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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.

In the United States, some prison gangs control not only inmates, but also what happens on the street. Since most gang members eventually get detained and incarcerated, prison gangs will victimize or kill any resistors in jail and prison. In this paper, I examine such a case between the California prison gang, La Eme, and the rebel Maravilla gangs of East Los Angeles. La Eme controls almost all the Latino gangs in Southern California and enforces prison and street rules that “Southsider” gangs must follow. Between 1993 and 2006, the Maravilla gangs resisted La Eme’s prison co-governance and then experienced a violence and victimization perhaps unrivaled in the gang world. Through field research on the Maravilla gangs, this paper reveals how some gangs defy prison co-governance, which then makes them feel meaningful in the gang world.

The populist radical right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP / UDC) has been largely known for its xenophobic discourses and its political agenda restricting immigration through popular initiatives such as the vote against minarets (2009), the deportation of “criminal foreigners” (2010) and the initiative against “mass immigration” (2014). This paper shows how SVP/UDC activists, who themselves or whose parents had migrated to Switzerland, understand their political engagement and contribution. This sheds light on their desire to become part of a “deserving minority” and on their use of boundary-making strategies to demarcate their positions from others they label as “undeserving migrants”. Their political engagement needs to be understood as part of a broader quest for belonging to the Swiss national community. By showing that migration-related experiences inform the political involvement of activists at the Swiss People’s Party, this paper questions widely spread assumptions on contradictory or counterintuitive political commitments.

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.

In my paper, I focus on a carmen written by a 17th-century Hungarian peregrine, Jakab Farkas of Alistál to his fellow student, György Csipkés of Komárom, on the occasion of this latter’s disputation Disputatio Scholastico-Theologica. De Speculo Trinitatis, in 1652. This carmen is one of those Utrecht poems which were written in Hebrew and created for Komáromi in the first part of the 1650s; chronologically it was written after István Ötvös of Szathmár’s, Johannes Leusden’s, Petkó János of Somos’ carmina and before the author’s second greeting poem (1654). In my paper, I publish the poem in a normative transcription, analyze it from the linguistic point of view, regarding the erroneous or extraordinary forms, and interpret it regarding the content-stylistic and poetic features. I take some notes about the translational solutions as well. At the end of my paper, I conclude that linguistically and in terms of the content it is a little bit obscure, peculiar creation, and doesn’t fit into the prevailing literary tendency of the age, the Baroque, or the dominant trend, the “Baroque-esque” style. But if we see it as a forerunner of the modern, expressionist poems, its oddities are immediately not so confusing.

The paper rekindles a three-decade-old debate in the annals of Indian anthropology / sociology which became dormant after no significant headway was made. The debate which goes by the name of “crisis in sociology” in India provides the backdrop against which the paper makes sense of current regimes of knowledge production that a doctoral candidate in India must navigate. By doing so, the paper reflects on the limitations of epistemological critiques wherein an epistemic critique stops at the corridors of an academic workplace. The paper argues that doctoral candidates in India today are cognitive workers engaged in exploitative relations of knowledge production. However, these exploitative relations are obfuscated by the postcolonial epistemological critiques that indulge in foregrounding the hegemony of the North / West. The paper proposes an infrastructural critique of knowledge that does not respond with despair to perceived transformations and crises.

The (re)attribution of place names plays a significant yet subtle role in the production of spatial and national identity. Since 1948, the Israeli administration has endeavoured to Hebraize (therefore Judaize) the space in the Israel Palestine region. Yet, Arabic names of major neighbourhoods within Jerusalem have survived while their Palestinian residents have not been allowed to return since they fled or were expelled in 1948. This article explores this toponymic paradox. After delving into the Israeli efforts to create and maintain an (almost) exclusive Hebraized landscape and the variety of ensuing toponymic clashes, this paper examines different reasons that might explain the ‘resistance’ of Arabic names in areas of Israel’s proclaimed capital city. Using concepts such as toponymic attachment and place identity, this paper reveals much about the strength of traditional naming practices versus imposed policies, including in contexts of disputed territories where the Other’s toponyms tend to represent a threat to One’s narrative of the land.

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.

This paper delves into the life stories of three unaccompanied asylum seeking youth residing at a state care shelter in Istanbul in 2015 and 2016. Through its intervention, the research follows an engaged anthropological approach to reveal the hidden aspects of the youth's emotional and intellectual worlds. The in-depth life stories shared here illuminate Homi Bhabha's Third Space Theory (1994) and are amplified by a methodological approach we call affective multimodalities. As we seek to understand the various ways the youths navigate survival and learning to be freed from institutional categories, we explore a few concepts of Third Space Theory: extraterrestrial territories, paradoxical worlds, afterlife-rebirth, and a displaced angle of vision. Through the practice of a collaborative radio show and photography elicitations, the youth were asked to share their dreams as they were encouraged to realize their potentials. During this co-creative approach, one of the youth even became a co-author of this paper. The ethnographic insights produced through this approach allows us to explore the third space theory with a poetical reflection through words and images.

This paper proposes a reflection on collaboration through dance. Drawing on ten years of fieldwork within the Swiss contemporary dance scene, the author, an anthropologist, dance scholar, and dancer, discusses her ethnographic practice, method, and writing inspired by collaborative anthropology. The first part of the paper advocates for dance as a practice-based research method, and for auto-ethnography to convey anthropological knowledge in a more accessible way. Research-creation is claimed to particularly suit sensorial topics, tending toward symmetrical relationships between anthropologists and fieldwork interlocutors. Drawing on an applied anthropological project using djembe dances for better social cohesion, the second part of the paper shows one possible engagement with society through dance practice. Generating intimacy and misconceptions, the project Kunda emphasizes how dance can become a laboratory to learn and negotiate intercultural differences.

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.

This paper aims to trace the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian concept of “royal divine glory” (farr) through its visual translations within the Iranian manuscript cultures in the Safavid period, specifically in the illustrations of the Shahnama-yi Shahi in the 16th century. Reviewing the longue durée idea of Iranian kingship perceived within the Safavid royal ideology in the reigns of the first two monarchs, we delve into the Shahnama paintings to see the artists’ assets for showing the divinity and dignity of Iranian kings and how they managed to mark a difference between the profane and Shiite iconographies. We took as case studies nine illustrations of Zahhak’s story, the most tyrannical legendary King in Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnama. Indeed, to analyse the artistic manifestations of the Royal farr, we examined the scenes where the “true” king is literally absent.

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.