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Drawing on a corpus of spoken and written German obtained from the "Institut fuer Grunddeutsch," it is shown that the dative ending -e which occurs in strong masculine and neuter nouns is disappearing, especially in spoken German. (IFS/WGA)

The book "Nominal Style" by Mathilde Hennig deals with the concept of nominalization in the German language. It explains how verbs and attributes can be transformed into nouns through nominalization. The book is aimed at students of German studies and offers a thorough analysis of example sentences and their comprehensibility after nominalization. However, it emphasizes that not all nominal groups are productive and that not everything can be expressed in a nominal way. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 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.)

Prepositional form and function in Irish, as in other Modern Celtic languages, are topics of much significance. In Modern Irish numerous simple prepositions not only form compounds with possessive forms of personal pronouns but additionally marshal an impressive array of 'conjugated' forms corresponding to the various grammatical persons. Prepositions also play a crucial role in indicating aspect and are involved in passive/ reflexive roles with the verbal noun. This paper offers an overview of the functioning of a selection of important prepositions in the language and provides examples by way of illustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Polish nouns denoting selected positive emotional states in comparison to their equivalents in the Russian text. The factual material was taken from Katarzyna Kołczewska’s book entitled Kto, jak nie ja? and its translation into Russian, and includes sentences containing the above-mentioned nouns and their equivalents from the target text. The conducted analysis allows us to state that the nouns denoting emotions recorded in translation dictionaries, despite the presence of exact equivalents, are translated by means of lexemes modifying their meaning both in the quantitative aspect (by using lexemes indicating emotional states of higher or lower intensity), as well as in the qualitative aspect. In addition, the emotional meaning of selected nouns is conveyed in the target text by means of words referring to other parts of speech, often co-occurring with the main dictionary equivalent. The study has shown that despite the presence of established equivalents in translation dictionaries, the meaning of nouns naming selected positive emotions is conveyed in different ways in the Russian translation text. The presented repertoire of textual equivalents is by no means complete and final. The study concludes that the repertoire remains open, and textual realizations are not always consistent with the equivalents proposed by the dictionary.

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

On the basis of synchronic and diachronic data, we argue that in the human domain German masculine nouns commonly display a “non-male” generic interpretation which we take as evidence for a separation of syntactic and semantic gender: synchronically, we show that agreement differences between masculine and feminine nouns cannot be traced back to their semantic gender since nouns without sex specification (as e.g. feminine Person (person) or masculine Mensch (human being)) behave just as differently as nouns with sex specification. In the diachronic part, we prove that the so-called generic masculine is a stable and well-documented phenomenon in the grammatical system of German at least since the Old High German period. To substantiate this claim, we present numerous historical examples for the generic use of masculine nouns such as Gast (guest), Nachbar (neighbour), and Sünder (sinner). These nouns allow us to look at the particular language use without confounding it with the sociological problem of women’s lack of professional integration in the pas [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistica Pragensia (Charles University Prague, Faculty of Arts) is the property of Charles University Prague, Faculty of Arts 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 Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 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 review describes the work "Føroysk mállæra" by Hjalmar P. Petersen, which is a comprehensive grammar of Faroese in three volumes. The work is aimed at upper secondary school students and language and teaching students. It covers phonetics, inflectional morphology, word formation, and syntax, and contains many new insights. The first volume deals with gender, word formation, and inflectional morphology of nouns, while the second volume focuses on the basic principles of Faroese syntax. The work provides a systematic description of the Faroese language and includes many examples from everyday life. The text also discusses the use of the genitive case in Faroese and criticizes some unclear explanations of pronunciation. The author praises the work overall but calls for more consistent terminology. [Extracted from the article]

The present study deals with an alleged Egyptian loanword in ancient Greek. As Egyptian equivalent for Greek κάλαθος "basket" the Egyptian nouns qrh.t and krht were proposed, but for both suggestions there are some linguistic and semantic problems. Instead, the Greek noun is attested from the fifth century BC and is related to or derived from the Mycenaean ka-ra-to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Light verb constructions (German ‚Funktionsverbgefüge') are complex predicates consisting of a semantically light verb and a phrasal element. A characteristic property of light verb constructions is that they come in families, i. e., groups of identically formed light verb constructions exemplifying different interpretation patterns. On the basis of a corpus study, the paper discusses the existence of three different families of stehen unter ‚stand under' light verb constructions. In a detailed study, it is demonstrated that the three families are associated with different characteristics like the semantic type of PP-internal nouns and the choice of a causative light verb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to discuss the phenomenon called linguistic sexism, i.e. a lack of symmetry between the sexes in a language. The focus lies on comparing Norwegian and Polish, which with regard to feminist language reform follow two different strategies for a more inclusive use of language. While Norwegian speakers aim at replacing gender-marked forms with gender-neutral ones, in Polish there is a clear tendency to differentiate between nouns referring to men and women in order to increase the visibility of the latter. The article outlines how the lack of symmetry between the sexes in both languages is manifested in various areas, such as generic use of masculine forms, word formation of gender-related nouns, lexical gaps in the case of women together with titles and address forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

In this study, I am going to show that speakers at a multilingual urban street market in Berlin established own patterns for the use of attributive adjectives in German. Besides perfectly canonical patterns for adjectival inflection and linearization, the data contain instances where uninflected adjectives precede or follow the noun (normal Pide, 'regular pita bread'; Weintrauben lecker, 'grapes delicious') or where adjectives are inflected with a reduction morpheme -e (türkische Mokka, 'Turkish mocha'). I am showing that these patterns occur highly systematic. Concerning the question of what factors might have influenced the emergence of these patterns, I argue that speakers pick up typological and language-internal tendencies and apply these to new grammatical contexts. The linguistic diversity at the market as the site of these linguistic developments plays a central role for that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sprachreport is the property of Institut fuer Deutsche Sprache 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 analyses 200 nouns of Lithuanian slang with the three most common Slavic suffixes: -ka, -kė (Russ. -ка, Pl. -ka); -akas (Russ. -ак, Pl. -ak), -iakas (Russ. -як); -ščikas, -čikas (Russ. -щик, -чик). The majority of nouns in the slang are with the suffixes -kė, -ka. A part of the borrows with theses suffixes are the result of suffix univerbation; the univerbs usually are informal or slang words in Russian language. The borrowings with the suffixes -akas, -iakas are the second most common: these nouns are mostly slang words in Russian. There are many hybrids created with the suffixes -akas, -iakas in Lithuanian slang. The nouns with the suffixes -ščikas, -čikas are the third most common; the words with -ščikas are more ordinary in slang; the suffix -čikas is less common, but both forms are often used as synonyms. There are also few pseudo-borrowings with Russian roots and suffixes -ščikas, -čikas as well as hybrid derivatives.

In this paper I will discuss four passages in the Miles gloriosus whose text is disputed: Mil. 61-63 contains an unsolved riddle, 93 a corrupt verb, 115 an unusual colloquial expression, and 450f. an indubitably corrupt noun. In this contribution I want to disencumber the apparatus criticus of my edition of the play, which will appear in the editiones Sarsinates (Sarsina-Urbino). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The present research aims to describe the German pragmatic phraseme Keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort ('No answer is also an answer') from an intralingual perspective delineating its formal and functional features and, more specifically, its internal and external syntactic behaviour as well as its illocutionary force. In addition to its fixed and lexicalised form, the focus will be placed also on the "partially lexically filled constructions" (Goldberg 2006) [Kein(e) N1 ist auch ein(e) N1] 'No N1 is also a N1', i.e., a more abstract construction which is partially lexicalized and used in specific speech acts. With recourse to corpus data, the noun classes that more frequently occupy the N1 position will be identified. The phraseme Keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort will be analysed also from an interlingual perspective; the problem of the equivalents in Italian will reflected upon and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the results of four corpus studies investigating determinerless count nouns in different predicative contexts in German (i.e., copula sentences with sein ‘be’, werden ‘become’, bleiben ‘stay’ and predicative als-phrases). The starting point for these corpus studies is the recent literature on German copula sentences with sein that addresses the question which nouns need to occur with a determiner and which can occur determinerless when used predicatively (Hallab 2011; Geist 2019, 2014). The studies reported in this article provide a broad overview of the attested data, which shows that the near exclusive focus on copula sentences, as well as the way in which the data was compiled in the literature so far have led to a biased picture of the determinerless predicative use of German count nouns. The data furthermore motivates the two theoretical results of this article: (i) a new characterization of the class of nouns that can occur determinerless in German copula sentences and (ii) a list of desiderata for future theoretical and formal analyses addressing which aspects of the determinerless occurrences can be attributed to the nouns and which are plausibly a result of the predicative contexts [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 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 specialty of hybrid nouns is their different agreement according to certain features of the agreement target. They result from a conflict within in the gender assignment system. For example, the German noun Mädchen (semi-transparent diminutive for denoting a girl) is grammatical neuter but it refers to a female person. In German, nouns denoting females are feminine but diminutives are neuter. Since both rules apply, you can refer to Mädchen with a neuter (es) but also with a feminine pronoun (sie). There are different factors which influence the agreement pattern: the linear distance between noun and pronoun and the type of agreement target. So far there are only few studies on the influence of possible non-grammatical factors such as the age of the referent. In this paper, I elaborate on those factors and present the results of a discourse completion task focusing on the influence of a sexualized context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with a family of German constructions based on the reduplication pattern [von Xsg zu Xsg], The theoretical framework of the paper is formed by central postulates of Construction Grammar. German-Russian (RNC) and German-Spanish (PaGeS) parallel corpora serve as the empirical basis. The pattern under investigation is characterized formally by the duplication of a noun in singular without article, and semantically by different readings such as 'iterative locomotion' (von Haus zu Haus gehen, 'going from house to house') or 'steady development' (von Tag zu Tag zunehmen, 'increasing from day to day'). On the contrastive level, the lexical slot filling of each construct plays a special role, because it also conditions the formal and semantic specifics of the equivalents in Russian and Spanish. We thus primarily attempt to determine the functionally equivalent constructions of the German pattern on the basis of the consulted German-Russian or German-Spanish parallel corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Communication & Culture Online / Komunikacija i Kultura Online is the property of FOKUS: Forum za Interkulturnu Komunikaciju 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 Colloquia Germanica Stetinensia is the property of Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego / University of Szczecin Press 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 noun gridʼ (“member of the prince’s retinue”) and its derivatives are an example of Old East Slavic words of Scandinavian origin, whose life within the active East Slavic lexicon seems to be limited to a quite short period of time. The article contributes to the discussion about its etymology and fills in a new semantic link to the Old Norse noun grið (“security guarantee”). Besides, it describes the use of the word group in Old Russian documents, that have not been dealt with before too closely or at all: the medieval birch bark manuscripts, legal codes and charters. The semantic changes and development of the word group are further investigated in the ancient East Slavic oral epic poems (byliny songs) and in both Slavic and Baltic dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use data from a questionnaire study on lexical variation in the German of current inhabitants of three places characterized by immigration from Northern Bohemia in Rio Grande do Sul. Data elicitation for 40 words (mostly nouns) followed the principles of Pluridimensional Dialectology, providing the opportunity to include variants from three steps of elicitation per lexeme (spontaneous answers, additional variants the informants were aquainted with, additional answers suggested by the interviewer) and meta comments. The data are used to take a qualitative look at ways in which the lexicon was changed and expanded in Brazil. The results show that complex contact situations shaped the development of the varieties: Variants from the original dialects are rare. The data suggest that they were frequently replaced by West Middle German and Standard variants. Portuguese loan words play a strong role, especially when they designate items of everyday relevance that were new in the Brazilian surroundings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their high frequency in present-day language, German proper name compounds have received little attention in the linguistic literature. It has been assumed that this pattern is rather recent, and possibly a loan from English. Focusing on the period between 1600 and 1900, the paper provides evidence against this claim. More specifically, I argue that the development of proper name compounds can only be properly described if proper name compounds that are names themselves (e. g., Martin-Luther-Universität 'Martin Luther University') are strictly distinguished from those that are common nouns (e. g., Nilfahrt 'Nile ride'). It is shown that both types develop differently, and in particular that common noun compounds undergo a functional extension in this period. In this connection the paper also discusses the idea of proper name compounds as competitors of the genitive and it compares proper name compounds and alternative constructions with respect to the concept of the "Nominalklammer" (nominal frame). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In framing his theory of personal identity, John Locke introduced »the self« as a philosophical term, and the concept has remained current in English to this day. The translations of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2nd edition of 1694) into French (1700) and German (1757) established »le soi [-même]« and »das Selbst« in the philosophical discourse of the eighteenth century, but the noun forms of Moi and Ich have persisted in these languages as enduring alternatives to »the Self.« This philologically oriented contribution sketches the linguistic backdrop and the translational repercussions of Locke’s immensely influential, if still controversial, concept formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution I propose to etymologically connect Vedic yóni- 'safe place; bed, nest; womb' and Avestan yaona- 'safe place' with Greek εὐνή 'bed; lair' as well as Old Irish úam 'cave; lair, den'. I derive these words from a PIE formation *(H)i̯eumn- V- meaning 'nest, private place' and derived from the root *(H)i̯eu- 'to separate, set apart' (Vedic pres. yuyóti). Furthermore, it is argued that the Greek adjective εὖνις 'bereft' as well as the noun ὑμήν 'membrane' derive from the same root. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an etymological difference between Ved. śrīnāti – derived from PIE *k̑rei̯H- 'to stand out' – and Gk. κεράννυμι (from PIE *k̑erh2- 'to blend, mix'), as argued in this journal more than thirty years ago by Narten 1987. Although convincing and nowadays widely accepted, Narten's argumentation lacks an explanation for one important phenomenon, namely the conspicuous discrepancy in usage between verbal forms from the root śrayi- 'to make perfect, shining' and the root noun śrī́- f. 'perfection, beauty, brilliance' from the same root. Whereas śrayi- is used mainly to denote the blending of Soma (especially with milk), the root noun śrī́- is effectively never found in such contexts. Addressing this problem, a phraseological analysis of Ved. āśír- f. '(addition of) milk' and āśīrta- 'mixed (with milk)' shows that the Vedic continuants of the root PIE *k̑erh2- are confined to a ritual context and therefore exhibit many symptoms of formal (i. e. morphological, phraseological) fixation and freezing. It is exactly this obsolescence and defectivity of the phraseme *Soma [with Milk] k̑erh2- (or at least some of its phraseological components) that led in consequence to its reactivation and (re-)integration into the productive verbal paradigm of śrayi- (< *k̑rei̯H-), which was not only phonetically close but also semantically. This process is responsible for the fact that śrayi- adopted the sphere of usage from the root *k̑erh2- and that it deviates so significantly from the use of the root noun śrī́-. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Medieval Latin, the adjective armelinus, -na and the noun armelinus are attested in notarial documents and other texts from different regions of Western Europe, in a wide chronology. At first glance, both the name and the adjective are related to the classical Latin demonym Armenius, but this etymon does not explain several aspects of its form and function. The present paper reviews all the etymological hypotheses suggested so far and arrives at the proposal that armelinus could be the result of the adaptation of the Andalusian Arabic armaní ~ arminí 'Armenian (tissue)', after converging semantically with armini ~ ermini, derived from the Latin armenius '(skin of the) Mustela ermine'. The authors suggest that both terms - adjective and noun - could arise in the territories corresponding to the linguistic domain of Catalan and that they passed from there to Italy and the rest of Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the work on a typology of the selectional restrictions that verbs from different semantic classes impose on the nouns they combine with. Using the restrictions that have already been defined in FrameNet and VerbNet, we attempt at compiling a unified set of restrictions and translate them as sets of WordNet classes and (sub)trees. As the description of verbs&' conceptual structure is largely language independent, the enriched representation is to a great extent applicable cross-linguistically, as illustrated in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German words ending in ›-nis‹ can have either the female or the neutral gender. As is well known, in his Critique of Pure Reason as well as in other writings, Kant often shifts from the neuter to the feminine for words having the mentioned ending, without thereby leading to a difference in meaning. However, in German the word »knowledge « (as a neuter noun) does not only have an epistemological meaning, but a legal sense as well. It has the meaning of »arbitration award, a judge´s decision, verdict«. In the present article I try to prove that Kant occassionally uses the word »knowledge« in the legal sense rather than in the epistemological sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tshivenda is one of the official languages of South Africa, mostly spoken in Limpopo Province at Vhembe District. From 1994, when the Republic of South Africa became a democratic government, speakers of the Tshivenda language spread to all nine provinces of South Africa. Tshi-venda has different word categories, like nouns, verbs, adjectives and many more. When words are looked up in dictionaries, one should know what types of categories are given, e.g. their spelling, pronunciation and meaning. If this is not clearly represented one would not be able to use such a dictionary. This paper seeks to investigate how nouns are lemmatised in Tshivenda dictionaries. Attention is given to word and stem lemmatisation. It also looks at the lemmatisation of singular and plural nouns, and the lemmatisation of deverbative and diminutive nouns. This will be accomplished by analysing published Tshivenda dictionaries in circulation.

In Vulgar Latin, the nominative and the accusative are used as neutral forms of nouns to replace the oblique cases, whose meaning and functions they can duly acquire. In this paper, I analyse the examples of such uses in the epigraphic corpus of early and late Lusitania, with special attention to the development of the Ibero-Romance system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vox Romanica: Annales Helvetici Explorandis Linguis Romanicis Destinati is the property of Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co.KG 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.)

Morphological differences between languages, here concretely between German and Croatian, appear because of differences in systems and therefore it is extremely important to examine genetic-linguistic any typological characteristics of their systems. German language belongs to the West-Germanic group and its most important morphological characteristics are articles, decreased system of cases, more adjective declinations, system of strong and weak verbs, etc. On the other hand Croatian language belongs to South-Slavic group of languages and it inherited a very developed morphological system of Proto-Slavic language, which was reduced in its development but without bigger deranging of relations within declinational and conjugational system. German language belongs to changeable-analytical languages and the change can be “external” by suffixes and “internal” by vocal change. Change is not equally developed in all parts of speech. It is more developed in adjectives than in nouns, pronouns or verbs. It played a great role in the Croatian language when forming a morphological system of aspirations for simplifying a rich Proto-Slavic system which had many declinations and verbal forms. In that way Croatian preserved little from the old system and it formed relations in the internal system on the basis of natural and grammatical gender, two numbers and two verbal aspects. As a result of that system of seven cases, system of indefinite and definite adjectives and system of verbal aspects based on the opposition “perfective – imperfective” verbs were developed. Differences which were identified in this analysis should help both in overcoming and eliminating differences and mistakes at the morphological level in both languages.

In this paper it is suggested that a large subset of Vedic exocentric nominal compounds can best be described by focusing on two semantosyntactic relationships that exist in addition to the first one, viz. the modificative relation an exocentric compound bears to the head noun: A second, external relation which establishes a link between one single member of the compound and the noun the compound modifies as a whole, and a third, internal relation which combines the two members of a compound to form a semantosyntactic unit. For both, internal and external relations, a distinct set of three preferred readings is established which provides a semantosyntactic framework for interpreting these compounds. It is emphasized that a correct interpretation always depends not only on these sets of possible readings, but, most importantly, on the semantics of the compound members and the modified noun as well as on the pragmatics and the context the syntagm occurs in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with fundamental questions of etymology and especially with the history of the Slavic dialectical word ponyaga ('backpack'). It is shown that contradictory meanings of the word in different dialects ( ponyaga is used in the sense of 'bridle' for reindeers as well as in the sense of 'backpack') can be explained with the common verbal sense 'to take hold', 'to take'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author describes the use of the prepositions laut, zufolge and gemäß. These phrases are used exclusively when adopting parts of a text in another one. Thus, phrases with these prepositions are understood here as explicit intertextuality markers. Furthermore, the paper examines the nouns from these phrases, as well as some text-pretext relations arising from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Facultatis Philosophicae Universitatis Ostraviensis. Studia Germanistica is the property of Acta Facultatis Philosophicae Universitatis Ostraviensis. Studia Germanistica 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.)

In Modern French, the pattern être X includes various types of complex predicates, that is, copular predicates (être heureux, être professeur), a certain type of light verb construction (être en alerte), as well as various periphrastic constructions, such as the stative passive (être déçu), the dynamic passive (être battu par qn.) and the progressive (être en train de faire qc.). According to the "standard analysis" (e.g. Hengeveld 1992, Detges 1996), copulas and light verbs are grammatical devices which indicate that non-verbal elements (nouns, adjectives, prepositional phrases) are - "against their nature" - used as predicates. In this paper, I will argue that this view is problematic for the French être X pattern, since the latter includes sub-constructions which are already verbal in nature (the two passives and the progressive) and therefore cannot be interpreted as devices to turn non-verbs into predicates. Following Croft (2002), I will show that a construction grammar approach is far more apt than the "standard analysis" for capturing the syntactic and distributional properties of the être X pattern and the relations between its various sub-patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argumental status of verbal participants in event nominalizations is still under debate. Investigating syntactic and semantic properties of referentially interpreted genitive noun phrases related to German nominalized infinitives (= NI), cf. das Stören der Mannschaft (‘the disturbing the team-’), I will argue in favor of different interpretative mechanisms at stake: whereas themes retain their argumental status in the nominal domain, agents are not lambda-bound in the argument structure of NI. Instead, the corresponding participant is a modifier whose agentive interpretation is motivated merely conceptually. Evidence for the proposed asymmetric analysis comes from two sources: it will be shown that the alleged agentive genitive contributes a possessive relation not identical to the verbal agentive interpretation. The conceptual preference for an identification with the verbal agent will be accounted for by abductive reasoning thereby explaining the modifier's argument-like behavior. In addition, as data on NI from different sources reveal, the genitive interpretation is mainly conditioned by lexical properties of the base verb. In particular, it will be shown that a postnominal agentive interpretation is bound to configurations where the theme is independently predicted optional. These findings follow from the proposed asymmetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]