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The study describes Italian functional equivalents of the pronominal adverb dabei on the basis of InterCorp parallel corpora. The multifunctionality of German deictic-based pronominal adverbs, in particular of dabei, suggests such interlingual analyses. The present one confirms the wide range of options to translate dabei: verbal phrases (many with gerundio), very different and more or less lexicalised prepositional phrases in adverbial (only sporadic in conjunctive) function, especially with in and con as head, adverbs (most of them connective adverbs), lexical and syntactic additions, reformulations, (pseudo-)cleft sentences. Moreover, new insights into the correlations between several parameters for analysis have been gained, among them the following ones: dabei in Vorfeld-position is often rendered with marked syntactic constructions mostly conveying concession; dabei in Mittelfeld, on the other hand, seems to favour rendering through prepositional phrases. With reference to verbal phrases, gerundio mainly goes along with temporal dabei, sometimes with further pragmatic nuances in the interpretation, whereas finite modes translate local dabei. Finally, the tendency to make the reading of dabei explicit can be observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This explorative study sheds light on article usage in German academic texts by French and Italian university (including Ph. D.) students. Given the differences between and among Romance and Germanic language systems, one might expect deviations in article usage in L2 German; in particular, speakers of Romance languages would seem likely to overgeneralise articles in their German language production. Contrary to these hypotheses, the corpora of learner varieties investigated in the present paper do not show evidence of overrepresentation and overgeneralisation of German articles, not even in generic sentences. In fact, articles tend to be underrepresented, as L2 learners often omit articles that are required in L1 German. Potential explanations of these findings are provided, giving rise to further research questions and desiderata. The latter include empirical studies on L1 German article usage in bilingual areas such as South Tirol, the use of articles in translations, and comparisons of article usage between L1 German and the L2 varieties of learners whose L1 does not have grammaticalised articles. Such studies should apply qualitative (i. e. semantic and pragmatic) as well as quantitative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]