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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 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.

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.

The present paper discusses necessary adaptations in research methodology to include Deaf Sign Language users in a survey on Sign Language interpreting. Prelingually Deaf Sign Language users have, on average, lower literacy levels than their hearing counterparts. Many of them disfavour reading and writing texts and prefer to be addressed with, and communicate in Sign Language. The present paper reports on a survey among hearing Sign Language interpreters and Deaf Sign Language users that included qualitative expert interviews and a questionnaire with multiple choice as well as free text answers. In total, the questionnaire was processed by 771 participants, 325 of whom are hearing Sign Language interpreters and 446 Deaf Sign Language users. The paper reports on how the data was collected among the Deaf participants including the use of Sign Language and Sign Language oriented Easy Language Plus in order to meet their communicative preferences. The paper is a contribution to the current efforts in Accessible Communication research to adapt methodology according to the participant’s communicative needs.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, it is proposed on the basis of data from German that some of the information-structural features encoded by the projections located in the clause-internal Split-CP domain in the Rizzian (1997) model are replicated in the so-called “outer left periphery”, i. e. in the area situated above ForceP. In doing this, I pursue a cartographic approach in which information structure is directly represented in the syntax by means of syntactic heads that project within the clausal left periphery. The main claim of the paper is that the outer left periphery (of German) includes dedicated projections for four classes of topics, namely so-called “Contrastive Hanging Topics”, “Aboutness Contrastive Topics”, “Familiar Hanging Topics” and “Frame-setting Hanging Topics”. The observations made in this paper pave the way for a comparison with other languages, as well as for the question of the universality of this clause-peripheral makeup.

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.

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.

Autonomous verbs in Irish are special verb forms incompatible with the surface realization of a subject. Previous studies have suggested to postulate empty categories such as pro, PRO or expletive pro to fill the subject position (cf. Stenson 1989; McCloskey 2007; Bondaruk/ Charzyńska-Wóicjk 2003), thus rejecting the idea that these verbs might be classified as completely subjectless. A series of syntactic tests bear out the hypothesis that, at least for Irish, these verbs behave as actually lacking a subject. I first suggest correlating this state of affairs to the fact that, with autonomous verbs, no argument role to be promoted to subject position is selected at the valency level, although it is “implied” in the unfolding of the event. Secondly, I argue that both valency reduction and syntactic non-realization of an argument role is driven by information structural constraints; notably, the focal nature of autonomous verbs (as advocated elsewhere, cf. Nolan 2012) causes the subject (together with the argument role it is associated with) to be informationally downgraded, thereby leading to its suppression in the sentence. The position held in this paper is that autonomous verbs of the Irish type epitomize an interesting phenomenon of semantic-pragmatic interface, with the pragmatic level of the utterance “mediating” between the semantic and the syntactic level; in such a perspective, the pragmatic (information structural) level of an utterance would determine either the number and type of argument roles a verb can take in a particular discourse context (cf. DuBois 1987; Goldberg 2006) and their syntactic encoding.

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.

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.

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.

Studies on the Linguistic Landscape (LL) have become a particularly prolific object of study and research in the last fifteen years. The most recent research perspective has led to new categorizations for the LL, which not only form the basis for further empirical research, but are also of great use in foreign language teaching (Malinowski/Maxim/Dubreil 2020). Indeed, working with the LL that is also interculturally specific fulfils one of the primary goals of foreign language teaching, as the close relationship between language and culture also promotes intercultural communicative competence. Our paper will examine in particular the great potential of this tool in the context of teaching German as a Foreign Language in Italy, in order to stimulate greater language awareness and linguistic reflection in the processes of learning and teaching German in which learners are involved. By means of the administration of didactic sheets prepared by us, we will consider the possibility of applying to a didactic context data on both the German language and culture, taken from the observation of the LL of Alto Adige/Südtirol and collected on several occasions within a corpus, the LLSÜDTIROL, which will be discussed below.

As already shown in a newly published article (Autelli/Caria 2022b), the phraseological studies on the Catalan of Alghero are still in their infancy, and there is an urgent need for documenting more phrasemes in this diatopic variety. One can already find some of them in dictionaries and amatorial collections. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the written sources and dictionaries of Algherese, then to analyse the terminology used in the latter in reference to phrasemes and, most importantly, to find out what kind of phrasemes are provided, trying to pinpoint their main morphosyntactic, semantic and cultural features.

This article aims to present a proposal for the lemmatisation of Hispanic phraseology in a digital multilingual phraseological dictionary. Indeed, in the current lexicographic panorama, bi- or multilingual electronic dictionaries capable of comprehensively presenting the phraseology of the different diatopic varieties of Spanish are still lacking. For this reason, within the framework of the Digital Multilingual Phraseological Dictionary (DFMD) project, currently being developed at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, a preliminary study illustrated in this paper has been carried out. This focuses on the inclusion of Spanish phraseology in a Spanish-Italian/ Italian-Spanish bilingual repertory. In the following chapters, I first outline the state of the art as regards the presence of Hispanic phraseology in existing digital lexicographic works (chapter 2), and then move on to the presentation of the elaborated phraseographic proposal: in particular, I will set out the parameters adopted for the selection of the phraseological corpus under investigation and its subsequent lemmatisation in the Venetian repertory (chapter 3). Subsequently, I will examine some examples of lexicographic entries in which the proposed methodology is applied (chapter 4). Finally, I will offer some points of re-thinking for possible future studies (chapter 5).

The paper is devoted to the analysis of partially lexically specified constructions in different diatopic varieties of Italian. These word combinations can be defined as constructions since they are pairings of form and meaning characterized by the presence of fixed and empty positions. The investigation examines examples of partially lexically specified (phrasal and sentence) constructions in Sardinian and in the regional Italian of Rome. The analysis shows that this combinatorial type is widespread within the national language as well as in local varieties. The phenomena which have been considered mainly concern: i) the presence of indigenous constructions in the local variety; ii) the presence of constructions modelled on the roof language; iii) the lexicalisation of forms in the local variety from roof language constructions, which radiate back as fixed sequences into the national language. The analysis also considers the lexicographic perspective and shows that these constructions are generally underrepresented in lexicographic tools, even though their single instantiations are often recorded in the corresponding entries.

In this paper, the treatment of phraseological elements in four bilingual dictionaries of Istriot varieties – Gallesanese, Vallese, and Rovignese – and Italian is analyzed. First, an overview of the sociolinguistic situation of Istriot in the complex linguistic reality of Croatian Istria is provided. This is followed by a concise outline of Istriot lexicography. In the empirical part, after describing the analyzed dictionaries, the research results of the treatment of phraseology in the latter are presented and discussed. Finally, some concluding remarks are made.

Dialect phraseography is, generally speaking, still in its early stage; however, it is booming with some of the first studies in this direction as far as some diatopic varieties of Italy are concerned (additionally to the articles in this special issue, cf. also those contained in Autelli/Konecny/Lusito 2023a). As to Genoese phraseography, it has been living great development thanks to the Genoese-Italian projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, whose lexicographic entries can be found in one single, freely accessible online dictionary. As the latter project shows some additional innovative features, those will be further investigated in this paper, paying particular attention, within the numerous innovations, to the new sources and metalinguistic information integrated in the dictionary, to the phonetic transcriptions of the phrasemes as well as to the criteria chosen for creating sample sentences containing selected phrasemes.

The paper discusses the role of metaphor in the name construction of sea creatures among Akan (Mfantse) people within the purview of onomasiology. The role of metaphor in the naming of sea creatures has been understudied. This paper is a step towards filling the gap by analyzing the role metaphor plays in constructing naming units for sea creatures. This study has a qualitative research design. Twelve (12) fishers were purposely sampled, three (3) each from four fishing towns: Anomabo, Apam, Sekondi (Sekunde) and Moree (Mowure). The data collection tool was a semi-structured interview. The paper finds that likeness between sea creatures and static and/or dynamic entities triggers names for sea creatures. It concludes that, metaphor is employed to achieve simpler forms for salient features, communicate non-codable salient features and condense multiple features in the quest to name sea creatures among the Mfantse people. Through these vital roles, a general metaphor Sea Creatures are Land Animals/Entities is realized. The encyclopedic knowledge, which the Mfantse people have about their environment is realized through their naming strategies. It is recommended that the linguistics of naming percepts in indigenous Akan occupations be explored further.

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.

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.

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.

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 self-contained 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.

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.

Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this paper examines the practice of offering medical advice and its implication for negotiations of medical authority in Nigerian HIV consultations. Analyses of ninety treatment recommendation sequences from seventy audio-recorded interactions between doctors and HIV-positive patients reveal that doctors issue instructions as a form of medical advice on patients’ adherence to medical recommendations. During the advisory interactions, patients are held accountable for maintaining medical wellness, although the doctors’ reasons for offering medical advice, and the turn design and sequential distribution of the advice-giving sequence indicate that advice serves to enact authoritative roles. The findings are a counter-balance to the position, in existing conversation analysis research, that patients’ actions palliate medical authority. This paper calls for a broader conceptualisation of “adherence” and “medical authority” within medical institutional settings.

This article brings together recent onomastic investigations developed in Brazil between 2011 and 2018. In the field of toponomastics there is some degree of uniformity resulting from both the use of the same research paradigm and the development of projects dedicated to the production of toponymic atlases in several regions of the country. In the field of an-throponomastics, however, there is dispersion and fragmentation of anthroponymic studies due to non-affiliation with the field by some sociolinguistics and literature researchers The comparison between research papers in this review and a number of onomastic studies in Europe reveals that the socio-onomastic field is an emerging one in both Brazil and Europe. There are investigations that relate the studies of linguistic settings to toponymic studies and socio-anthroponomastic investigations based on data collection in written documents or data generation through field investigations. The existence of comparative anthroponomastic re-search and studies dealing with theory, methodology and literature review in the field of an-throponomastics can be observed. Studies about Brazilian indigenous onomastics and sec-ondary non-official personal names used by Brazilian city councilors has been found just in Brazil in the literature review presented in this paper.

Double Object Construction in Zarma sometimes allows alternations in the order of its internal arguments and the order in some cases may also be fixed. This tendency does not make predictions about a canonical order for the occurrence of Theme and Recipient objects within the VP simple. The same condition applies to monotransitive structures which vary between a complement-head and a head-complement order. It is the aim of this paper to present and analyse the most salient features of the kind of variations found in Zarma word order, particularly the ones associated with the verb that encodes three-participant events. The paper adopts the minimalist program proposed by Chomsky and is complemented with the Antisymmetry Hypothesis proposed by Kayne (1994). The study shows that the language has a uniform linear order where the recipient canonically precedes the theme on the basis of animacy factor. This is particularly common with the pronoun as the recipient in double object structures. Employing different diagnostics, the paper concludes that the recipient only follows the theme when the theme is associated with a more prominent discourse status. It is also argued that asymmetric C-command always occurs between the theme and the recipient. It implies that the language symmetry is altered by movement to designated positions for the purpose of feature checking.

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

Both in the academic literature as well in everyday life, the concepts “authenticity” and “norm” are used, but seldom explicitly defined. What is more, at first sight they might not even be regarded as linked. Synoptically considering the findings of three studies on various aspects of authenticity in relation to German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS), the paper explores how both concepts are connected. It will be shown that there are a number of linguistic and para-linguistic features that are perceived as indexical of authentic signing by deaf DGS signers. Drawing on the conceptual distinction between “standard language” (Standardsprache) and “high language” (Hochsprache) introduced by Gloy (1993), it will be argued that whilst these DGS features can be ascribed normative character corresponding to “high language”, these are not to be confused with “standard DGS”. Apart from newly introducing the concept of “norms of authenticity” (Authentizitätsnormen) in DGS, the paper offers new perspectives in that it will be demonstrated on the basis of sign language data that “standard language” and “high language” may – but in no way necessarily have to – correspond to the same linguistic realizations.

This paper 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Personal names and naming practices are among the linguistic topics that have occupied scholarly attention from diverse fields: philosophy, history, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. This paper investigates personal names from a linguistic perspective. It examines Kemunasukuma personal names by focusing on their structural patterns and the morphological processes involved in their formation. The study followed a qualitative approach as it deals with textual data (personal names). Data was collected through interviews and documentary review, and morphological approaches were adopted in data analysis. Personal names were broken down into meaningful morphemes to trace their structural patterns as well as determine the word-formation processes involved. The findings indicate that Kemunasukuma personal names exhibit seven structural patterns that range from simple to complex. Also, the findings indicate that three word-formation processes: inflection, derivation, and compounding are productive and responsible for the formation of Kemunasukuma personal names. The structure of Kemunasukuma personal names not only points to the structure of the Sukuma language but also gives vital clues about their semantics.

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.

Humanistic studies on medical causality from language studies have hardly explored how causality is constructed in medical referral materials, which is the research gap this study intends to fill. For data, forty completed National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) medical referral forms, comprising 842 words and medical signs, were purposively selected from a healthcare provider in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, and subjected to discourse analysis with insights from the causal coherence categories of Mann/Thompson’s (1987) Rhetorical Structure Theory. The paper identified two causal relations/structures – nonvolitional cause and nonvolitional result – in the data. Each structure reveals the primacy of diagnosis among the medical processes of diagnosing, investigating and treating or referring. The diagnosis proposition is primed as the consequence of pathophysiological causation in a diagnostic schema; while in the medical referral process, it is elevated as the causation for a medical referral, for instance for further specialist review and management, in a medical-referral schema. The construal of the semantic parameter of non-volition in the coherence relations is aided by the reality that illness is not intended, except caused by self-harm or suicide. The relations were signalled by four signal types, which are genre, semantic, syntactic, and semiotic; and six specific signals – mapping, lexical overlap, lexical chain, adverbials, semiotic overlap, and lexical-semiotic chain. These are implicit signals that complement the concise presentation of the medical processes. To conclude, this research provides the causal modeling of some medical processes, which highlights the prominence of diagnosis in medical referrals.

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

This study examines consonant mutation particularly in Esahie[1] and Nzema. The reason for the study arises from the mutuality in the two languages. Again, previous studies have superficially treated this subject in the separate languages. However, the subject of consonant mutation is common in the above languages, yet the prevailing characteristics of the phenomenon are similar and dissimilar in the languages. Thus, this study compares and contrast consonant mutation in the two related languages to establish a correlation. In this vein, it discusses the mutational pattern, directionalities and voicing. Data for this study are assembled from four native speakers of each of the languages and literature of the respective languages. The data are analysed within the purview of Distinctive Feature Theory. The study identifies evidence to the relational effect that, the phonological environments in which the various realizations of mutation occurs also results in a harmony system. However, they differ in their mutational domains. The featural agreement normally forges between the vowel-consonant. Again, it is observed in Nzema and Esahie that, the common feature responsible for mutation in the alternant pairs, [k/x] and [k/g] is [dorsal]; [d/l] and [d/n] is [coronal]; [ʨ/ɕ] is [+strident] and [b/m] is [labial]. In both languages, harmonic assimilation is bidirectional. [1] Esahie is also known as Sefwi, Sehwi, or Asahyue. In Ghana, the language is classified as part of the linguistic Akan group of the larger Akan dialects, even though it shares very close intelligibility with Nzema (a solely ethnographic Akan) than Twi and Mfantse (which are both linguistic and ethnographic Akan). Therefore, in this paper, we shall refer to both variants as separate languages.

By virtue of its status as a national language recognised by the princely institutions, Monegasque is the only Ligurian variety to have an officially regulated spelling system. The current writing norms, sanctioned by the Commission pour la langue monégasque, represent in essence the standardisation of the spelling choices introduced and developed in the last century by Louis Notari (1879–1961), the originator of literature in this language. This paper aims to illustrate the first proposal for the systematisation of Monegasque spelling, formulated between 1926 and 1927 within the Comité des traditions locales (ancestor of the current Comité national des traditions monégasques), an association established a few years earlier with the aim of protecting and safeguarding the linguistic and folkloric heritage of the Principality of Monaco. The proposal, while fairly naïve in terms of its approach and content, is a striking testimony to the first steps towards the linguistic analysis and representation of a variety which, until then, had not yet been codified and had known practically no written usage.

Construction Grammar and research on phraseology have both commenced as purely synchronically oriented subfields of linguistics and are nowadays only starting to gain a historical dimension. Both disciplines put such units of language in the center of their research that I address in the present paper as formulaic patterns. The paper aims to discuss the possibilities and limits of multifold interactions between the two subfields of linguistics with regard to historical formulaic language. An overview of the state of the art in the field of diachronic Construction Grammar (Section 2) is followed by reflections on historical phraseology that can already partially offer some answers to the questions posed by the Construction grammar only now (cf. Section 3). The case studies (Section 4) provide an empirical basis for the preceding theoretical considerations and are based on the data of the Research Group HiFoS at the University of Trier. The data consist of about 32.000 fully annotated formulaic patterns from historical German texts since the beginning of the written tradition in the 8th century to 1650.

Research on the facial expression of emotions has become a bone of contention in psychological research. On the one hand, Ekman and his colleagues have argued for a universal set of six basic emotions that are recognized with a considerable degree of accuracy across cultures and automatically displayed in highly similar ways by people. On the other hand, more recent research in cognitive science has provided results that are supportive of a cultural-relativist position. In this paper this controversy is approached from a contrastive perspective on phraseological constructions. It focuses on how emotional displays are codified in somatic idioms in some European (English, German, French, Spanish) and East Asian (Japanese, Korean, Chinese [Cantonese]) languages. Using somatic idioms such as make big eyes or die Nase rümpfen as a pool of evidence to shed linguistic light on the psychological controversy, the paper engages with the following general research question: Is there a significant difference between European and East Asian somatic idioms or do these constructions rather speak for a universal apprehension of facial emotion displays? To answer this question, the paper compares somatic expressions that are selected from (idiom) dictionaries of the languages listed above. Moreover, native speakers of the East Asian languages were consulted to support the analysis of the respective data. All corresponding entries were analysed categorically, i. e. with regard to whether or not they encode a given facial area to denote a specific emotion. The results show arguments both for and against the universalist and the cultural-relativist positions. In general, they speak for an opportunistic encoding of facial emotion displays.

The increasing volume of Internet based health resources means that decisions about how to trust information and advice encountered online become ever more complicated. As peer-to-peer experiences become a source of health information, lay people are required to evaluate the trustworthiness of such online personal accounts. In this paper, we present two contemporary studies of the negotiation of trust in e-health. The first study explores how people come to select a trustworthy voice from a community of online peers whilst the second explores how video bloggers use the medium to present a credible account of their health experiences. Drawing on data from interviews with community members, video transcripts and viewers’ comments, we examine issues of trust, language and advice from the perspective of those presenting the authentic voice as well as those seeking to evaluate the voice. The paper highlights the importance of similarity matching, motivation and interactivity to the portrayal and recognition of trustworthy accounts online.

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.

This chapter functions as an introduction to the special issue on Language and Health Online, which features 10 original research papers. It reviews the results of the papers and the joint emerging themes: the impact of technical and social affordances of computer-mediated interaction; discovering an emic perspective of health issues, uncovering health ideologies, and the theme of patient empowerment; the construction of identities, the construction of shared experiences, and the use of narratives. The diverse methodologies that are employed are introduced and a case is made for an open, versatile and mixed methodology when researching language and health online.

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.