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This paper deals with autonomous uses of German subordinate wh-interrogatives as headlines, so-called wh-headlines (e.g. Was Kinder brauchen, 'What children need'), which we approach from a discourse-pragmatic and diachronic perspective. We take our starting point in the QUD-based, discourse-pragmatic model of interrogatives as proposed by Rosemeyer (this issue). Applying this model, first, to the case of wh-headlines in present-day news discourse, we develop the hypothesis that a writer in using a wh-headline may explicitly introduce an implicit QUD into discourse without posing it as an information-seeking question. In a second step, we assess this hypothesis with respect to the use of wh-headlines in various genres from the Middle High German and Early New High German periods, for which we provide three in-depth case studies. The case studies are contextualized against the backdrop of reflections on potential impact factors in the diachronic evolvement of this particular writing practice. Overall, the results of our study can be taken to lend support to our hypothesis also for genres other than news discourse and for time periods other than modern German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But if, as Construction Grammar takes it, semantics and pragmatics are part of the same overall conceptual system, with no sharp distinction between the two, the question arises how the common representational distinction between semantics and pragmatics can be justified, whether it is becoming obsolete, or whether there are in fact good reasons to keep this distinction. In terms of [2] influential work on the grammar-pragmatics distinction, one can say that constructionist approaches focus on "grammatical pragmatics" (or "form/function pragmatics"; cf. [3]). Fillmore ([19]: 55, 63), who was reflecting from early on upon the notion of pragmatics in Construction Grammar, distinguishes three kinds of pragmatics: I regular pragmatics, conventional pragmatics i , and I constructional pragmatics i . Conventional pragmatics is "the pragmatics which is based on conventions about what sorts of ideas people can express in given contexts (One doesn't inquire into a stranger's age as a matter of small talk)" ([19]: 68), while constructional pragmatics is "the pragmatics that belongs in the description of the language's grammatical structures" ([19]: 68). First, the area of "post-semantic pragmatics", or PCI's; second, the area of "pre-semantic pragmatics" (GCI's or truth-conditional pragmatics); and third, the area of conventionalized pragmatics. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, I investigate the German N hin, N her ('N thither, N hither') construction. I first provide a close description of its syntactic and semantic properties, arguing that N hin, N her is a grammatical construction. I then show that this construction is not entirely idiosyncratic, as there are specific pragmatic aspects contributing to its meaning and functional potential. These are the deictic adverbs hin and her, restrictions on the choice of nouns, and effects of syntactic disintegration. I argue that a purely semantic analysis of the construction as concessive or concessive conditional is insufficient, as it neglects pragmatic processes of contextual enrichment and implicature. Based on these assumptions, I provide a detailed analysis of the discursive and interactional functions of the construction, showing that it is a prime candidate for construing textual coherence and for subjectification and stance taking. Evidence comes from a corpus of newspaper examples. [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]