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Copyright of Info DaF: Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Info DaF: Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on 30th Meeting of the Young Slavists: Institute for Slavic Studies and Caucasus Studies of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena held from September 8-9, 2022. It mentions conference papers are on the fields of discourse linguistics, gender linguistics, intercomprehension research, contact linguistics, multilingualism research, morphology and assigned to phraseology without exhausting themselves. It also mentions methodology of using keywords in the discourse analysis.

An important source for the investigation of the Russian language during the reign of Peter the Great is the first printed paper Vědomosti (1703-1727) initiated by the Tsar himself. Here many compilations from Western European papers are found, that transported words of Latin provenance into Vědomosti, including later latinized spellings and Latin quotations. This shows the strong position of latinitas in the Western European language area at the time, in particular Dutch, the language favoured by the Tzar, but also German and French. Therefore we are dealing here with «Eurolatinisms» which form a connection between Russia and the European area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a corpus-driven analysis of wh-interrogatives in Castilian Spanish. Combining methods from variationist and interactional linguistics, it is demonstrated that both the distribution of the variants and their discourse functions can be described in terms of the degree of mental accessibility of the interrogative proposition (P) and the referent of the interrogative pronoun/ adverb (X). In contexts in which both P and X have a low degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives establish a new Question under Discussion; in contexts in which P has a high and X a low degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives are used to elaborate a current Question under Discussion; in contexts in which both P and X have a high degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives are used to repeat, clarify or challenge a previous utterance. Given that the wh-interrogative variants differ in their restrictions regarding the accessibility of P and X, they typically also fulfil different discourse functions. The analysis moreover demonstrates that due to these functional differences, the type of response to the interrogatives produced by the listeners differs systematically depending on the wh-interrogative type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is dedicated to the concept of ambiguity and humor as an intercultural phenomenon. In the first section, we introduce different concepts of the term humor in literature from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, psychology and cognitive linguistics. We attempt to show that the concept of humor and ambiguity of an intercultural and interlingual perspective may belong to the most difficult areas of translation theory. At the same time, humor and polysemy are the key concepts of a semantically and pragmatically based theory of translation. In the second section, we will briefly deal with the phenomena of humor and ambiguity from the psycholinguistic and cognitive point of view and thereby we try to analyze the difference between visuality and textuality of Shakespeare's tragedy 'Romeo and Juliet' in film and on stage. The third section of this paper is devoted to the phenomenon of interculturality and the interlingual translation of pragmatic and cognitive-semantic categories on the example of polysemy, vagueness, irony, pun, word play and joke (and its various strategies and conversational implicatures in the literary text). It is assumed that initially the validity of the Relevance criterion (Sperber & Wilson 2005) and the validity of the principle of cooperation are in play, even in a text that is commonly considered as 'meaningless'. We want to prove the example of James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake', demonstrating that even such a seemingly illegible or difficult text that has often been considered non transferable, in a certain pattern and its narrative potential of the storyline, in the dynamics and in the progression descends from and is determined by the VALIDITY of the criterion of relevance. In another part of this third section, we turn to the Elizabethan drama of Shakespeare and the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, Ulysses by James Joyce as well as the unforgettable Novel by Jaroslav Hašek Brave Soldier Švejk, showing how wit and irony work and can be translated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents an overview of the present-day system of varieties of German with a focus on linguistic usage in the Federal Republic of Germany. The interaction of social and regional factors underlying these varieties is discussed with special reference to the sociosituational conditions determining their existence and use. On the basis of this analysis, the second part of the paper examines three developmental tendencies and the effect they have on a restructuring of the system of varieties: dialect decay, dialect revival, and regionalization of the standard language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

The subject of this paper is the presentation of the analysis of details of various German phraseologisms containing the constituent Hand [ hand]. It will be shown that a considerable improvement in clarity can be achieved by analyzing these phraseolgisms as belonging to a specific construction family. The analysis follows in its classification previous studies from the project 'Linguistik des Körpers' [ Linguistics of the Human Body]. The essential objectives of this project are: As considered from a methodological point of view (II) would be the conditio sine qua non with regard to (I). The thesis is the following: Although phraseologisms - following Goldberg - are not absolutely predictable, the body part terms still allow the identification of a specific contribution to the phraseological meaning. To a certain extent the phraseological meaning turns out to be compositional as if moved along a metonymic guide. Analysis of the meaning will be the main focus of this investigation. Meanings occur in daily use. The only way to get further knowledge about the meaning(s) of linguistic entities is by analyzing their (actual) use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the critical analysis of a specific dictionary, the present paper argues that the comment on semantics in contemporary dictionaries of language contact has to be set up in a completely different manner than that which has been used to date. Dictionaries of this type, which omit the evaluation of corpora as primary sources in favor of secondary sources, reveal systematic shortcomings in the semantic description of contact phenomena. The article focuses specifically on the temporal dimension of marking and the contemporary relevance of the semantic items. The discussed methodological issues are for the most part independent from the respective contact languages, in this case German and Italian, so that the results might be generalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the iconic and indexical relations of lexical signs in German Sign Language (DGS). It is argued that the theory of signs as established by Charles S. Peirce is particular fruitful with respect to the description and classification of signs in the visual-gestural modality, but also needs some additional discussion on the nature of the relation between sign and reference object. As will be demonstrated, motivated signs in German Sign Language are more complex with respect to indexicality and iconicity as is recognized in contemporary research. Accordingly, the paper discusses the necessity to modify the typology of linguistic signs with respect to sign languages. It will be demonstrated that there has to be established a class of schematic signs within the group of hypoicons. Secondly, it is argued that DGS has a class of motivated but non-iconic signs, which show a designative-indexical relation which relates to the spoken or written form of a word of the oral contact language German. In sum, a modified typology of lexical signs is established which not only includes the sign types symbol, index and (image)icon but also the new types schematic icon and indicator (‘Hinweis’). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the concession-relation on epistemic-level, herein after referred to as ‘concession’. It is shown that there is a spectrum of means to encode concessions in German: the forms vary from rather “idiomatic” constructions to less specified constructions, from lexico-grammatical constructions up to hardly encoded forms, which have to be inferred from discourse context. Furthermore, a method is demonstrated to reconstruct hardly encoded forms of concessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of grammar typically have some way of accommodating fixed or semi-fixed idiomatic expressions in addition to expressions derived compositionally by general abstract rules. Construction Grammar differs from most other theories in that it takes such idiomatic expressions as a model for the grammar of natural languages as a whole. Linguistic structures at all levels of complexity and schematicity are uniformly modeled as “constructions”, i.e. form-meaning pairs with unpredictable formal or semantic properties. This view of grammar is plausible only to the extent that abstract and complex linguistic structures can be shown to constitute such form-meaning pairs. In this paper, I present an analysis of the so-called “modal infinitives” in German (structures consisting of haben ‘have’ or sein ‘be’ and an infinitive with zu ‘to’). I argue that German modal infinitives can be described adequatlyadequately only if we assume that they are constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar. While their general function of encoding possibility and obligation can be predicted from the meaning of haben/ sein and the infinitival verb phrase, at least one of their more specific conventionalized meanings, “obligation without alternatives”, is more specific than anything that could be derived compositionally from these component parts. Since modal infinitives are part of the “core grammar” of German, this analysis strengthens the case for an analysis of natural language grammars in terms of constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shifts in a word's valency (such as increases or reductions, e.g. of a verb) are alterations to a core valency. One precondition of valency shift is that the verb provides semantic and conceptual opportunities for this shift. Another precondition is that, in a given language, constructions have already evolved in which these shifts can be actualized. Valency shift is construction inheritance: a given verb inherits a construction for which it had not previously been licensed from another verb that is licensed for this construction. Valency inheritance is the inheritance of a verb's valency by a noun construction. Valency theory and construction grammar are therefore complementary. Our concept of shift and inheritance of valencies and constructions is prototypical and analogical. In this context, the paper discusses identity, polysemy and homonymy of constructions, using the nominative-accusative construction as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a far-reaching change took place in the language of Southern Germany and Austria. This change from the traditional baroque Upper German written language [oberdeutsche Schreibsprache] to modern High German occurred not only in the language of printing, but also in private letters. One result of this transition is a broad variety of linguistic forms. The extensive correspondence between members of the Mozart family (father, mother, daughter, son) is an extremely useful subject for the investigation of this language variation. After a series of introductory sections, the usage of written language by the different members of the family will be analyzed in part one of this paper. The range of variety reaches from Leopold Mozart's modern, educated German to the traditional, partly colloquial language of Mozart's mother. A separate chapter deals with W. A. Mozart's creative use of language (and varieties), his fancy for artificial jokes and word play [Sprachspiele]. Part two deals with the question of what we can learn from the written language of the letters about how the Mozarts spoke with each other and with other members of their society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of linguistic nuances in (Post-)Yugoslav Studies, emphasizing how a minor mistranslation of 'galeb' from 'seagull' to 'dove' alters the interpretation significantly. It delves into power structures in academia, advocating for more substantial involvement of native speakers to enhance knowledge production, drawing parallels with the struggles of other marginalized groups in academia. Topics covered include the significance of language nuances, power imbalances in academic research, and the need for inclusion and engagement of heritage scholars in Post-Yugoslav Studies for more equitable knowledge production.

The article focuses on the author's experience as a Romanian researcher in the former Yugoslav space, highlighting their extensive research spanning over a decade. It explores the complexities of bridging the perceived "island" of Romania with the distinct identities of the former Yugoslav region, detailing the researcher's immersion in post-war urban reconstruction, heritage, memory processes, and linguistic dynamics, ultimately reflecting on the affective, phenomenological, and nested orientalist dimensions of their positionality in this field.

Copyright of Info DaF: Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article investigates the ways in which people positions themselves and others in political debates by using linguistic devices. The papers focuses on the ecological debate in the Czech Republic concerning the usage of wind power. The debate is characterized by universal style devices. It is observed that the Czech president Vaclav Klaus plays an influential role in the national debate and utilizes argument styles, which are apparently culturally specific. Some contrasts are made to similar ecological debates in Germany.

The article discusses the structural language situation in Belorus using a semiotic process. The authors uses semiotics because it has, allegedly, become increasingly common in cultural analysis to use distinctive imagery and signs. The semiotic process of sign-formation is intensified in peripheral, small, and perhaps mixed spaces, and according to linguistics have functional limits. The paper compares figurative and metaphorical concepts in metalinguistic discourse culled from contemporary Belorussian texts.

After a brief survey of the establishment of German Studies as an academic discipline, the article will deal with the process by which the two ›sides‹ of the subject, literature and linguistics, grew apart, and the 1960s and 1970s attempts to bring them closer together; finally, the current situation will be briefly reviewed. How will the relationship between the two ›sub-departments‹ take shape in the radically different academic world of the 21st century, against a background of different paradigms, concepts, and methods? Is there any real and objective substance to the appeals for a return to -- purported -- similarities, which, while hardly dominating the self-perception of literary or linguistic studies, are perceptibly coming from both camps? This study orients itself chiefly on the relevant discussion in the journal Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (LiLi), which has concerned itself with interdisciplinarity since its foundation, with particular reference to the relationship between the two ›sides‹ of German Studies. Building on the case of LiLi, and going beyond this, this article shows, via current conceptions of text, style and genre, as well as the methodological possibilities of corpus linguistics, that there are areas of common ground, and what methods will prove useful in collaborative work. It is concluded that, whether one approaches one's object of study from a literary or linguistic perspective, that object is both a linguistic and textual phenomenon. Today, both sub-disciplines can agree on a broad understanding of ›text‹ and ›style‹. The contemporary understanding of style has turned away from traditional rhetorical -- or purely linguistic -- categories, towards text- and function-related understandings, or to discourse linguistics and semiotics. Equally, the former understanding of texts as a unit, complete in structure and content, unified in theme, and unambiguous in its intentions has vanished. Instead, when approaching texts in general and literary texts in particular, scholars proceed from an assumption of a semantically open, processual, functional text, which is different for each recipient. As this can only be constituted through language, considerations of style are always implicitly present in the superficial textual features. Language and literary studies could also co-operate in the field of text-type/genre. Both the current linguistic understanding of ›text‹, much broader in comparison to older ones, and the cultural studies approach to the phenomena of text-type, imply that text-type can be understood not only from a language-internal perspective, but also as communicative patterns and cultural artefacts. They can be understood as instruments of collective action, which the members of a cultural community produce together, so as to live and act together in their lived reality and to engage with this reflectively and in practice. Text-types are as much involved in the form/constitution of cultures as they are formed by them. Their cultural conditioning is closely related to their characteristic of acting as crystallised ›bundles‹ of knowledge. The patterns (understood in the cognitive sense), which underlie the linguistic-communicative uses of texts of particular text-types, are the intersections between relevant areas of situated knowledge, to which, along with encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, knowledge of behavioural norms, and linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge also belongs. This also includes the social function of a text-type, the ›Sitz im Leben‹ (Gunkel, Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der religiöösen Lyrik Israels [[1933]], 1986, Jaußß, Theorie der Gattungen und Literatur des Mittelalters, 1972) unique to the pattern of each text-type. This refers to the fact that each text-type makes possible a specific situation for problems of its lived reality. It is easy to imagine a collaboration between linguistics and literary studies here. In both linguistics and in literary studies, a new interest in questions of hermeneutics, of understanding and interpretation can currently be noted. In linguistics, there is a determined effort to make the study of the understanding and interpretation of texts, on the basis of new knowledge about cognition and processes of understanding, the centre of attention. In a cognitive-linguistic act, the complex sign constituted by a text is given meaning, which always entails an interpretation of that which is understood, which moves between closed and open meanings (Gardt, Linguistisches Interpretieren. Konstruktivistische Theorie und realistische Praxis, 2007). With this new turn towards hermeneutics, the single, individual text as creative achievement returns to the centre of attention. Via micro- and macro-analyses, all levels of the text and their functionalities are considered. Similar approaches may be met in literary studies, for instance when Weimar (Mitteilungen des deutschen Germanistenverbandes 49: 104--115, 2002) demands that texts should be given all the efforts at understanding which are necessary to the text and which the text offers, and when he develops the idea of Interpretation as an understanding of that which has been understood. Electronic data-storage and electronic access (e. g. search engines) make possible the exact and complete analysis of what would have been an impossible mass of text in a paper corpus, and enable the discovery of systematic connections where once only chance results might have been found. It is now possible and easy to compare large text corpora in search of inter-textual connections, or large or small similarities in theme. This promises to be an aid to the production of scholarly editions, as well as in the study of the literary, artistic, and theoretical discourses of a given era. As well as a historical overview, the article shows that German Studies raises questions which it appears may be profitably investigated by linguists and literary scholars in collaboration. It will also introduce, via representative examples, the insights and methods which literary studies lack, and linguistics can offer in this shared undertaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the periphrastic perfect tenses – past participle + have or be – is a phenomenon for which the analysis is especially promising with regards to the research on grammaticalisation. Firstly, it involved several steps of syntactic reanalysis and lexical recategorisation leading to a construction-specific auxiliary verb form. This allows for conclusions to be drawn about processes involved in grammaticalisation in general. Secondly, it is a grammatical change in which both Germanic and Romance languages converged. This allows for conclusions about universal conditions underlying such kinds of change. Thirdly, in German, the rise occurred rather late and within a relatively short period of time. This allows for the observation of the periphrasis in statu nascendi. In this paper, the grammaticalisation process is modeled and explained in a formal framework of generative syntax, also taking into account performance-based changes and contextual aspects providing the conditions for the relevant changes in the grammar. The main claim is that this process of grammaticalisation was terminated by an abrupt parametric change, leading to a syntactically reanalysed form of analytic inflection and the recategorisation of have as an auxiliary. The result was a full paradigm of periphrastic perfect tense. The preconditions for this grammatical change were provided by a sequence of performance-based changes and minor formal reanalyses, giving the process its gradual nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article cites the regionalist perspective chosen by the Silesian author Jerzy Pilch on the dichotomy between "us" and "them." The said perspective by Pilch was being considered to be one of the most interesting aesthetic solutions offered by Polish prose writers within the last fifteen years. From the peripheral Protestant point of view, Pilch undermines the traditional equivalent Pole = Catholic. His prose stresses a seemingly non-Polish denomination. Such strategy as also shown in his novels are being discussed in the paper.

The article focuses on the sociocultural and semiotic aspects of the discourse of protests sparked by the rigged presidential election in Belarus, in August 2022. It mentions mass demonstrations, using symbolic items such as posters, slogans, exclamation marks, performances, posts in the social networks on the Internet have been analyzed as a type of social discourse. It also mentions emphasis is on linguistic forms of creativity, especially the protest slogans.

Presents a list of books and information resources related to linguistics.

The aim of this contribution is to reposition a key notion to the centre of Wulf Oesterreicher's theoretical disciplinary reasoning: grammar, or more generally, 'rules and norms' specific to single languages and varieties the linguist deals with. This includes contingent, non-motivated structures, and claiming the necessity to analyse their existence 'as such' (i.e., also independently of communicative, social etc. factors) as the core task of linguistics. This point is illustrated with a much debated variable in French descriptive linguistics: past participle agreement. Combining theoretical and corpus linguistic observations, the distribution of the two variants (absence vs. realization of agreement) in constructions with the auxiliary avoir shows that a grammatical analysis interested in the derivation of certain rules and their application in actual language usage permits to understand the logic of linguistic variation - at least the one observable alongside the standard - non-standard opposition in French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]