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

In this paper we will investigate the nature of deverbal nominals across languages. Deverbal nouns are typically classified according to their word-formation model: affixation and conver-sion. Our study will compare the word formation of deverbal nominals in Slavic (Croatian, Slovenian and Polish) and Romance languages (Italian, French and Spanish) in order to show (i) that affixation corresponds to a specific mode of morphological operations and (ii) that the differences and similarities between deverbal nominals of these two language families follow from the properties of the base verbs. Furthermore, our analysis will try to shed some light on the distinction between nouns and verbs. The paper comprises three major thematic parts. The first part briefly reviews the basic notions and theoretical assumptions of Generative Grammar regarding word formation. We have especially tried to explain those notions that we draw from Distributed Morphology. This part further exposes the theoretical framework that is used in this paper. In the second part, deverbal nominals in Slavic languages are analysed and de-scribed. We primarily investigate the Slavic languages, since in these languages morphology plays a larger role in the construction of deverbal nouns. The third part contains an investiga-tion of the phrasal structure of nominalizations across the Romance languages. We close the work with a general conclusion about the behaviour of deverbal nouns in these two groups of languages. We concentrate mainly on the differences between the phrasal architecture of nom-inalizations and correspondent verbal constructions.

The starting point of this paper is the observation of an unequal frequency of the additive particle auch in German as compared to the paucity of its French counterpart aussi, in L1 and L2 developmental data as well as in adult native speakers' production, which leads to an investigation of the reasons for the observed difference in language use. The paper brings together findings on the structure and discourse integration of utterances containing additive particles (translation equivalents of also) in written sources from French and German and in oral production data from speakers of French and Italian, German and Dutch. Next to data from native speakers, developmental data from learners of French and German (as L1 and L2) are shown to be relevant sources of information about the integration of the optional particles into utterances and at the discourse level. The developmental data reveal a difference between Romance and Germanic languages, concerning not only the frequency of additive particles, but also their interaction with early markers of assertion: auch/ook function as precursors of the assertive value, in competition with the expression of assertion through finiteness, whereas no such interaction is attested for aussi/anche. A comparison of native speakers' preferential choices concerning the information unit highlighted to enhance discourse cohesion confirms the differences between the two language families: speakers of Germanic languages preferentially use particles and Verum Focus, i. e. anaphoric links operating on the assertion value of the relevant utterances, whereas speakers of Romance languages choose anaphoric links operating on the utterance's descriptive content (entities and predicate). Although additive particles across languages share a similar basic meaning, only the Germanic ones are integrated in a system of assertion-related items that push their speakers to apply a discourse perspective oriented towards a comparison of assertions.

The goal of this paper is to offer a cross-linguistic analysis of the most commonly occurring additive focus adverbs used in Italian, French and English – namely anche, aussi and also – on the basis of a corpus of written texts. The corpus used in this paper consists of comparable online news in Italian, French and English amounting to approximately 750000 words. In line with previous findings, our results show that there are important quantitative and qualitative differences between It. anche, Fr. aussi and E. also. These items differ not only in their overall frequency of use but also in the specific syntactic configurations in which they occur when they associate with the Subject of a canonical sentence. These differences are partly enhanced by the fact that this paper concentrates on a non-prototypical configuration, i. e. on the cases in which the canonical Subject coincides with a new entity while the Predicate is maintained.

The present paper offers a comparative presentation of the possibilities and limits of five of the most important large digital corpora on present day German which are currently publicly available (Leipzig, DWDS, COSMAS, COSMAS tagged and TIGER). The aim of this article is to put at the researcher's disposal a comprehensive survey of the possibilities for using automatic search devices in the fields of lexicology, morphology, word formation and syntax. Special attention is given to the comparison of the performance and user friendliness of the proposed search options and analysis tools (lemmatisation, cooccurrence analysis, etc.). The information given in this paper is condensed in several comparative synopses which are individually understandable to a reader who does not want to have recourse to the full text.

Investigating and teaching collocations. The starting point of the paper is the observation that foreign language learners translate collocations literally from their L1. Collocations are conceived here as phrasal units which can be placed between free word groups and idioms. The paper focuses on metaphoric collocations, i.e. with polysemic collocator. In this type of collocation the collocator is used in a metaphoric meaning, while it appears in denotative meaning in free word groups. Contrasting types of collocation are presented in a model. Data from empirical research show that foreign language learners of a certain level regard metaphoric collocations as marked and transfer them less often than non-metaphoric collocations. The paper supports the need for pointing out the significance of collocations even for beginners.

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

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, it aspires to discuss some general considerations regarding the treatment of word-forming elements in a bilingual dictionary. It is argued that not few lexicographic decisions are to be made rather independently of fluctuating linguistic postulates and that the user aspect and the function of the respective dictionary should be paid special attention to. Second, the paper examines the quantity and quality of the information provided on affixes in two German-Czech dictionaries. The analysis focuses on the entry components terminology, spelling, pronunciation, input and output units, sense distinction, translation equivalents, examples, cross-references, usage labels and productivity as well as on selectional criteria and information on affixes in the outside matter. The analysis reveals that the dictionaries under scrutiny show considerable weaknesses with respect to the information provided. Third, the paper briefly describes the treatment of the German prefix/circumfix Ge-...(-e) in the emerging Large German-Czech Academic Dictionary, an output of a project pursued at the Institute of Germanic Studies, Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles University in Prague. It is shown how contrastive analysis can be supplemented by a corpus-based view using new corpus-linguistic tools.

This paper is an overview of some of the complications associated with conceptualizing second language in African societies, particularly with reference to European languages. Most popular opinions and many scholarly insights appear to define second language mainly in terms of sequence of acquisition. From this perspective, the term second language refers to a language learnt in addition to a previously acquired one. While this view of second language actually applies to many African situations, there are complex bilingual and multilingual situations in Africa that pose serious conceptual problems when viewed from the standpoint of this dominant view. This paper raises the need for scholars to be conscious of these situations, and the variations in the conception of second language that consequently exist, so that divergent perspectives of second language can be better accommodated in the emerging global academic community.

This paper discusses the semantic content of syntactic dependencies. We assume that syntactic dependencies play a central role in the process of semantic interpretation. They are defined as selective functions on word denotations. Among their properties, special attention will be paid to their ability to make interpretation co-compositional and incremental. To describe the semantic properties of dependencies, the paper will be focused on two particular linguistic tasks: word sense disambiguation and attachment resolution. The second task will be performed using a strategy based on automatic acquisition from corpora.

The topic of the present paper is the relation between linguistics and language education. Put as a question one could ask: 'what benefit can linguistics have for language teaching?'. It will be claimed that as a precondition, language teachers should have more than just marginal insight into theories of natural language. I will try to support this postulate using sentences with modal verbs: based on a certain linguistic theory, illustrations of sentences with modal verbs will be given. These illustrations are thought to be a first step for a didactic preparation (transformation) of explanations given by a linguistic theory for natural language phenomena. As a consequence of the considerations it will be postulated that it is obligatory for the education of teachers to include linguistic modules, since, in line with the hypothesis of this paper, insight into linguistic theories can help: 1) to understand phenomena of natural language and 2) to find a didactical preparation for the phenomena in question.

Based on where and how phonological rules apply, studies in Lexical Phonology (Mohanan 1986; Kiparsky 1985; Pulleyblank 1986; etc.) distinguish between two levels in the phonology; namely, lexical and post-lexical. At the post-lexical level, the various phonological rules normally require particular domains, without which they fail to apply. The question that follows is where and how we define these domains. Considering Akan Noun-Noun and Noun-Adjective phrasal word (compound) constructions in prosodic phonology (Selkirk 1986, Nespor and Vogel 1986 and Hayes 1989; etc.), this paper touches on some aspects of the prosody-syntax interface on the idea that the domain of a post-lexical rule is drawn from the prosodic component, an intermediate phase of interface analysis. The rules that come to bear are tonal (i.e. H-Deletion, H-Insertion and Boundary assimilation) and segmental (i.e. Prefix deletion and Diphthong simplification) ones that apply on the dictates of particular prosodic domain attainment. Thus, this paper argues that the syntactic structure influences these phonological rules, but indirectly through the prosodic structure (Inkelas 1989). Finally, the paper claims that with the prosodic domains occurrences are better defined and accounted for.

Although Swiss dialects of German are widely used in everyday communication, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of transcribed spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for dialectological, historical and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source, and summarise a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to stimulate the use of the corpus for dialectological research.

The present investigation explores the language definitions (i. e. the language ontologies) that have emerged in the field of sociolinguistics. In general, it examines three types of sociolin-guistic studies: Labovian sociolinguistics (Labov 1972), the Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz/Hymes 1964) and Conversation Analysis (Sacks 1992). Firstly, it offers an account on the ontology of language developed by Chomskyian linguistics (1986) which is used as a starting point to contrast the three sociolinguistics’ language ontologies. Then, the paper pre-sents Labov’s ontology of language (Labov 1977), the criticism that it has faced and examines proposals that aim to integrate social facts and linguistic structure. With regard to the Ethnog-raphy of Communication, accounts about its ontology of language (Hymes 1974, 1986) and its ontology of culture (Sapir 1921; Hymes 1972) are presented and a possible explanation about the relationship between language and culture is offered. With respect to Conversation Analysis, its ontology of language is presented (Ochs et al. 1996) as well as its analytic in-sight and an account about grammar as an interactional resource is given. The final section proposes that, for these three types of sociolinguistics, “language” is a social, functional and behavioural entity which is socially and behaviourally structured. “Language” transmits social meanings, reflects the social order and expresses the identity of its speakers.

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

Academic discourse relies on a common register that reaches across disciplinary boundaries. This so-called common language of academia includes terms denoting common objects and actions of academic work in the fields of knowing, understanding and learning, of perceiving and observing, of designing and devising as well as of writing and speaking in their many different forms. In German academic discourse, this common register is highly figurative, often creating problems in bilingual contexts as well as during students’ acquisition of academic discourse. This paper presents an ongoing project to identify, describe and categorize the lexical dimension of this common language of academia by means of corpus-linguistic analyses. It presents operators to distinguish said register from non-academic German as well as discipline-specific discourse. Following these filtering procedures, the figurativity of the identified items is discussed in terms of their spatial-haptic, optical-visual, mental-cognitive and acoustic-linguistic character. Prominent cases of ambiguity, when specific lexical items can be used and read as expressing two figurative aspects, are also identified.

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

In a chat discourse it is not always clear who is chatting with whom; automatic discourse analysis is especially problematic. It is important to identify the users' nicknames in the written discourse to find out the receivers of the chat messages. But the linguistic possibilities in nickname creation, and also of using them in the discourse, are various. To study how nicknames are created and used in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), logs of 13 channels consisting of 8937 public chat messages and 7936 unique nicknames were analyzed in detail. The paper shows, among other things, the basic structure of IRC nicknames, of which parts-of-speech group nicknames are compounded, and which parts-of-speech of a nickname are omitted within the chat discourse. This knowledge leads to a better prediction as to whether there is a link between a current logged-in user and the examined word in discourse, which can be a shortened or creatively changed form of a nickname.

In the past years a large number of electronic text corpora for German have been created due to the increased availability of electronic resources. Appropriate filtering of lexical material in these corpora is a particular challenge for computational lexicography since machine readable lexicons alone are insufficient for systematic classification. In this paper we show – on the basis of the corpora of the DWDS – how lexical knowledge can be classified in a more fine-grained way with morphological and shallow syntactic parsing methods. One result of this analysis is that the number of different lemmas contained in the corpora exceeds the number of different headwords of current large monolingual German dictionaries by several times.

This study presents the results of the author's research project called Olomouc Corpus of Spoken Czech (OCSC). The paper is focused on the state and partial phases of constructing the corpora, its methodology and annotation. Within the OCSC we use so called dual system of transcription, which means (1) an orthographic one with the purpose of linguistic (morpho-logical) analysis and tagging and (2) a phonetic version of transcript which consists of three layers of the text: first the real transcription and further various types of the metatexts as a second and third layer, including communication aspects of the texts. The criteria of selection of speakers are also listed here and the highly important statistical analysis of the sociolin-guistic categories (gender, age, type of education, types of recordings) is presented as well. This analysis can serve as a base for a partial correction of possible non-balance among those sociolinguistic parameters. The annotation rules and principles are mentioned at the end of this study.

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

Morphematic reorientation of German orthography takes place in conformity with a general law in the history of writing. Alphabetic writing systems, being necessarily phonographic, tend to develop towards the encoding of non-phonetic units. The emergence of morphematic elements in German is preceeded by the evolution of word-separation by regular spaces which had been adopted throughout Europe by the end of the 13th century. Based on a corpus containing 157 High German texts (late 15th to late 18th centuries), this paper will demonstrate that morphematic reorientation of German orthography can be explained neither as an invisible-hand-process nor as the outcome of prescriptive grammar, but as the result of interaction between orthograpic norm and usage. Three cases will be considered in detail:(1) Graphic assimilation of allomorphic plosive variation emerges as early as the 12th century, reflecting regional final devoicing. By the early 17th century, the rule governing orthographic reprensentation of final devoicing in present-day German is fully adopted in usage. Its morphematic reinterpretation does not follow before the end of the 17th century.(2) Morphematic graphic representation of [a]-Umlaut emerges during the 14th century in Upper Germany as a phonetic reflex of open [e]. It is recommended by Middle German grammarians since the 1560s, with explicit mention of morphological factors. Around 1700 the writing rule imposes itself in usage.(3) The use of double consonant letters occuring in final positions of 'graphic' syllables ( according to ) rests inhibited until the 18th century, in particular to prevent tri- or tessaragraphs (, ). It is the influence of Adelung's grammar which leads to the final adaption of the present-day rule.

In this paper, a semantic analysis is presented of the Dutch particle toch and its German cognate doch. On the formal level they may appear as either adverb, conjunction or interjection, and they also occur in different sentence types. It is argued that the core meaning of both particles is the same. The range of uses differs, however, between the two languages. For example, German doch can be used as an 'answering particle' in reaction to a negative statement or question. This is not possible in Dutch. The core meaning of the particles can be explicated in terms of three steps: the utterance with toch/doch represents a positive step. This step is preceded (implicitly or explicitly) by a negative step, which is in turn preceded by a positive step wich is identical to the actual positive step. For certain uses of toch and doch, however, we have to assume a modification of this general schema. A Dutch novel (by Maarten 't Hart, 1983) and its German translation was used as a corpus. The original text contained 270 occurrences of toch, and the translation 230 doch's.

This paper illustrates the usefulness of natural language processing (NLP) tools for computer assisted language learning (CALL) through the presentation of three NLP tools integrated within a CALL software for French. These tools are (i) a sentence structure viewer; (ii) an error diagnosis system; and (iii) a conjugation tool. The sentence structure viewer helps language learners grasp the structure of a sentence, by providing lexical and grammatical information. This information is derived from a deep syntactic analysis. Two different outputs are presented. The error diagnosis system is composed of a spell checker, a grammar checker, and a coherence checker. The spell checker makes use of alpha-codes, phonological reinterpretation, and some ad hoc rules to provide correction proposals. The grammar checker employs constraint relaxation and phonological reinterpretation as diagnosis techniques. The coherence checker compares the underlying "semantic" structures of a stored answer and of the learners' input to detect semantic discrepancies. The conjugation tool is a resource with enhanced capabilities when put on an electronic format, enabling searches from inflected and ambiguous verb forms.

Over the past ten to fifteen years, web-based methods of sociological research have emerged alongside classical methods such as interviews, observations and experiments, and linguistic research is increasingly relying upon them as well. This paper provides an overview of three web-based approaches, i.e. online surveys, crowd-sourcing and web-based corpus analyses. Examples from specific projects serve to reflect upon these methods, address their potential and limitations, and make a critical appraisal. Internet-based empirical research produces vast and highly diverse quantities of (speaker-based or textual) data, presenting linguistic research with new opportunities and challenges. New procedures are required to make effective use of these resources.

This paper discusses pivotal theoretical and methodological problems of historical corpus linguistics. In two case studies from Swedish language history, the development of the epistemic adverb kanske and the group genitive respectively, it illustrates how the use of qualitative method in addition to corpus investigation can contribute to understanding grammatical change.

International audience; In this paper, we present a foreign language learning approach inviting the learner to reflect on the linguistic system. We define "the reflecting learner" as a thinking being who decides to engage in thinking rather than following the teacher's invitation to reflect on his or her performed action. After describing our references (the theory of enunciative operations, the conceptualisation approach, etc.), we give an overview of the main questions which must be answered when designing a learning scenario including language reflection activities. These questions are related, for instance, to the choice of learning objectives and materials and to the choice of metalinguistic terms. The last part of the article presents and analyzes the main characteristics of two recent scenarios, in order to show how a reflective approach can be implemented. In these scenarios, the use of technologies, in particular of an online forum or of online corpora, plays a positive role.; Dans cet article, nous présentons une approche en didactique des langues étrangères, offrant à l'apprenant l'occasion de réfléchir sur le système de la langue. Après avoir précisé les références sur lesquelles nous nous appuyons (théorie des opérations énonciatives, conceptualisation, etc.), nous passons en revue les questions essentielles qui se posent pour une telle entreprise, entre autres : quels objectifs, quels supports, quel métalangage ? Pour finir, nous montrons par des exemples récents de mise en œuvre d'une approche réflexive le rôle positif que peuvent avoir les technologies, en particulier le recours au forum ou aux corpus numériques.

Mass Customization and Learner Autonomy: A Mexican PerspectiveMaría Elena Llaven Nucamendi (Cozumel) AbstractCustomization of services or products fundamentally involves choices being made by the cus-tomer. This paper explores the conception of learner autonomy in language learning and its relationship to the capacity of students to make choices about their own education as a pre-requisite for implementing mass customization in learning support. A study of the impedi-ments to learner autonomy in a Mexican context indicates some of the conceptual and cultural issues that should be addressed in implementing mass customization in language learning.

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

Semantically complex units cover a high percentage of the lexicon of a language, ranging from collocations or routine formula to proverbs. The difficulty for learners of a foreign language lies in the fact that in many cases the meaning of those elements of the lexicon does not result just from addition of the meaning of individual constituents. Although (active and passive) knowledge about such lexical elements can be considered essential for successful communication in a foreign language, there still exists a lack (we focus on German as a foreign language, but we assume that the situation is comparable for other languages) of up-to-date and authentic didactic material that takes into account the characteristics of semantically complex units and the learners' cognitive strategies to analyze their meaning. In this paper we develop a didactic model that describes the use of magazine advertisements in teaching German as a foreign language. Due to their multimodality (e.g. the combination of verbal and visual elements) the texts allow the learners to better understand and actively use semantically complex units, even with a low competence level. In order to illustrate our didactic approach we present 5 advertisements that we have used with learners of German in their first and second year at a French university. It turns out that not only can phraseology be conveyed in an efficient way but that other educational objectives, such as a general increase of the learners' motivation, can be achieved.

The paper deals with the doubling of the verb laa 'let' in the dialect of the city of Zug. The data are collected by means of written questionnaires. The results of this inquiry are compared with the results gained by the project SADS ('Syntactic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland'). This comparison clearly shows differences in the results according to the elicitation techniques. It also shows that there is a greater variation with regard to the laa-doubling than illustrated by the SADS project. This variation seems to at least correlate with the age of the informants.

HyperHamlet is a database of allusions to and quotations from Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation as a joint venture between the Departments of English and German Philology, and the Image and Media Lab at the University of Basel. The compilation of a corpus, whose aim it is to document the "Shakespeare phenomenon", is intricate on more than one level: the desired transdisciplinary approach between linguistics, literary and cultural studies entails data selection from a vast variety of sources; the pragmatic nature of intertextual traces, i.e. their dependence on and subordination to new contexts, further adds to formal heterogeneity. This is not only a challenge for annotation, but also for data selection. As the recognition of intertextual traces is more often than not based on intuition, this paper analyses the criteria which underlie intuition so that it can be operationalised for scholarly corpus compilation. An analogue to the pragmatic model of ostensive-inferential communication with its three constitutive parts of speaker's meaning, sentence meaning and hearer's meaning has been used for analytical heuristics. Authorial intent – in a concrete as well as in an abstract historical sense – origin and specific encyclopaedic knowledge have been found to be the basic assumptions underlying data selection, while quantitative factors provide supporting evidence.

This paper compares the output of two translation tasks. In an attempt to find out the extent to which students of translation can translate Arabic contextualized collocations into English properly, two conflicting views about carrying out a translation task are tested. The first holds that avoiding the use of a dictionary in test sessions, though not in translation classes, would save time and yield better translation products, whereas the second contends that recourse to a dictionary is unavoidable at any translation task, including tests. The two opposing views have their corollary in a similar dispute which has already been settled in favour of the mental lexicon rather than the dictionary (cf. Rangelova/Echeandia 2001). The results of this study defeat the first claim and run counter to Rangelova/Echeandia's findings, though obtained from qualitatively a different test setting.

The language of written business communication is characterised by the extensive use of phraseology, not only in terms of collocations and idiomatic expressions, but also of standard phrases in prototypical business genres. In any case, the phraseological information should be included in business dictionaries (in the following referred to as BDs) in accordance with the planned dictionary functions. Hence, the selection and presentation of the phraseological information should be decided by the lexicographer on the basis of the user needs alone and not on the recommendations of the phraseological literature about lexicographical practice. In this paper, I will firstly explain why lexicography and phraseology, although closely associated in a large number of studies, are quite different disciplines, and how their shared interest for dictionary practice in general is based on radically different views. I will then discuss the dictionary functions of BDs and focus on a number of concepts featuring extensive phraseological solutions to show and argue that dealing with phraseology in BDs should always keep focus on dictionary functions.

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

The aim of this paper is to draw the necessary terminological distinction between media, communication forms and communication genres, and to use this distinction to compare specific communication genres belonging to chat communication. After some preliminary remarks, the following two sections deal with the definition of media and communication forms and the most important characteristics of communication forms, which are illustrated with examples of chat communication. Section 4 introduces the concept of communication genre, and section 5 shows the way communication genres, especially the expert chat and the information chat, can be analyzed within this framework and why it is not possible to do it in the same way with emails and short text messages. In this context the distinction between communication genres and text genres will also be discussed.

The rhotic or "r-like sound" of Standard European French is a segment varying in manner, both degree of aperture and voice quality. This paper presents a broadly functional analysis of /ᴚ/ voicing within an Optimality Theoretic framework, accounting for instances of voice assimilation, neutralization and apparent free variation. Autosegmental analysis of /ᴚ/ voice alternation is critiqued based on its inability to account for voice patterns. A lenition-based approach, taking into account active and passive voicing mechanisms, is proposed, from which alternations between voiced and voiceless /ᴚ/ are seen as the result of principled phonological processes involving effort avoidance and reduction. This analysis supports a representation of /ᴚ/ that is unspecified for active glottal control; essentially, the output or surface instantiation of /ᴚ/ derives from its phonological environment, as constrained by universal principles of effort reduction or avoidance. These principles are articulated in grounded constraints LAZY(glot), targeting glottal or laryngeal effort. Other issues raised include the integration of phonetic principles in phonological explanation, the justification for input or underlying representations of variant phonemes and the heuristic capabilities of proposed constraints. A concluding section comprises a discussion of the data and the conception of voice as a phonological category.

This paper presents an approach for combining web-based learning (WBL) with problem-based learning (PBL), aiming at computer aided learning (CAL) support for introductory lectures to Computational Linguistics. Contrary to most current learning paradigms, we neither follow the "platform + content"-approach of current learning management systems used for distance learning, nor focus on the collaborative aspects of PBL. Instead we propose a text-centred concept for individual learning featuring problem-based interactive learning applications (TIP).