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One of the most important goals of foreign language teaching is to enable students to use the target language in everyday situations. Developing lexical competence in foreign language learning can play an important role in achieving this goal. The aim of the present study is to call attention to the importance of teaching collocations in foreign language education. The first part of the paper gives an overview about collocations and collocational competence. In the second part of the paper, I would like to focus on principles of phraseology and foreign language teaching methodology that can be used for teaching collocations in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This thematic issue collects a selection of the linguistic papers presented during the interdisciplinary conference Parità, genere, disabilità: la prospettiva giuridica e la prospettiva linguistica ('Equality, gender, disability: the legal and linguistic perspective') held in October 2021 at the University of Milan. The papers deal with the inclusive languages of social sustainability, and in particular, six focus on the topic "language and gender" and one on "language and disability", mainly in German and Italian and partly in other languages. Both topics are analysed in the standard language and/or in specific domains of use (i. e., legal communication and institutional communication). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on regiolects commonly concentrates on phenomena of traditional dialectology. In his talk at the 6th IGDD congress in September 2018 Michael Elmentaler whatsoever plead to rather focus on characteristics of regiolects by themselves. As a scientific approach he mentioned regional phraseology. The following research project now focuses on the regional distribution of phrasemes and tries to find out whether participants are aware of these and which influence age has. Therefore 26 phrasemes, based on the Rheinisches Mitmachwörterbuch, an interactive online tool of the LVR-Institut für Landeskunde und Regionalgeschichte (ILR), that are not codified or coded „landschaftlich rheinisch/westmitteldeutsch“ in relevant lexicons are presented to participants. They then rated whether they knew and used these phrasemes or whether they were unknown to them. Moreover, participants were able to fill in variants of the idioms in question. First results from the study concerning awareness and age will be presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language experiments have a long tradition in the field of dialectology to investigate phonological, lexical and syntactic variation. Methodologically, the repertoire ranges from written test procedures to standardized language production tests and interviews whereby different types of tasks (e. g. translation, picture-naming, evaluation tasks) are used. In order to investigate the variation and perception of morpho(phono)logical phenomena (e. g. the variation of the superlative dat schéinst/dat schéinsten/dat schéinstent Meedchen ‘the most beautiful girl’) in Luxembourgish, I developed a new test procedure, which is based on test procedures and tasks already used in other dialectological and variationist projects (e. g. Syntax Hessischer Dialekte (SyHD), cf. Fleischer/Lenz/Weiß 2015, Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland (SiN); cf. Elmentaler et al. 2015)). The development of a new method was indispensable, since firstly, it must be adapted to the analysis of morpho(phono)logical phenomena that are not linked to regional variation and secondly this test aims to analyse salience and pertinence, two relevant concepts within the scope of language perception and evaluation (cf. Purschke 2011), separately. This paper thus presents an experiment that aims to investigate the perception of morpho(phono)logical variation and its variants in Luxembourgish. The individual test procedures, a salience test, a specific form of scale-based test, a translation task and a supplementary questionnaire are described, contextualized and discussed in detail. The focus also lies on the special design of the test, which is able to ascertain the salience and pertinence of certain variants and to correlate them directly with the production of the variants and the self-evaluation of the individual participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a pilot study of audioguides concerning paintings from museums in Italy, Germany and Denmark. The study combines an analysis of speech actions based on categories from the theory of Funktionale Pragmatik with a frame-oriented analysis of knowledge relevant for understanding the audioguide texts, which can be assessed from the formulation choices made by the authors. The focus of the paper is on building a descriptive and analytical tool to identify characteristics of German, Danish and Italian art audioguides. The aim of the study is to establish first results to be substantiated in future work also concerning the receiver modelling (Hörer:innen-Modellierung) in the investigated audioguides and furthermore to see whether intercultural differences are visible in the texts. The study shows that the same speech actions are present in audioguides from different cultures, but that they occur in different proportions according to the specific culture. Along similar lines, it was possible to create a consistent coding system concerning types of knowledge conveyed in the audioguides that enables us to assess and compare the results of analysing the texts. This analysis, too, indicates intercultural differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to propose a reflection on the importance of German varieties in the preparation of interpreters. Like many other languages, German is classified as a pluricentric language, i. e. a language officially spoken in more than one centre or nation. This makes it a very variegated language that boasts a multitude of both standard and non-standard varieties. The task of interpreters who choose German as a foreign language is therefore to be able to understand and translate into another language what is spoken by native speakers of German, many of whom, according to the previous statement, often speak different varieties. To do this, the interpreters' preparation must consider the inclusion of the different language varieties of both standard and non-standard German, especially at the level of auditory decoding, in order to facilitate the understanding of the message at a receptive level. Starting from the definition of a pluricentric language, this contribution will highlight the main difficulties of interpreters at the level of listening comprehension, most of which are found at the level of auditory decoding, before proposing training aimed at decoding the different varieties of standard and non-standard German realised through the use of new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work aims at showing the didactic potential of the novel Zweinhalb Störche: Roman einer Kindheit in Siebenbürgen, written in 2008 by the German-Romanian author Claudiu M. Florian, for multilingual learning in GFL classes. The paper focuses on the possible use of corpus-based learning tasks and consists of two parts: the first will introduce the main features of multilingual didactics and multilingual competence and the possible teaching approaches of inter- and transcultural literature through the use of corpora; the second will focus on the use of the novel to promote multilingual competence within the GFL classroom. In particular, specific tasks will be suggested to achieve a didactic surplus through the use of corpus compilation and analysis tools such as Sketch Engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the role of lexicographic resources in the South Tyrolean (i. e. the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy) educational context against the backdrop of legal provisions (Das neue Autonomiestatut 2019/1972) and the relevance of language education on the part of educational institutions (Rahmenrichtlinien DE, Rahmenrichtlinien IT), taking into account both normative requirements and their application in practice. The focus is on two questions that have been little researched so far, not only in the specific context but also internationally (cf. Abel 2022; Nied Curcio 2022): To what extent are lexicographic resources represented in the school framework guidelines? How are they actually used in schools? For the case study presented here, the South Tyrolean framework guidelines provided by the German and the Italian school boards at all levels of education for German and Italian as first (L1) and second (L2) languages, as well as for English as a foreign language (L3) were examined by means of a document analysis. In a second step, a questionnaire survey with language teachers at all school levels (German and Italian as L1/L2, English as L3; number of survey respondents: 644) determined the actual use of lexicographic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the construction of the KOMMA corpus and the presentation and analysis of selected case studies. The paper contains written and oral data from young adults attending the final year of a German-language high school in South Tyrol. In addition to describing the data collection and the methods used, the paper will also go into more detail about the data processing (transcription, normalisation, lemmatisation and POS tagging). Finally, some research results illustrate the usability of the corpus, with selected case studies from the field of word formation and lexis being presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with multimodal displays of non-affiliative stances and assessments in face-to- face triadic storytelling activities. Building on conversational analytical research that has highlighted the co-constructed nature of storytelling activities and the intersubjective nature of stance-taking, this paper takes a multimodal perspective and focusses on how interactants use language, prosody, gaze, and gestures to express stances that are non-affiliative to different degrees. The paper addresses two issues: We first concentrate on the ways that disaffiliative assessments and stances are communicated as multimodal packages before zooming in on the ways that storytellers and recipients deal with displays of disaffiliation. This includes both verbal and nonverbal strategies to highlight disaffiliation and interactional work to jointly mitigate it. By its focus on multimodal stance-taking in storytelling activities, the paper ties in with both the recently growing interest in the multimodal nature of stance-taking as well as recent pleas to revisit interactional storytelling from a multimodal perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As young visitors represent "the museum audience of the future", museums should be particularly committed to engaging children in museum experiences pursuing a child-oriented approach to art communication and education. The analysis of museum communication from a linguistic perspective seems thus a promising way of exploring the target-group-specificity of museum educational resources explicitly designed for addressing young audiences. Explanatory videos featured on museum websites which present the museum itself or masterpieces of its collections are examples of digital tools employed by museums to introduce children to art and encouraging them to become devoted visitors. The paper presents the findings of a case study of a sample of German and Italian museum explanatory videos for primary school children, aiming at analyzing the linguistic and multimodal strategies used by museums in order to transfer knowledge about art, artists and exhibitions in a child-centered explanatory style. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and to what extent these videos encourage a participatory, play-based access to art or enable an experience-oriented approach to art-related contents, as advocated by current trends in museum communication and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to examine the strategies for conveying regional culture-bound terms in monolingual and bilingual (or multilingual) texts and chooses a type of museum for which such terms are particularly important: the folk museum. After a brief overview of this type of museum in Italy and Germany (section 2), section 3 deals with culture-bound terms, their classification and the strategies for introducing them in texts. Section 4 presents the empirical analysis carried out on a corpus of texts from the websites of 10 Italian and 10 German or Austrian folk museums. The use of realia was examined first in the monolingual, then in the multilingual museum communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art communication is a functional and specialized form of social communication constituting the meaning of art. It includes museum communication, understood not only as a transfer of individual and social knowledge about exhibits, but also as an opportunity to encounter art. The museum is thus a learning place as well as a space for experiences, emotions and relational exchanges. This thematic issue deals with the role of language in museum communication concerning figurative art, in its relation both to other expression modes and to the target audiences with their different languages and cultures. Within this framework the active role of museum visitors in the reception of exhibited works, stimulated by the use of new technological formats, is discussed too. In particular, the papers focus on three main aspects: the interaction between iconic and verbal language, the need for a target-oriented (multimodal) museum communication, and the investigation of multilingual and culture-specific knowledge transmission strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on the impact and reception of science communication pointed out, that marginalized groups in society like people with mental or learning disabilities or people with limited language skills often remain unconsidered by conventional measures of communicating scientific content (Humm/Schrögel/Leßmöllmann 2020). Easy reading concepts might be a helpful approach to a more inclusive mode of science communication. The paper evaluates if German science institutions and universities offer easy reading versions on their websites to enable the above-mentioned groups to access fundamental scientific information. In a second step it analyses how these easy reading versions have been formally implemented and to what extent the requirements of the Federal Ordinance on Accessible Information Technology (BITV 2.0) have been followed. The paper aims to give a first overview on the efforts of scientific institutions to address marginalized groups and to point out deficits of these efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading is a highly complex cognitive process. From a neurobiological point of view, it involves at least six linguistic sub-competences including orthographic, semantic, syntactic, phonetic and prosodic competence. Each of these skills is required of the reader to extract different types of information from the text, ranging from the perceptual and the syntactic to the lexical and pragmasemantic one. Based on the main results of cognitive-oriented research on text and reading, this paper illustrates how prosodic competence, combined with formal coherence patterns, can be considered and employed as a reading strategy, enabling the reader to progressively grasp the meanings of a text. In the first part particular attention will be paid to the description of the syntax-prosody interface as well as of its function as a means of encoding of information structure in German. With regard to the teaching of German as a foreign language, the second part of the paper will present a method to train intonational reading. This approach aims to raise foreign language readers' awareness of prosodic features of written texts and to introduce them to melodic patterns which can be encountered while reading. Such a practical training may prove to be advantageous, as the most typical and apparently "uncorrectable" errors committed by foreign language learners when speaking and reading German texts are almost always related to the domains of phonology and prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is dedicated to the particle subclass of modal particles and their supposed function of indicating the social proximity between speakers. This assumption stems mostly from the reference to shared knowledge of modal particles. This marking of the relations between the speakers occurs on the one hand through a high frequency of modal particles in conversational situations characterised by proximity, and on the other hand through the occurrence of certain modal particles. This paper deals with an empirical test of these assumptions. For this purpose, a corpus of twenty-two conversations in two different settings was used, one setting characterised by a close relationship and the other by unfamiliarity and social distance between the speakers. Within these conversations the frequencies of modal particles were collected and analysed in terms of their quantity and distribution. The results of the case study show that it is not all modal particles for which a function as relational markers can be assumed. Only the two particles ja and eh occur more frequently in the conversations characterised by social proximity. In addition to this, other factors like age and gender are highlighted that may influence the distribution of modal particles in this case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article examines metalinguistic and metadiscursive reflections in the public discourse on climate change. The public thematisations of language play a crucial role in public discourses as they carry out strategic and action-orienting functions. The article investigates which expressions and whose language use are repeatedly the subject of metalinguistic reflections in the defined section of the discourse. In the process we also address the question of which positions and arguments are expressed or justified through the thematisation of language. Furthermore, the study investigates the metadiscursive reflections of the discourse participants, which are frequently connected with media criticism. The analysis focuses on a corpus of manually selected articles from German newspapers. In order to identify and examine the explicit thematisations of language, the paper adopts a methodological approach which combines corpus-linguistic tools with interpretive-hermeneutic analyses. The analysis reveals how the critical thematisation of the same linguistic phenomenon is in many cases used to justify conflicting positions in the discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This thematic issue collects a selection of the linguistic papers presented during the interdisciplinary conference Parità, genere, disabilità: la prospettiva giuridica e la prospettiva lingui-stica (‘Equality, gender, disability: the legal and linguistic perspective’) held in October 2021 at the University of Milan. The papers deal with the inclusive languages of social sustainability, and in particular, six focus on the topic “language and gender” and one on “language and disability”, mainly in German and Italian and partly in other languages. Both topics are analysed in the standard language and/or in specific domains of use (i. e., legal communication and institutional communication).

This paper exposes the idea of humour as a strategy for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. By focusing on the Swiss federal council's media conferences, it aims at evaluating specific linguistic and thematic features which constitute humour. The analysis highlights the importance of everyday topics in dealing with the coronavirus and shows that the humorous potentiality in the press conferences' oral communications is specified by laughing expressions and even more so that the humorous interactions occur at specific moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through their discursive actions, parliamentarians have an impact on the public perception of societal issues. Drawing on the Discourse-Historical Approach of Critical Discourse Studies this paper strives to illuminate how persons, objects, or abstract things are discursively constructed as victims. The debate speeches relate to two cases of terrorism: The National Socialist Underground (NSU) and the ISIS attack at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin. After first identifying the types of victims in the data, the study then conducts a detailed analysis of the discursive resources that are used in the construction process. Furthermore, the victim constructions are interrogated in terms of their strategic political aims. Apart from linguistic means, different context levels play a crucial role in the construction. The examined victim constructions aimed for example at the sense of unity (Wir-Gefühl) and presenting the own party in a certain light. The study shows how the discursive construction of victims contributes to the construction of reality for the public and how they serve different kinds of strategic and political aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hengeveld/Mackenzie (2008: 52) consider that the constructions with mas 'but' result from the combination of two Discursive Acts with different communicative statutes, there being a Nuclear Discursive Act, with greater communicative weight, and a Subsidiary Discursive Act, which will have a rhetorical function named "Concession". This paper aims to investigate the various uses of mas 'but', according to Functional Discourse Grammar, in order to determine the pragmatic, semantic, and morphosyntactic properties of each case in real occurrences of Portuguese. The combination of linguistic units through mas 'but' always indicates interpersonal strategies, which are differentiated by the communicative intention of the speaker as well as reflected in the layer involved. However, mas maintains the capacity to attribute the most salient status of information to the unit it scopes or operates on. We identified four uses of mas 'but' in different layers: Move Operator in the Move layer, Emphasis Operator and Concession rhetorical function in the Discursive Act layer, and the Contrast pragmatic function in the Communicated Content layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistik Online is the property of Universitaet Bern, Philosophisch-Historische Fakultaet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Verbal periphrases (VP) constitute a typological feature of Romance languages and they are especially frequent in the Iberoromanic languages. In the context of this paper, the aspectual verbal construction stare a + infinito and the modal VP volere + infinito will be "grasped in the concrete speech action" (Katelhön 2013: 237; my translation) in order to show how these two VPs are used as discourse-structuring elements in contemporary Italian (outline signals, turn-taking markers, hesitation phenomena etc.). Furthermore, formal and functional equivalents of the periphrastic discourse markers it. sta(mmi) a sentire and it. voglio dire will be analyzed in two Romance "sister languages", namely French and Spanish, as well as in a typologically more distant language, namely German. The translation strategies chosen in the respective target languages will be examined with regard to the preservation or modification of pragmatic- discursive values inherent in the source language structure. For the present study, which is exclusively qualitative, the LIP corpus and the OPUS corpus (Tiedemann 2012, Italian), which is a collection of subtitles from a wide range of films in various languages, were used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses interactions between a host of a Swiss mountain destination and her guests. The conversations take place in a scenic gondola. The analysis is conducted in the format of an ethnographic case study and focuses on the interactants' speech style. The case study constitutes a part of a larger, applied and interdisciplinary project of the Business School of the University of Applied Sciences of Lucerne. The aim of the main project is to specify what could be defined as "hospitality" in a touristic context and to develop tools to enhance hospitality at touristic destinations in Central Switzerland. The aim of the present ethnographic case study is to analyse interactions between hosts and their guests. It seeks to find communicative elements which let the guests perceive an interaction as hospitable and to discuss if generic features of a "hospitable speech style" may be identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important goals of foreign language teaching is to enable students to use the target language in everyday situations. Developing lexical competence in foreign language learning can play an important role in achieving this goal. The aim of the present study is to call attention to the importance of teaching collocations in foreign language education. The first part of the paper gives an overview about collocations and collocational competence. In the second part of the paper, I would like to focus on principles of phraseology and foreign language teaching methodology that can be used for teaching collocations in the classroom.

Keen observers of Kenyan English usage will agree that idiomatic expressions such as put into consideration, rather than take into consideration, are certainly common in daily usage. The author of this paper set out to establish if that was indeed the case by having a sample of 122 respondents, all fourth-year university students, to choose between put and take. 77% of them chose put, which suggests that the expression put into consideration is indeed quite familiar to Kenyan English speakers. It was tested alongside another 19 idiomatic expressions. 17 out of the 20 were found to be familiar, though to varying degrees. But this familiarity was not reflected in corpus data from the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web-based English, where they were found to be rare. The same corpus data showed that this familiarity of the 20 expressions to Kenyan English speakers did not mean that they used them more frequently than their Standard International English counterparts. For example, the data showed that the “less familiar” take into consideration had more tokens in the Kenyan English components of the two corpora than the “more familiar” put into consideration. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that so-called Kenyan English idioms can still be claimed to be typical of Kenyan English, since they are practically absent from e. g. British English, its colonial ancestor.

Narrating is a crucial activity in theatre rehearsals. Through this activity, narratives are performed, expanded, reinterpreted, or even completely improvised. The communicative practices used by theatre professionals to develop a play as a theatrical narrative have rarely been researched, both in linguistics and theatre studies. Therefore, this paper addresses how actors, directors, and other members of a theatre production collectively develop monologues as selfcontained narratives within a play. The research focuses on how narrators and listeners, as an interactional ensemble, use multimodal actions to realize such monologues. Surprisingly, the co-narrators don't appear to imagine their future audience but construct the narrations in situ with and for the present members. This observation especially becomes evident when mobile eye-tracking glasses measure the co-narrators' gaze behavior. It shows that members of a theatre rehearsal perform different activities (e. g., improvising, reading, prompting, instructing, discussing, monitoring) with regard to local interactional requirements. This paper illustrates the procedures with which theatre-makers produce monologues as multimodal narratives and highlights the differences that distinguish such narratives in theatre from spontaneous everyday storytellings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe is a unique framework of communication with similar issues discussed in different linguistic and cultural areas. This paper gives a detailed overview of a discourse linguistic project that analyses this multilingual discourse space. We focus on the issue of vaccination since this is a controversial issue in the media of all countries that are of interest for this study (Germany, Italy, France, UK). Methods from discourse, corpus and computer linguistics are used to identify the most relevant linguistic, argumentative, and emotional patterns in discourse. The paper discusses these methods in detail. We then show how these patterns are annotated in our corpora and how the different kinds of annotations can be analysed in correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistik Online is the property of Universitaet Bern, Philosophisch-Historische Fakultaet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While there has been a substantial body of research on the asymmetry between main and subordinate clauses in terms of the licensing of pro-drop, potential differences between types of unembedded clause have received much less attention - despite the fact that competing theories of pro-drop make strong, clear predictions about the distribution of null subjects across clause types, especially with regard to interrogatives. This paper presents the first in-depth comparative study of pro-drop in both declaratives and interrogatives in two asymmetric pro-drop languages: Old High German and Old Italian. Based on a parallel corpus study using two translations of Tatian's Diatessaron, we show that there is a clear difference in distribution between interrogatives and declaratives: null subjects are more frequent in declarative clauses than in interrogatives, and these also differ in terms of the persons in which pro-drop is licensed. Our results speak against the V-in-C licensing theory of asymmetric pro-drop of Benincà (1984) and Adams (1987), and in favour of an account based on an Agree relation with left-peripheral operators in the sense of Frascarelli (2007, 2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elaborates on the problem of the traditional terms of experts and lay people. Language is a fundamental component of everyday life and all individuals react to language issues by using language itself. The paper contests the claim that lay people do not exist in the field of linguistics. There must be dealt with innovative concepts, such as professional and amateur, because the "lay people" (as a considerable amount of studies have investigated) are well aware of processes concerning language issues and thus generate their own kind of "linguistic theory". The task of linguists is to scrutinize such theories, which form the basis for the understanding of linguistic change and the formation of language norms. The line of argument presented here is arranged in chronological order: starting in antiquity, light will be shed on the meaning of the term "lay people" in cultural history. Special emphasis will be put on the Middle Ages, the early modern age and the modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hessian language area is characterized by the opposition of an object-linguistic heterogeneity and a perceived homogeneity. The perception and conceptualization of "Hessian" is highly connected to the medial distribution of "Hessian". This Mediahessian hasn't been investigated profoundly. Thus, this paper - based on an outline of the Hessian language area and the media usage of regional language - analyzes: (a) the knowledge about Mediahessian based on a survey, (b) the concept of "Hessian", which is provided by popular scientific publications, (c) the constitutive and optional features of (TV)-Mediahessian and (d) its functions. The paper ends with a summary of the results and a definition of Mediahessian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Progressivity in German can be expressed not only by lexical means but also by various periphrastic structures, e. g. the am-periphrasis, the prepositions bei and in combined with nominalized infinitives or the periphrastic infinitival construction with the auxiliary verb tun. However, the use of these structures can vary considerably from region to region, especially in oral communication, often also in connection with significant diastratic, diaphasic and diamesic variation. This paper investigates native speaker judgments of different progressive markers in German (i. e. am-periphrasis, beim- and im-periphrases as well as tun-periphrasis) regarding their acceptability, use, familiarity and distribution in a particular geographical area or social group. The present study essentially focuses on regional differences between three distinct dialectal regions of the German-speaking area (Middle Bavarian, South Bavarian and RhenishWestphalian). Results indicate a tendency towards successive advancement of the am-periphrasis, even though the actual usage of this specific progressive construction still shows clear diatopic and diaphasic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose an extension of Busse's cognitive discourse semantics through a usagebased construction grammatical approach. Following Lasch (2015a, 2015b, 2016), I will argue that (i) constructions are discursive per se, and (ii) some constructions can fulfil a textual or discursive function depending on their usage. The theoretical discussion shows that construction grammar is arguably an interesting and fruitful tool of a cognitive discourse semantics, which is empirically explained with examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present observations on the pragmaticalized use as well as the concomitant functions of the demonstrative este in Mexican Spanish. Este seems to serve an additional range of functions in Mexican Spanish in particular, but also in other Hispanic American varieties, as it has turned into a quite productive discourse marker that can be considered, among other things, as a hesitation element, an outline signal, and probably also as an evidentiality marker. The specific functional domains (especially with regard to possible evidential functions) will be illustrated in more detail in the paper using oral language data from the speaker community of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca de Juárez. The study also includes a sociolinguistically oriented quantitative analysis, the results of which will also be discussed in the context of language ideological attitudes towards este.

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts to open to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience offered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic devices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age. The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project “Museo poliglotta”, a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Brescia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. A number of observations lead to the conclusion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector.

In the introductory article to this special issue, the two editors first provide a brief insight into how it arose and then give an overview of the contents of the individual papers, all of which are dedicated to phraseography or metaphraseography. These two fields of linguistic research belong to both phraseology and (meta-)lexicography and deal with the inclusion of phrasemes in dictionaries and the corresponding practical and theoretical issues. The articles also have in common that they focus on various diatopic Romance varieties spoken in Italy (Genoese, Trentino, Piedmontese, Tuscan, regional Italian of Rome, Sardinian, Catalan of Alghero), Croatia (Istriot), Spain and Latin America (regional varieties of Spanish). Since the term phraseme is used in a broad sense in this publication, numerous different phraseological categories are discussed in the papers, including, for example, syntagmatic verbs and partially lexically filled constructions, in addition to more classical categories such as idioms, proverbs and collocations. Finally, it will be briefly argued why this special issue, which is inspired by the two research projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, can be regarded as particularly innovative.

This paper aims at describing the innovations brought in the digital phraseography of Genoese thanks to the recent FWF projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2. First, an overview on dialectal phraseography will be given, then the focus will be postponed on the Genoese one. The projects will be described, explaining the main choices that had to be made and that contribute to the innovative character of the Genoese-Italian phraseological dictionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the morpho-syntactic variation of subjunctive II in Bavarian dialect regions of (former) Austria and focuses on language dynamics. The broad empirical basis comes from two different corpora: The first corpus consists of data from the "Dictionary of Bavarian dialects in Austria" (WBÖ), reflecting the base dialects of the first half of the 20th century. These data are supplemented by recent oral data that were elicited in project part 03 "Speech repertoires and varietal spectra" of the Special Research Programme "German in Austria. Variation -- Contact -- Perception" (DiÖ). Combining WBÖ and DiÖ, PP03 data, a real time comparison is carried out. For additional apparent time evidence, the internal variation within the two datasets is taken into account: While in the WBÖ data different registers are compared, variation in the DiÖ, PP03 data is analyzed with respect to different registers and different speaker groups (old vs. young). The WBÖ and the DiÖ, PP03 data provide empirical evidence that the -ad-marker that was initially restricted to weak verbs has exceeded its domain and is universally compatible with all verb classes. In connection with this, there is a decrease of strong synthetic subjunctive II forms. The real time as well as the apparent time findings indicate an increase of analytic subjunctive II constructions at the cost of synthetic forms. Furthermore, we find an expansion of the werdenperiphrasis, while the number of tun-subjunctives declines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until today, variation and change in the use of subjunctive II variants in the dialects of Austria have been poorly studied. Largely neglected by traditional dialectology, even more recent studies neither consider all dialect regions of Austria, nor do they go into detail about intra-linguistic factors. Furthermore, an integration into morpho-syntactic theories of language change is missing. This paper addresses the above-mentioned desiderata. Using an apparent-time design, it intends to uncover linguistic, geographical, and sociolinguistic factors of variation and change in the use of subjunctive II variants in Austria's dialects. In order to achieve these goals, a comprehensive corpus of direct dialect recordings is analysed by means of various quantitative methods (cluster analyses, factor analyses, mixed variance analyses). Data are based on the dialect translations of 21 verb forms by 163 speakers from 40 locations (3,430 tokens). Overall, results show that periphrastic variants spread in the Austrian dialects, in particular periphrastic forms with the täte-auxiliary. Meanwhile, synthetic forms lose importance (both strong and weak synthetic forms). Moreover, results reveal significant verb-related differences which cannot be explained by their belonging to inflectional classes, as previous studies suggested. Instead, the 21 verbs studied can be divided into six clusters reflecting different stages in the spread of periphrastic forms. In terms of linguistic geography, Austria is divided into three parts with regard to subjunctive II variation: an Alemannic region in the west, a northwestern Bavarian area, and a south-eastern Bavarian area. With respect to sociolinguistic factors, gender is hardly a relevant factor, whereas age turns out to be decisive. Younger speakers use periphrastic forms more often and synthetic variants less often. Finally, these empirical findings will be discussed against the background of the theory of Natural Morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper aims at examining in detail a specific narrative pattern that is often found in picturebook stories for preschool children, namely, serial narration, or narration with repeated sequences. It is argued that serial narration is a form of linguistic routinization at the level of an actual text exemplar, by which a recurrent textual pattern emerges sequentially. In the first part of the paper, I analyze a number of both traditional and contemporary picturebooks and show that a key feature is repetition with variation at the level of the episode. In the second part of the paper, I investigate potential implications of the systematic utilization of serial narration for language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, based on a corpus of 20 Dutch and 20 German scientific journal articles, looks at how authors of German and Dutch research papers use nouns referring to persons. This investigation shows that although the two West Germanic languages are typologically similar due to their geographic proximity the two languages can vary a lot in terms of the abstraction (e. g. Lehrkräfte, Personen; leerkrachten, personen) and specification (e. g. Lehrerinnen und Lehrer; leraressen en leraren) of both grammatical gender and biological sex in academic articles. As a result it can be observed that Dutch authors prefer generic masculine personal nous whereas German authors tend to use more alternative forms, especially in recent times. The result contributes not only to a deeper understanding of personal nouns in academic articles but also to a clearer understanding of where and why there are differences between German and Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German sentences with man and Italian sentences with si impersonale or si passivante are often presented as equivalent in contrastive grammars. However, this functional equation proves to be problematic when Italian students refer with man to their own role as authors, such as in: "Darauf wird man aber im folgenden Kapitel eingehen". Evidently, man cannot refer to the speaker role, while in the same context the Italian si is well suitable. Starting from this interference error, the paper examines the possible range of reference of the two pronouns. It turns out that the most common reading of man and si in both languages is the generic one, which can be paraphrased as "everyone". Systematic divergences, on the other hand, occur in the particular reading, i. e. when referring to single unspecified subjects. While the German man characterizes the subject as anonymous and does never include listeners or speakers (e. g: Gestern hat man bei uns eingebrochen; man? 'jemand', 'somebody'), the Italian si, according to the verb class (transitive, unergative, unaccusative, etc.), can or must be read as speaker-exclusive (Mi si è raccontato che ...; si? 'qualcuno', 'someone') or as speaker-inclusive (Ieri si è andati al ristorante; si? 'noi', 'we'). The speaker-inclusive reading also occurs when si is used in academic texts as a substitute for the established form of speaker (author) reference by means of the 1st person plural (noi, 'we'). In addition to man and si, other forms of indeterminate subjects are examined, namely the non-anaphoric uses of German "sie (pl.)" (Sie haben schon wieder die Preise erhöht.) and of the Italian 3rd person plural null subject (Ti hanno cercato.) as well as the so-called impersonal passive form in German (Es wird gemurmelt.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that linguistic variants play a key role in the acquisition of language skills in the first, second or foreign language as well as in writing and translation processes and in general in communicative interactions. Thus, a major research goal is the systematic investigation of intra- and interlinguistic variation. Due to its complexity, its qualitative-quantitative analysis continues to be a challenging issue, but it seems to become more and more feasible thanks to both the possibility of compiling very large corpora and the availability of high-performing corpus-linguistic tools. The paper discusses a corpus-linguistic pilot study concerning the use of besser, am besten and das Beste as pragmatic markers in a cross-linguistic perspective. In particular, the analysis focusses on selected superlative and comparative constructions on the left periphery used for expressing advice. The data basis consists mainly of German and Italian comparable very large web corpora and, to a lesser extent, of bilingual sentence pairs drawn from parallel corpora. As will be shown, even restricting the analysis to a very small segment of microvariation, in both languages the modal constructions appear to be characterized by the combination of numerous overlapping and interplaying variants and by different tendencies in language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is i) to investigate the distribution of different topic types in the highest portion (found above valutative adverbs such as glücklicherweise and leider, Cinque 1999) of the German Mittelfeld, i. e. the clause portion found between the finite and non-finite verb forms (Satzklammer), and ii) to compare it with the distribution of topics within the Italian left periphery, i. e. the area found above the finite verb where operators, focalised and topicalised constructions are hosted (Rizzi 1997; Benincà 1988, 2001). Based on a corpus of written and oral German data collected through the DeReKO and the FOLK Databases, we show that in German i) in both written and oral examples a single topic belonging to all topic classes can appear in the highest portion of the Mittelfeld (as proposed by Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007), ii) and that multiple topics are restricted to written texts and appear with the fixed order "Aboutness Topic > Familiar Topic; Aboutness Topic > Contrast Topic". We compare the distribution of topics above valutative adverbs in German with the distribution of topics in the Italian left periphery. We show that the two languages share the fact that multiple topics are possible, with the difference that i) three topics can appear in the Italian left periphery in the order Aboutness Topic > Contrast Topic > Familiar Topic whereas only sequences of two topics are attested in German; ii) the sentence-initial position functions as an "extra" position for topics in German but not in Italian due to the V2 nature of the former language; iii) the presence of multiple topics in the left periphery is restricted to oral or informal texts in Italian and it is a typical trait of colloquial/informal language, whereas the availability of multiple topics in the German Mittefeld is restricted to written/formal texts and can thus be seen as a written/formal trait. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a pilot study of audioguides concerning paintings from museums in Italy, Germany and Denmark. The study combines an analysis of speech actions based on categories from the theory of Funktionale Pragmatik with a frame-oriented analysis of knowledge relevant for understanding the audioguide texts, which can be assessed from the formulation choices made by the authors. The focus of the paper is on building a descriptive and analytical tool to identify characteristics of German, Danish and Italian art audioguides. The aim of the study is to establish first results to be substantiated in future work also concerning the receiver modelling (Hörer:innen-Modellierung) in the investigated audioguides and furthermore to see whether intercultural differences are visible in the texts. The study shows that the same speech actions are present in audioguides from different cultures, but that they occur in different proportions according to the specific culture. Along similar lines, it was possible to create a consistent coding system concerning types of knowledge conveyed in the audioguides that enables us to assess and compare the results of analysing the texts. This analysis, too, indicates intercultural differences.

In this paper, we explore the geolinguistic relationship between urban and rural areas through the conceptualisation and modeling of spatial topologies. Geolinguistic topologies concern the structure of the mutual linguistic relationship between localities. They can be defined either deductively or on the basis of empirical data and represent the linguistic similarities or distances between localities. We operationalise and apply several such topological models to Austrian data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA), a linguistic atlas documenting colloquial German using crowd-sourcing methods. The results are evaluated on the basis of statistical examination and of visualisations of the topological relationships predicted by the models. It is confirmed that linguistic similarity is determined both by geographical distance and by the distribution of population, but the exact relationship is complex: Not only do smaller geographic distances on the one hand and higher population numbers on the other hand bring about increased linguistic similarity; the relevance of these two factors for linguistic similarity varies with population size, too, such that linguistic relationships between cities are determined more by their size and less by their distance, while for smaller locations the opposite is true. Hence, no single topological model can be identified as superior; instead, the individual models emphasise different aspects of the linguistic relationship between urban and regional language usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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