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This paper offers novel insights on articlelessness in noun phrases in Dutch and German headlines. Modified noun phrases that lack a determiner in headlines exhibit adjectival agreement that cannot be explained if one assumes an article that is phonologically null or that has been PF-deleted. We describe the pattern, consider different analytical options and eventually conclude that the interpretation, distribution as well as the observed adjectival agreement characteristic of articlelessness noun phrases calls for an account in which the article is never projected to begin with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate on how speakers and listeners process and interpret information in a morphological system that is very complex and not very transparent. A well-known test case is the German nominal number system. In this paper we employ discriminative learning (e.g., Ramscar & Yarlett, 2007; Baayen et al., 2011, 2019) to test whether discriminative learning networks can be used to better understand the processing of German number. We analyse behavioral data obtained from a patient with primary progressive aphasia (Domahs et al., 2017), and the unimpaired system. We test a model that implements the traditional cues borrowed from the schema approach (Köpcke, 1988, 1993; Köpcke et al., 2021), and compare it to a model that uses segmental and phonotactic information only. Our results for the unimpaired system demonstrate that a model based on only biphones as cues is better able to predict the number of a given word-form than a model using structural phonological cues. We also test whether a discriminative learning model can predict the number decisions by the aphasic patient. The results demonstrate that a biphone-based discriminative model trained on the patient's responses is superior to a structure-based model in approximating the patient's behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to investigate the semantic value of the German spatial preposition jenseits ('beyond'). It is argued that our conceptualization of the spatial-physical world and how we interact with objects in our environment transforms a prepositions' primary meaning into domains of meaning that are tied to time or social interactions. While the study of the semantic structure of English prepositions has received attention, German prepositions, particularly less frequently used ones such as hinter ('behind') or jenseits, present a gap in research. It is attempted to show that the different senses of jenseits form a semantic network in which meaning extensions of the spatial, primary sense of jenseits are motivated by varying construal patterns imposed upon an observed scene. The description of the semantic structure of jenseits also draws on previous studies on its English counterpart, beyond (Boers, 1996; Lindstromberg, 2010). Based on the sample collected for the purpose of this study, this paper analyzes 1000 occurrences of the preposition jenseits in the DWDS-subcorpus Die Zeit. The analysis shows that a high frequency of the occurrences found in the sample constitute non-spatial meanings of jenseits and thus encode a configuration between objects in more abstract domains. Furthermore, the notion of metaphorical mapping is used to explain the conceptualization and metaphorical transfer of spatial jenseits to abstract domains of human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the results of a diachronic study of the light verb constructions containing the German verb kommen 'come' accompanied by a prepositional phrase containing a deverbal noun and the preposition zu 'to'. The analysis is based on the corpus data from the DTA (DeutschesTextarchiv) between 1600 and 1900. The aim of the paper is to integrate traditional grammatical descriptions of Funktionsverbgefüge with grammaticalization and lexicalization approaches as well as with more recent usage-based constructionist approaches. In doing so, the view of composite predicates as more or less grammaticalized or more or less lexicalized constructions will be challenged by offering empirical evidence in favor of a more diversified account. It will be argued that it is often a matter of the methodological perspective as to which particular status is assigned to a structure under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic expressions in social media vary along many axes, including author style, the specific medium and its affordances, and others. In this paper, we argue that different registers must be distinguished within social media and that register should be included as an important factor independent of (social) medium in analyses of variable linguistic phenomena. We introduce a new German cross-media corpus, consisting of blog posts and tweets from the same 44 authors. We define the registers as 'Informative', 'Narrative', and 'Persuasive', based on situational characteristics of the texts. We then correlate the registers with two variable linguistic phenomena: German modal and intensifying particles. In each case, we document considerable inter- and intraindividual variation in the expressions used and their frequency across texts. The statistical analysis shows that the register grouping corresponds more closely to linguistic similarities between texts than the grouping by medium does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementing Reichenbach's (1947) classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenges of modal particle research is the search for appropriate ways to describe the meanings these particles convey. As these meanings are subtle and situated at the abstract and non-propositional level of intersubjective meaning making, the function of the particles is notoriously hard to pin down. As a consequence, scholars also disagree on what the precise relation between different but related particles is. In this paper, I show that gesture analysis can shed new light on these issues. By looking at the gestures used with the German particles denn, ja, doch, eben, einfach, and halt, the paper illustrates how studying gestures can lead to a better understanding of the particles and their mutual relations by showing how gesture data can offer new evidence for existing hypotheses and help in finding a way out of matters of discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue for a systematic study of the role that language contact has played in the development of German, French, Italian and Spanish address systems. While the current state of research clearly points to contact-induced changes in Early Modern European polite address, some important desiderata concerning the precise direction, nature and scope of contact influences remain. Against this background, I present historical foreign language manuals as a promising source for the comparative study of historical European address practices and their development. Through an explorative analysis of metapragmatic comments and model dialogues in selected foreign language manuals, the increasingly dynamic pressures experienced by interlocutors both to distance themselves from one another and to express solidarity come to light, as multi-level address systems emerge and mixed styles of address gain in importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we focus on the syntax of question particles in Basque and provide an account that draws new parallels between the syntactic behavior of discourse particles in Basque and some recent findings that have been reported for the German language, perhaps the most studied language of all when it comes to discourse particles. In particular, after having argued for a syntactic perspective on discourse particles for German, we deal with Basque particles in both wh-questions and polar questions. For wh-questions, we provide evidence for the claim that the particle ote occupies an IP/TP-internal particle position and, when attaching to a wh-element, can serve to form emphatic questions of the type that have also been observed in German. In the context of polar questions, we demonstrate that there are two distinct positions for discourse particles in central and eastern dialects of Basque: one inside the IP/TP-domain and one in the left periphery of the clause. Again, we indicate relevant cross-linguistic parallels, thereby dealing with Basque discourse particles from the perspective of a cross-linguistic syntax of particle elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Not much is known about how children cope with the task of acquiring the complex, polyfunctional, and often abstract and idiosyncratic system of German verbal prefixes. This paper presents an experimental study on children's knowledge, i.e. their morphological and semantic awareness, of the five verbal prefixes be‑, ent‑, er‑, ver‑, and zer‑ in preschool age and early school age. The experiment combines a decision and a definition task involving canonical and novel prefix verbs, and it examines the influence of context on the recognition of the verbs. The results of the study show that, in general, the knowledge of prefix verbs increases significantly between 6 and 8 years. Preschoolers have preliminary, but still very labile representations of the five verbal prefixes, school children have established much more independent representations, however, the lexical knowledge they have about prefixes and prefixed verbs is still fragmentary. The five prefixes under investigation differ considerably with respect to their morpho-semantic transparency. Higher transparency results in good passive knowledge of the prefixes, even when they are rarely used by the children spontaneously, such as the infrequent, but semantically salient prefix ent- (ent-kommen 'escape'), that is much better known to children than spontaneous speech data would suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates the question whether different languages can be categorized into 'constructionally tolerant' languages, which grant speakers considerable freedom to combine syntactic constructions with lexical items in non-conventional ways, and 'valency-driven' languages, which impose stronger restrictions on the way in which constructions and lexical items can be combined. The idea of such a typological distinction is sketched for instance by Rostila (2014). In order to explore possible effects of constructional tolerance, a grammaticality judgment task is administered to speakers of English and French, which are two languages that differ with regard to this phenomenon: English verbs can be used across different argument structure constructions with relative ease, French verbs are more constrained. Both populations of speakers are exposed to stimuli sentences of varying creativity in a second language, namely German. The paper advances the constructional tolerance hypothesis, which states that speakers of a constructionally tolerant language should judge nonconventional examples in an L2 with more lenience than speakers of a valencydriven language. The experimental results are in line with this hypothesis, but they also suggest that grammaticality judgments are influenced by the availability of a productive L1 construction that shows functional overlap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have shown that public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of reference to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes. This paper intends to contribute to this new strand of research by investigating discursive transpositions of the historical Germanism Kulturkampf in the donor language, German, and two host languages, Polish and English. Originally used mainly in reference to government attempts to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church in Prussia/Germany in the 1870s, this term has come to be used in German and other languages to signify conflicts in various political and cultural contexts. Adopting a triangulated and trilateral approach and the method of corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS), this paper examines the use of Kulturkampf in large collections of Internet and newspaper data in German, English and Polish. The results show how the meaning of Kulturkampf has been discursively re-contextualised and appropriated to perform local ideological work in public discourses in the three different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a usage pattern with German mit ‘with’ that is labelled here as the German mit-predicative construction. The pattern has been mentioned in previous research, but a usage-based constructional account is still missing. A qualitative analysis shows that the construction is subject to a number of constraints that point to its function as a predicative construction. It is argued that its constructional meaning can be adequately captured through the semantic frames of being in a category and having an attribute. Through the application of Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis to a corpus-based sample of 356 instances of the mit-predicative, it is shown that the construction can be analyzed as a cluster of five subtypes that display different typical structural and semantic traits. Through the analysis, the paper offers a perspective on intra-constructional variation and how such variation can be exploited for the purpose of grammatical description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports three experiments concerning variation in the grammar of German wh-questions.We found much variation but no clear dialects in the acceptability ratings of sentences violating the weak crossover condition. We attribute this variation to extra-grammatical factors. With a sentence completion task, we were able to show that there is regional variation concerning the scope of wh-movement. In a training experiment, we were also able to make speakers of the restrictive dialect behave like speakers of the liberal dialect with respect to wh-movement. We argue that this suggests an extragrammatical explanation of the dialectal difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports results of an ongoing ESRC-funded project into constructions of identity in German and Polish border communities. We are interested here in how our informants from different generations position themselves and their communities with regard to those on the other side of the river. The data come from a set of semi-structured interviews conducted in the towns of Guben (Germany) and Gubin (Poland) separated by the river Neisse, with some reference to the data elicited in the similarly split communities on the former East West German border on the Saale. For the people living in our target communities, the official narratives of the nation were re- written not just once, but in the case of the older generation at least three times. This meant a challenge of how to construct their own cultural identity in response to official changes and in relation to oppositional constructions of the nation on the other side of the border literally by 'looking across' at the Other in their every-day lives. In this paper we discuss how members of the oldest generation living on both sides of the river Neisse in the respective German and Polish towns of Guben and Gubin construct each other in their discourses. We show that the discourses of the Other are ridden by a mismatch in the constructions of the ownership of the past and the present. While the Polish narratives construct the German neighbours in terms of threat to the present status quo of the town, the German narratives position Gubin mostly in terms of the nostalgic past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to close a gap in the ongoing research on heritage languages (HL), their acquisition, and the nature of transfer in HL with a study on a hitherto understudied language combination, namely Italian heritage speakers (HS) raised in Germany with two native languages. The current study compares data from spontaneous speech of these HS with speech data from native speakers of Italian who immigrated to Germany as adults with German as L2, and Italian monolinguals. Analyses of Italian objects reveal that the HS show native knowledge about lexical options of object omissions and their pragmatic identification, and of object clitic use. The results indicate no evidence for covert transfer with regard to Italian object realization types. Finally, the study leads to the conclusion that Italian HS differ in fewer investigated aspects from Italian monolinguals than L1/L2 speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current theoretical approaches to inflectional morphology make extensive use of the two concepts of abstract feature decomposition and underspecification. Psycholinguistic models of infection, in contrast, generally lack such more differentiated morphological analyses. This paper reports a series of behavioral experiments that investigate the processing of grammatical gender of nouns in German. The results of these experiments support the idea that elements in the mental lexicon may be underspecified with regard to their grammatical features. However, contrary to all established morphological and psycholinguistic approaches, we provide evidence that even the lexical representation of bare noun stems is characterized by underspecified gender information. The observation that the domain of underspecification of grammatical features extends from inflectional markers to noun stems, supports the idea that underspecification is a more general characteristic of the mental lexicon. We conclude that this finding is mainly driven by economical reasons: a feature (or feature value) that is never used for grammatical operations (e.g., inflectional marking or evaluation of agreement) is not needed in the language system at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the expression of Source and Goal in German and Polish, on the basis of descriptions elicited with a series of video clips. As satellite-framed languages (Talmy 1985, 2000), both German and Polish mainly rely on grammatical morphemes to encode Path of motion with respect to Source and Goal. Nevertheless, despite this shared typological feature, these languages also display fine morphosyntactic and semantic differences. Our study reveals that the expression of Source and Goal is more asymmetrical in German than in Polish, both in types of linguistic resources and in semantic distinctions. We show that German speakers tend to combine Path satellites with Path verbs – including both deictic satellites and deictic verbs – more frequently in Source-oriented events, depicting them with finer semantic distinctions than Goal-oriented events. In the expression of the Ground, however, they tend to make finer distinctions in the expression of Goals as compared to Sources, by using a greater variety of prepositions. Polish speakers, by contrast, tend to express Source and Goal in a more symmetrical fashion. These cross-linguistic differences are discussed in the light of language-specific characteristics and their role in the expression – symmetrical or asymmetrical – of Source and Goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a contrastive survey of a morpheme originally meaning 'giant' in German and Swedish. In both languages, this morpheme has developed into a prefixoid with simile or intensifying meaning. More recently, these prefixoids have been shown to occur as free morphemes as well, and it is the purpose of this paper to explore whether a quantitative analysis of synchronic corpus data can be used to determine whether the free forms are spelling variants, or whether they are truly new constructions that are the result of debonding. Drawing data from the COW corpus of contemporary web text, we compare bound and free forms on the levels of R1 collocations, semantic bleaching, and productivity. Our analysis suggests that the German prefixoid has undergone debonding, whereas the Swedish free forms are mere spelling variants [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the typological differences between the Romance language French and the Germanic languages German and Dutch for the linguistic expressions of posture and location. It describes how these typological differences can be problematic for French-speaking learners of German and Dutch. The main difference between both types of languages is that posture and location tend to be encoded by posture verbs in Germanic languages and by very general verbs in Romance languages (Talmy 2000). After a detailed description of the semantic networks of the German and Dutch posture verbs, the paper takes a critical look at how these expressions are dealt with in teaching manuals. It further presents strategies for the efficient teaching of posture verbs to foreign language learners. These strategies are among others awareness-raising exercises about the compulsory use of posture verbs in Germanic languages and the description of conceptual metaphors in different languages. These pedagogical avenues for the efficient teaching of the Dutch and German posture verbs constitute a first step towards the elaboration of an experimental set-up aiming at verifying them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behaghel's claim that verb finality in German dependent clauses (DCs) reflects Latin influence (1892, 1932) has been revived by Chirita (1997, 2003). According to Chirita, DC word order remains variable up to Early New High German, while in Latin, verb-finality is more frequent in DCs than main clauses (MCs); hence, she claims, German verb finality reflects Latin influence. This papers shows that the arguments for Latin influence are problematic and that the Modern German word order difference between MCs and DCs can be explained as the ultimate outcome of developments that started in early North and West Germanic. In the conclusion I briefly discuss similar developments in Western Romance and their implications for European contact linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the contribution of external background factors which pertain to the child’s environment (e.g., parent education, parent occupation, family size, etc.), and internal ones which reflect the child’s time related experience with language (e.g., chronological age, age of L2 onset, etc.) to the development of linguistic skills in the two languages of bilingual children. 65 Russian-German (Mean age: 66mo, Range: 47-86mo) and 78 Russian-Israeli migrant children (Mean age: 70mo, Range: 58-81) with comparable mean length of L2 exposure (M=37mo) and family size (1.88 children) but different Socio-Economic Status (SES), were tested with a battery of language and their parents were interviewed.. Overall, internal, temporal, factors showed a stronger relationship to language measures than external, environmental, factors: age of L2 onset and length of L2 exposure correlated with L2, while parents’ education/occupation showed positive correlations with both L1 and L2 measures. In the Russian-German cohort, which had a sub-group with relatively lower SES, SES positively correlated with L1 success as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a study of the records of prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with the aim of uncovering as much information as possible about camp interpreters, their work and their attempts to ease the hardships of other prisoners, often risking their own lives in the process. As will be demonstrated, the generally accepted deontological norms for interpreting in community settings were not applicable to concentration camps, and different norms were adopted which were clearly justified, under the circumstances. The paper in particular investigates why interpreters were needed in the concentration camps, who they were, how they were recruited for the job, what their language combinations were, what their duties were, when the interpreters were required, and how they performed their duties as well what their roles were. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a systematic investigation into the use of German Nazi vocabulary in English. Nazi vocabulary is checked for frequency of occurrence in a large web corpus of English and then, where it occurs, for reference to Nazi discourse. Next, its frequency is compared to similar French and German web corpora, showing whether or not the use of Nazi vocabulary outside German is unique to English and whether or not its current usage differs between German and the borrowing languages. Finally, the use of two words that occur with similar frequencies in all three languages – judenrein and Blitzkrieg – and of two words that occur there with the highest difference in frequency – Anschluss and Lebensraum – is investigated in detail by means of the Sketch Engine corpus tool, including an analysis of collocations which indicate contexts of usage. The results can inform further research into lexical borrowing by demonstrating that borrowed words may be used in ways that differ notably from their use in the donor language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the long-term effects of peer and teacher feedback on pronunciation development. Participants included 94 learners of German. They were assigned to a teacher feedback group (TeacherF Group), a peer feedback provider group (PeerF Providers), a peer feedback receiver group (PeerF Receivers), or a control group. After completing general pronunciation training on a segmental and a suprasegmental feature in German, the TeacherF Group received feedback on their pronunciation from a teacher, the PeerF Providers gave feedback to peers, and the PeerF Receivers received feedback from peers. The control group did not complete pronunciation training or receive feedback. Results from native speaker comprehensibility ratings of learners' productions indicated that while the TeacherF Group and the PeerF Receivers improved in the short term, only the PeerF Providers maintained their gains in pronunciation development over time. Methodological and pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been frequently noted in the literature that content words need to consist of at least three letters; this observation is commonly dubbed "three letter rule." However, a survey of the CELEX database (Baayen et al. 1995) shows that there are (nearly) no content words in English and German that begin with two or more consonant letters and end in a single vowel letter. Words such as [bru:] are not spelt but with an additional letter. These findings cannot be accounted for by the three letter rule but they are explicable within a supra-segmental theory of graphematics that includes graphematic feet and graphematic weight: a wellformed graphematic word consists of at least one graphematic foot that in turn consists of at least one heavy graphematic syllable. This paper offers a data-based survey in order to answer the question whether there is a suprasegmental minimality constraint for monosyllabic graphematic words in English and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze written sentences containing the German particles obwohl ("although") and weil ("because"). In standard written German, these particles embed clauses in verb-last constituent order, which is characteristic of subordinated clauses. In spoken and - as we show - nonstandard written German, they embed clauses in verb-second constituent order, which is characteristic of independent sentences. Our usage-based approach to the syntax - graphemics interface includes a large-scale corpus analysis of the patterns of punctuation in the nonstandard variants that provides clues to the syntactic structure and degree of sentential independence of the nonstandard variants. Our corpus study confirms and refines hypotheses from existing theoretical approaches by clearly showing that writers mark obwohl clauses with verb-second order systematically as independent sentences, whereas weil clauses with verb-second order are much less strongly marked as independent. This work suggests that similar corpus studies could provide deeper insight into the interplay between syntax and graphemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss two types of total reduplication that prove to be productive in Contemporary German: real-X Reduplication (RXR) and Durative Reduplication (DR). The function of the former, RXR, is to restrict the meaning of a word to its prototypical content (cf. Buchbuch 'book-book; real book, not an e-book'). Based on corpus data I address the question whether we are dealing with reduplication or with compounding here. As a result it will become apparent that the process of RXR, while showing some parallels to compounding, lacks crucial characteristics of compounding and is therefore to be seen as a case of reduplication. The latter type of total reduplication, DR, involves the doubling of a bare, inflectionless verb stem, thus encoding durativity of the denoted event or activity (cf. grummel-grummel 'grumble-grumble, to be continuously grumbling'). Finally I sketch a path of diachronic development of the emergence of DR from ideophones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the relation between morphological productivity and semantic transparency. Using distributional semantics, we compare German word formation using particles with derivational word formation. We observed that derivational suffixes, but not particles, tend to make strong independent semantic contributions to their carrier words. In two-dimensional t-SNE maps, complex words show clustering by affix, but not by particle. Furthermore, the semantic vectors of suffixed words are predictable from their base words with higher accuracy than is possible for particle verbs. For particle verbs, but not affixed verbs, semantic similarity within the set of complex words correlated negatively with the number of types. Furthermore, only for particle verbs, a greater number of observed types predicted a reduced probability of observing unseen types. We propose that particle verbs primarily serve the onomasiological function of labeling, resulting in relatively idiosyncratic semantic vectors. By contrast, words sharing derivational affixes form distinct clusters in semantic space while maintaining strong and consistent semantic relations with their base words. This enables these words to serve not only as labels, but also allows them to be used with an anaphoric function in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies show mixed findings concerning whether higher-order story structure (macrostructure) is similar across bilinguals' two languages. It is not known how macrostructure is influenced by general language proficiency and amount of exposure. The present study investigates these issues in 46 German-Swedish bilingual 4- to 6-year-olds. Narratives were elicited in both languages with two picture-based tasks from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) in the telling mode. We investigate to what extent the language of elicitation (Swedish vs German) influences bilingual children's macrostructure (story structure, episodic complexity) and explore effects of narrative task, age, narrative length, expressive vocabulary and estimated language exposure, both separately and combined, on macrostructure in the respective language. Results show that macrostructural skills developed measurably with age from 4 to 6 years in both languages, with no task effects. Story structure scores were higher in the majority language Swedish than in German and developed differently with age. The effect of narrative length on story structure was similar in the two languages. Language exposure did not have any significant effect. Macrostructure scores were significantly affected by expressive vocabulary in German only. Generally, the results may be linked to slightly higher language proficiency in Swedish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with structural properties of German possessive compounds. Based on a comparison with compounds in Modern Greek, I argue against a general approach based exclusively on semantic criteria. Instead I distinguish between exocentric and endocentric formations in German, on the basis of specific structural criteria. In particular, I propose that compounds like Dickkopf 'pigheaded person' - also called bahuvrīhi or exocentric formations - are to be analysed as endocentric, right-headed compounds with a metonymical meaning. Furthermore, I propose that structures like Vierfüßer 'quadruped' and heißblütig 'warm-blooded/hot-tempered' are the real bahuvrīhi compounds in German, i.e. exocentric structures with a possessive meaning, headed by the derivational suffixes, -er or -ig. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of semantic descriptions of concepts by means of defining statements is a commonplace tenet of scientific and practical approaches to terminology. While the current understanding of defining statements remains bound to classical concepts of defining, there is limited knowledge about the types of conceptual information that may ease the transfer of knowledge. Furthermore, there is little insight into how defining statements differ epistemologically from non-defining (generic) statements; on the linguistic side, the same can be said about linguistic differences between defining and generic statements. Last but not least, it remains unclear how practical terminology work can benefit from corpus-based research on the description of defining statements. This paper aims to shed light on some of these questions by describing a corpus-linguistic study of knowledge-rich contexts in German and Russian web corpora. Hypotheses about linguistic features of knowledge-rich contexts are derived in a theory-driven manner and researched by means of corpus-linguistic methods. Significant features are then investigated further for the German data, using a multivariate method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Namibia was never under direct British rule, it has been a country with English as the de jure official language since 1990, the year of independence from South Africa. Surprisingly, the de facto role of English in Namibia has to date not been systematically and comprehensively investigated within the framework of World Englishes. This is a gap the present paper seeks to address. To this end, part one of our study provides insights drawn from a questionnaire-based inquiry into language use in the different domains of private and public life, questions of linguistic and cultural identity, as well as attitudes towards the different languages spoken in Namibia. Part two tentatively identifies some linguistic features on various linguistic levels as potential candidates for structural nativisation. Taken together, the overall results suggest an ongoing change of the status of English spoken in Namibia from English as a foreign language (EFL) to English as a second language (ESL). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the term "family of constructions", the present article investigates lexical and syntactic variation in a subtype of German concessive conditionals which is marked by was ('what') in combination with expressions of irrelevance like egal ('no matter'). 12,894 examples from the DeReKo corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) are analysed manually for seven variables. Both the quantitative and the qualitative results suggest that combinations of was with an expression of irrelevance, or "[IRR was]" for short, form part of a recently entrenched constructional schema [IRR w-] of concessive-conditional subordinators which are emerging into the family of concessive-conditional constructions in present-day German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction of several cases of grammaticalization going back to different source constructions may have dramatic consequences on a linguistic system. This paper discusses the so-called German scandal construction, which consists of a verbal complex displaying a number of synchronic form-meaning mismatches. The scandal is solved if a diachronic point of view is adopted, which shows that the mismatches result from the intraference of two different source constructions expanded in the course of the German linguistic history, namely the Perfekt construction and the zu-infinitive construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a corpus study that addresses the question whether distributional patterns of certain letter strings are orthographic cues to stress in German word reading. For that purpose, the occurrence of stress patterns with a different number of final consonant letters as well as with specific word endings in disyllabic German noun lemmas were investigated. The findings indicate that distributional properties of word endings can serve as reliable orthographic cues to word stress in disyllabic nouns - irrespective of whether they are polymorphemic or simplex nouns. Likewise, the number of final consonant letters is a potential orthographic cue to word stress in disyllabic simplex nouns. Such orthographic cues to stress may be employed during phonological recoding of written words by skilled readers of German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic evaluation has become an important area of inquiry in recent years. In the traditions of, e.g., lexical semantics, phraseology, corpus linguistics, and interactional linguistics, a large inventory of linguistic means have been identified by which speakers can express evaluative meanings. However, the class of German sentential idioms, e.g., Das kannst du dir in die Haare schmieren (lit. ‘You can smear that into your hair’, fig. ‘That is useless’), has not gained much attention. This paper explores how the evaluative meaning of German sentential idioms is constructed syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. In particular, it is investigated how the meaning of these idioms interacts with the context in which they are used. A context model of evaluation is developed in which the cognitive category of cause plays a central role. The model is applied to contextualized examples, the findings supporting the hypothesis that cause is one of the core categories of evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dative reanalysis ‘origins’ explanation for prenominal periphrastic possessive constructions (PPPCs) in Dutch has been maintained for well over a century. This paper brings new evidence to bear on this hypothesis, arguing that while genitive relational case marking on the possessor NP in earlier Dutch PPPCs is clearly attested, we lack evidence that the dative was used in this way. Instead, two types of case marking strategies are in use in earlier Dutch PPPCs — one relational and one concordial — as a solution to case conflict in instances which would otherwise give rise to double case marking. Historical and present-day dialect data from German is also examined to address the common assumption that developments in Dutch PPPCs mirrored those in German. Similar to Dutch, clear evidence attests to genitive relational case marking in earlier German PPPCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study sets out to construct a semantic network for the German preposition hinter ('behind') based on the theoretical framework of "principled polysemy". The analysis regarding the cognitive and pragmatic aspects motivating the meaning extensions of hinter attempts to highlight the importance of varying construal patterns and vantage points as well as the role of real-world knowledge. By means of corpus data, I intend to present six senses of the preposition hinter, hinting at the polysemous nature of prepositions more generally. Furthermore, the theory of conceptual metaphor is applied to account for metaphorical extensions of hinter to more abstract domains of embodied experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the different learning outcomes of two computer-based cognitive tutors using two approaches to instructing German declension: an additive, bottom-up approach, which focuses on a stepwise introduction of each case, and a concept-based, top-down approach, which focuses on developing students' conceptual understanding of the functions related to each case form and the case marking system as a whole. The results indicate that both groups learned, but what and how they learned differed depending on the method of instruction. The additive group showed general gains in production and a slight increase in their ability to correctly interpret object-first sentences. The concept-based group showed larger gains, but in fewer areas. Specifically, the production of adjective endings increased, although there were no differences in determiner production or accuracy. The concept-based group also had a larger gain in their ability to interpret non-SVO word order sentences. This study shows how concept-based approaches to grammar can outperform additive ones, and that the development of these concepts can prepare students for future learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the unresolved issue of systematic survey area selection for large-scale quantitative Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies. It presents a strategy of 'hypothesis-driven stratified sampling' whereby survey areas are picked out in a nested, multi-step process on the basis of the configuration of local LL audiences (regarding age, multilingualism, and tourism) and ambient activity types (commercial vs. residential). The rationale for this strategy is drawn from variationist sociolinguistics; and the undertaking is accordingly cast as 'Variationist Linguistic Landscape Study (VaLLS)'. The details of the design are showcased and implications discussed in the context of the large-scale project 'ELLViA – English in the Linguistic Landscape of Vienna, Austria'. More generally, it is shown how the application of state-of-the-art variationist principles and methodology to quantitative LL research significantly enhances the latter's scientific rigor, which has been a major point of criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language, Interaction & Acquisition / Langage, Interaction et Acquisition is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

A long-standing divide between Icelandic and German in the literature takes for granted that there are non-nominative subjects in Icelandic, while corresponding arguments in German have been analyzed as objects (Zaenen et al. 1985; Sigurðsson 1989). This is based on two differences between these languages: (a) differences with regard to control and conjunction reduction and (b) apparent subject behavior of the nominative in dat-nom constructions in German. This article focuses on the latter, introducing into the discussion the concept of alternating predicates, that is, dat-nom predicates that systematically alternate between two diametrically-opposed argument structure constructions, dat-nom and nom-dat. A comparison between Icelandic and German shows that Icelandic dat-nom predicates are of two types, a non-alternating líka type and an alternating falla í geð type, whereas German seems to exhibit only the alternating type. On this assumption, the apparent subject behavior of the nominative in German is easily explained, since such occurrences in fact involve the nom-dat construction and not the dat-nom construction. Therefore, the subject behavior of the nominative in nom-dat constructions does not invalidate a subject analysis of the dative in dat-nom constructions in German. The analysis is couched in the framework of construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments, we explored the integration of newly learned L2 German lexical units with differing semantic properties into the L2 semantic network. Previous studies (Dagenbach et al., 1990 for L1; Bordag et al., 2016 for L2) have indicated that the access to emergent representations with weak memory traces is supported by a retrieval mechanism that inhibits their semantically related competitors with lower activation thresholds and higher selection potential. In this study used pseudowords as novel L2 items and employed semantic priming and semantic categorization tasks as well as an introspective post-test to explore whether the access to new L2 words is modulated by meaning novelty (Experiment 1) and elaborateness (Experiment 2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the semantic and morphosyntactic development of the German evidential adverbs offensichtlich, offenbar, anscheinend, and scheinbar 'obviously'/'apparently'/'seemingly' and their meaning contribution in presentday German. It will be argued that these expressions, most of which are historically derived from adjectives, innovated separate lexical entries as sentence adverbs in New High German resulting from a morphosyntactic reanalysis of an ambiguous surface structure. This reanalysis was accompanied by a profound semantic change, as a result of which the expressions acquired a wide-scope reading of the type 'there is (clear) evidence that p'. The diachronic results are corroborated by experimental data from Present-Day German that show that these evidential sentence adverbs are underspecified with respect to evidence type (inference and report). The diachronic and synchronic findings are furthermore discussed in the light of grammaticalization and subjectification theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Immersion & Content-Based Language Education is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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 study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adverb placement, showing no influence of a V2 grammar. Performance in the VP-ellipsis task is more complex: heritage children produce VP-ellipsis at the level of controls, as opposed to L2 speakers; however, both L2 and heritage speakers show that cross-linguistic influence may produce a preference for pronoun substitution over VP-ellipsis in a task asking for redundancy resolution. Nevertheless, given that overall results show that heritage children perform at the level of L1 children, we take our results to support approaches to heritage bilingualism which suggest the development of an intact grammar in childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the expression of motion in translations of Tolkien's The Hobbit into Polish and German within the framework of Talmy's (1991, 2000) typology of macro-events and Slobin's (1991, 1996) "Thinking for speaking" hypothesis. We show that although both languages pertain to the satellite-framed typological group, Polish provides less diversified Manner and Path descriptions than German, which exploits the satellite-framed lexicalization pattern by far more productively. We relate these contrasts in the rhetorical style to the particular morpho-syntactic and semantic characteristics of the languages under discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]