in einzelnen Profilen stärker von ihren Kollegen in den anderen Profilen unterscheiden als weibliche Jugendliche. (DIPF/Orig.), «Maturity profiles» are different upper secondary school tracks diplomas. This paper investigates to what extent the development of cross-curricular competencies in upper secondary education depends on the students gender and on their learning context related to each maturity profile. The results presented are based on a 2x2 analysis of variance. The results show that maturity profiles, as institutionalisation of secondary schooling, show a significant correlation with the development of students’ cross-curricular competencies in students. Interaction effects can be identified on specific competency dimensions ; in most cases they indicate stronger differences of competency between young males of different maturity profiles than between young females. (DIPF/Orig.)

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.

In this paper, I will show that the investigation of passive constructions by means of written questionnaires ('Projekt Dialektsyntax des Schweizerdeutschen', University of Zurich) provides reliable data on Swiss German dialect syntax. Concerning the accusative passive, I will illustrate that the auxiliaries 'kommen' or 'werden' and inflected or uninflected past participles are found in geographically distinct areas. Our material shows a similar geographical distribution of variants as the data from traditional direct interviews. Since we have been working with several consultants at each place, it is possible to give a picture of the gradual nature of the transition from one to another variant. The distribution of the passive constructions fits more general, North-South-oriented dialect-geographical patterns (cf. Hotzenköcherle 1986) that are well-known from other syntactic phenomena (such as the inflection of the predicative adjective (SDS III 256), of copredicative and resultative constructions (Bucheli Berger/Glaser (2004), Bucheli Berger (2005)). The evidence concerning the dative passive (recipient passive) leads me to the conclusion that its existence is not beyond any doubt in Swiss German. Beside the different passive constructions, I will also discuss the geographical distribution of alternative constructions such as active, 'tun'-periphrasis, etc.

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.

In this paper I will investigate some passive phenomena in German chat communication including personal and impersonal passive, passive-like constructions and the use of the "dummy" pronoun es. Furthermore, I will compare the results of this study with other empirical works on passive in contemporary German (Brinker 1971 and Schoenthal 1976) thereby discussing whether chat language can be categorized as "spoken German".

This article deals with the occurrence of es in the subject position in German. It explores the functions of es as the subject of impersonal verbs, impersonal copula constructions and impersonal passive constructions. Explanations are offered to its obligatory and facultative functions in different construction types. The final part of the paper explores through a pilot study the acceptability of es as an expletive element in sentences with two predicates and one subject. Two rules are given to explain the findings.