Search

This paper discusses contemporary societal roles of German in the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania). Speaker and learner statistics and a summary of sociolinguistic research (Linguistic Landscapes, language learning motivation, language policies, international roles of languages) suggest that German has by far fewer speakers and functions than the national languages, English, and Russian, and it is not a dominant language in the contemporary Baltics anymore. However, German is ahead of 'any other language' in terms of users and societal roles as a frequent language in education, of economic relations, as a historical lingua franca, and a language of traditional and new minorities. Highly diverse groups of users and language policy actors form a 'coalition of interested parties' which creates niches which guarantee German a frequent use. In the light of the abundance of its functions, the paper suggests the concept 'additional language of society' for a variety such as German in the Baltics – since there seems to be no adequate alternative labelling which would do justice to all societal roles. The paper argues that this concept may also be used for languages in similar societal situations and, not least, be useful in language marketing and the promotion of multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surprisingly little is known about the number and frequency level of words that beginner‐to‐low‐intermediate 16‐year‐old learners of French, German, and Spanish are expected to know when taking high‐stakes national exams in England. This study presents exploratory analyses of the lexical content of the listening and reading tests of these exams, a corpus totaling 116,647 running words. Specifically, it seeks to understand the number and frequency level of words that (a) this demographic seems to be expected to know and (b) could be needed for awarding organizations to create exams year‐on‐year. Key findings include that the proportion of low(er)‐frequency words in the corpus of exam papers seemed large, given the stage of the learners and the purpose of the assessments. Critically, these low(er)‐frequency words changed at a high rate between papers, likely incurring a heavy reliance on the lexical inferencing abilities of these relatively inexperienced language learners. The Challenge: Every year, approximately 250,000 16‐year‐olds in England sit high‐stakes exams in French, German, and Spanish. But how many and what kinds of words do these learners need to know to understand the listening and reading exam texts? And how often do these words change year‐on‐year? This article aims to address these questions by analyzing a corpus of exam papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence‐internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus be context‐dependent, that is, dependent on other cues. Precisely this context dependency is investigated in the current study: Is there an effect of capitalisation on reading and is this affected by the presence of other cues such as a determiner (specifically, an article)? Methods: We ran an eye‐tracking study with 30 German‐speaking adults, measuring fixations during sentence reading. Critical NPs either contained correctly capitalised nouns or not and were presented either with or without a determiner. Results: The results show that both the presence of capitalisation on the noun and the presence of a determiner led to faster reading. When no determiner was present to signal the NP, the presence of noun capitalisation aided reading most. Conclusions: From these results, we conclude that the influence of capitalisation is indeed context dependent: Capitalisation aids processing most when no other cue is present. Thus, different cues play a role in NP recognition. Based on these findings, we argue that noun capitalisation should not be studied in isolation. We argue that a better understanding of capitalisation as a reading aid is relevant for teaching reading strategies. Highlights: What is already known about this topicGerman has the quite exceptional characteristic of sentence‐internal capitalisation of all nouns.The function of sentence‐internal capitalisation is controversial. What this paper addsThis study experimentally shows that capitalisation and presence of an article conspire in NP recognition in German.We find that capitalisation aids processing. This effect is strongest when no determiner is present. Implications for theory, policy or practiceWe argue that possible reading aids for NP recognition (like capitalisation, articles and adjectives) should not be studied in isolation.Investigations of these aids and how they may interact should also be done for other languages.A better understanding of capitalisation as a reading aid is relevant for teaching reading strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief review summarizes findings about syntactic markers, i.e., graphemic elements that indicate syntactic relations, such as inflection morphemes. Current spelling models subsume inflection with derivation and stem alternations under "morphological spellings." They hence consider inflection only in relation to the orthographic word. This paper argues that syntactic markers are a specific category as they are part of the orthographic word but also systematically tied to the presence of syntactic features above the word level. Syntactic spelling refers thus not only to the correct spelling of a syntactic marker but to its correct application within a given syntactical context. In syntactic reading, (proof)readers must notice the marker and interpret it correctly to understand the sentence. Syntactic spelling and reading have hence been found to be highly demanding in many languages. Syntactic information is not decisive for sentence understanding in many cases, since the information can be deduced from the context. In order to focus the definition of syntactic markers, this paper restricts them to those graphemic elements that convey syntactical but no lexical features and are further unrelated to phonology. The paper concludes that syntactic markers and spelling should be distinguished from morphological spelling. Examples are given for English, French, Dutch, and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the SAGT Turkish–German code-switching treebank, and observations and annotation challenges we encountered during its development. The treebank consists of transcriptions of bilingual conversations annotated with several layers: language IDs, lemmas, POS tags, morphological features, and dependency relations. The annotations follow the Universal Dependencies annotation scheme and the conventions used in monolingual treebanks as much as possible. We present and discuss a number of issues that arise because of the need for consistent multilingual annotation within a single treebank, as well as the informal language, which is where code-switching is observed most. Besides proposing solutions to these issues, we present some observations about code-switching phenomena that are only possible to observe in a data set with rich linguistic annotation. The treebank was annotated with a focus on quality of annotations through an iterative process of detecting and correcting annotation errors. We also present quantitative measures for indication of annotation quality. The code-switching treebank created in this study is released to the public through Universal Dependencies repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language loyalty can be viewed from the perspective of both language stability and language shift. The paper focuses primarily on the latter as it shows how the Bohemian composer Friedrich Smetana (1824–1884) shifted from a predominate use of German to Czech in private and official correspondence and his diaries to become known as the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. This change serves as a model of the collective language and social shift in Bohemia in the long 19th century. The paper shows, however, that Smetana encountered difficulties in making the language shift from German to Czech due to the stability of his previous language loyalty to German, tracing both Smetana's subsequent evaluation of the limited language shift's success and his explanation of its failure. In this regard, the study also considers the narrative of a Germanisation Smetana invokes to explain his loyalty to the German language during his education and beyond due to the Germanisation of educational institutions. The paper thus shows how Smetana's narrative of his own language biography is a model narrative for his generation as whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica 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 Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historiografía Lingüística (BSEHL) is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Historiografia Linguistica 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 COVID pandemic has sparked fear among many people worldwide and has thus led to the emergence of a variety of conspiracy theories. Individuals believing in these theories come from various social and demographic backgrounds, some of them being mere skeptics, while others are more radical and extreme. The present paper investigates the use of language in a conspiratorial anti-COVID Facebook group with the aim of describing the linguistic features and strategies employed to share and spread conspiracy theories and to form a common identity. The results show that the group uses features typical of extremist groups, such the ideological in- and out-group presentation, the use of agentless passives to create fear, and intertextual references. Further strategies detected in the data are the misrepresentation of scientific knowledge, the use of colloquial language, humor, and irony, among others, which are used to create a bond among the groups' members and to set themselves apart from the government and the rest of the population, whom they perceive as enemies and oppressors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal for Languages & Literatures of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad / Zbornik za Jezike i Knjizevnosti Filozofskog Fakulteta u Novom Sadu is the property of Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the intonation of L3 French, produced by six bilingual learners (ages: 15–17) who speak Turkish as a heritage language (HL) along with German and six same-aged monolingual German learners. We examined of a corpus of read speech in two respects: first, we determined the number of accentual phrases (APs) and, second, we extracted F0 values for each segment, normalized them, and calculated the deviations from the average values produced by three native controls (age: 21–23). Although the bilinguals were expected to outperform the monolinguals due to certain similarities between the intonational systems of French and Turkish, their mean deviation from the native contours was only slightly smaller than that of the monolinguals (difference not significant). To determine how strongly the bilinguals' Turkish intonation was influenced by German and whether it could serve as a basis for positive transfer whatsoever, we compared their production in Turkish with data recorded from three monolingual Turkish L1 speakers (ages: 21–32) and five German learners of L2 Turkish (ages: 22–43). Results show that the bilinguals' Turkish intonation does not deviate substantially from the monolinguals' one, in contrast to the contours produced by the L2 learners. This suggests that metalinguistic and prosodic awareness should be fostered in heritage bilinguals to make them benefit from their full linguistic repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in news gathering and dissemination technologies have made it possible that news stories are being shared simultaneously around the world. One internationally newsworthy event can generate dozens of news reports in multiple languages almost immediately by means of translation. Although news translation research has gained traction over the last 15 years, it has thus far tended to focus only on one language pair or on European language combinations because of practical limitations (e.g., language proficiency of researchers, access to content). This paper will illustrate the benefits of collaboration across languages and cultures for deepening our understanding of global news translation. To explore the possibilities as well as the limitations of this multilingual collaboration, a speech by the Japanese prime minister commemorating the 70th anniversary of Japan's surrender ending World War II and reports about this speech in English and German media are analysed. For a detailed comparative analysis, two direct quotations from the speech were selected which were included in nearly all of the reports. We reflect on the variation identified in the news reports with reference to sources the journalists used, their own language proficiency and the potential role of an intermediary text or language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses intercultural differences which should contribute to raising awareness of sociolinguists in particular with respect to the role religion plays in shaping talk in Arabic and to serious confusion and misunderstandings that may occur when communicators from different cultural backgrounds meet. Successful intercultural interactions are at the heart of what intercultural communication is all about. So what does it mean that Arabs interact successfully with Germans (Westerners) and vice versa? This is the focus of this paper which led to the development of an intercultural communicative competence framework (Byram 1997) based on critical incidents (Schumann 2012a/b). In utilizing such a framework, our efforts toward developing intercultural competence in our students can be included in a more comprehensive, integrated approach instead of having too much trust in the mass-market course book not necessarily always tailored to the teaching context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by earlier work on typological profiling of English by Benedikt Szmrecsányi and Bernd Kortmann ([1], [2], [3]), this paper investigates typological profiles of English, Spanish, German, and Slovak, applying Szmrecsányi and Kortmann's methodology of calculating the SYNTHETICITY INDEx and the ANALYTICITY INDEx based on 1,000-word corpus samples. The results show that Szmrecsányi and Kortmann's methodology is replicable, and confirm claims in the literature about degrees of analyticity and syntheticity of these languages. Instead of a simple analytic-synthetic continuum, Szmrecsányi and Kortmann's "typological space" [3] is used to visualize results, showing that languages can be both synthetic and analytic to varying degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to answer the question which phonetic parameters are particularly responsible for the sound of German. In particular, the accent-rhythmic structures are discussed. In doing so, we reflect on which factors also shape attitudes and perception of German [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating research on multilingualism and computer-mediated communication, this paper proposes the term ‘networked multilingualism’ and presents findings from a case study to explore its implications for the theorising of multilingualism. Networked multilingualism is a cover term for multilingual practices that are shaped by two interrelated processes: being networked, i.e. digitally connected to other individuals and groups, and being in the network, i.e. embedded in the global mediascape of the web. It encompasses everything language users do with the entire range of linguistic resources within three sets of constraints: mediation of written language by digital technologies, access to network resources, and orientation to networked audiences. The empirical part of the paper discusses the Facebook language practices of a small group of Greek-background secondary school students in a German city. Data collection follows an online ethnography approach, which combines systematic observation of online activities, collection and linguistic analysis of screen data, and data elicited through direct contact with users. Focusing on four weeks of discourse on profile walls, the analysis examines the participants’ linguistic repertoires, their language choices for genres of self-presentation and dialogic exchange, and the performance of multilingual talk online. The findings suggest that the students’ networked multilingual practices are individualised, genre-shaped, and based on wide and stratified repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the notion of politeness formulae in linguistic politeness research. It argues that the formal make-up of politeness formulae is crucially motivated by their function. The major claim of this paper is thus that there is a link between form and function of expressions of linguistic politeness. The usefulness of this account will be illustrated by the analysis of empirical data from Slavic languages and German. Reference to Roman Jakobson's markedness theory will show that the choice of linguistic means is not only dependent on concrete contexts (as is usually claimed in linguistic politeness theory) but also motivated by the language system itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historiografía Lingüística (BSEHL) is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Historiografia Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper focuses on the phonetic, morphological and semantic principles determining the grammatical gender of nouns in German. Based on the experiments we established the main trends in determining the gender of the German equivalents and interlingual homonyms and the role of the interlingual and intralingual interference in this process. The results of two experiments show that Ukrainian students take into consideration suffixes of German nouns when choosing the correct gender. Phonetic or semantic gender allocation rules play a subordinate role. The interlingual interference determinates the gender choice in the target language: the gender of the mother tongue lemma interferes the selection of the gender in the foreign language equivalent. This effect appears more frequently in interlingual homonyms than in translation equivalents. A plausible interpretation of these results could be: the lemmas of two similar nouns or translation equivalents share the same concepts, the relationship between them is rather close, and the competition between the two lemmas and their genus nodes is strong and influences language production. This conclusion supports the hypothesis that both languages, the mother tongue and the foreign one, can be activated during language producing. [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]

Using conversation analytic methodology, this paper investigates one function of the discourse marker so in everyday German conversations. In particular, the paper describes how speakers of German use so to manage sequences of actions (both verbal and embodied actions). With the production of so, speakers indicate that they view the prior action as complete and that they are ready for the next action. Specifically, so is placed between two types of actions where the second action can be considered a “logical next phase” in the overall design of the activity. The article contrasts German so with other types of sequence closings in German and other languages. The findings of this paper contribute to our understanding of how co-participants structure and coordinate their own conduct, and how sequences and turns are designed. Moreover, it speaks to the various functions of different discourse markers in interaction and raises questions of cultural specificity and translatability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we replicated two influential studies on gender-fair language that investigated how gender-fair language influences stereotype perception and recall of exemplars. We also updated the original studies to assess new forms of gender-fair language. A first set of studies replicated Gabriel et al. (2008) by eliciting gender proportion ratings for occupational nouns from adult German native speakers for word pairs, capital I forms and the asterisk. Results were mixed with effects mainly for female-biased nouns. Only the non-binary asterisk form (Lehrer*innen) showed an increase of women for male-biased nouns. A third study replicated Stahlberg and Sczesny's (2001) naming study. Here, the number of women answers was higher than in the original study and increased when using gender-fair language with a larger increase for capital I forms (LehrerInnen) than for word pairs (Lehrer und Lehrerinnen). Overall, the effects of word pair forms were weaker than those of other forms of gender-fair language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates object omissions in the spontaneous production of European Portuguese by second-generation Portuguese-German bilingual speakers and compares them to first-generation migrants, and two age-matched groups of monolingual speakers. The results show that bilingual speakers as well as the younger generation of monolinguals show a higher number of null objects in their speech than the two older generations. This may reflect an inter-generational development that favours null objects, which is independent of language contact. The analysis of the syntactic and semantic conditions determining the occurrence of null objects in the speech of the different groups reveals that the semantic properties of the null objects realized by the bilinguals, particularly the higher rates of animate and non-propositional null objects, show that they extend the semantic-pragmatic conditions of null object realization along a referential hierarchy. The bilingual speakers may reflect a language-internal pathway that appears to resemble a diachronic change observed in BP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the German idiomatic expression einen/den Teufel tun ‘do a/the devil’ which is used for emphatic rejection. It is shown that this expression is a PPI, as it cannot occur in the scope of negation. I will motivate that the asserted content of the expression is negation. With German being a non-negative concord language, the co-occurrence of several expressions of negation is usually avoided. This typological fact leads to two different judgement patterns for sentences with einen/den Teufel tun and a negation marker. The expression also contributes a conventional implicature that expresses an attitude of the subject. This conventional implicature shows an interaction with negation similar to that of evaluative adverbs. I will argue that the PPI-hood of the considered expression is fully reducible to its properties as an idiomatic negation marker in a non-negative concord language and its multi-dimensional semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present paper is twofold. First, it aspires to outline the current state of linguis-tic comparison of German and Czech that has been significantly influenced in recent years by the increasing importance of corpus linguistics (very large corpora, parallel corpora). Most importantly, we argue that the theoretical framework of contrastive linguistics is to be rethought in the light of empirical data obtained from corpus analysis and, on the other hand, that corpus linguistics cannot be degraded to mere analytical methods without any theoretical background. In addition, we posit that German-Czech contrastive linguistics is in urgent need of a large learner corpus of texts produced by Czech learners of German and by German speak-ing learners of Czech respectively. Second, the paper presents a new online bibliography on German-Czech linguistic comparison, a project pursued at the Institute of Germanic Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. The new bibliography capitalizes on the pro-perties of the electronic medium that makes continual updates of its contents possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we demonstrate the dialectical relationship between micro and macro language planning: macro planning influences micro planning and yet macro planning results (or should result) from micro planning. The relation between the two planning perspectives is illustrated within the framework of Language Management Theory (Jernudd & Neustupný, 1987; Neustupný & Nekvapil, 2003). We deal with the relations between various levels of 'organised management', and with the role of the 'simple, i.e. discourse-based management' in organised language management. Attention is also given to the impact of organised language management on naturally occurring discourses and discourse-based management. The paper is empirically based on research carried out during the past two years in branches of multinational companies or corporations founded in the Czech Republic by German, Austrian or Swiss owners. We focus primarily on the situation in a subsidiary of a Siemens corporation. The languages which have become the subject of management activities here are German, English, and Czech. The data we work with were obtained using various types of interviews (semi-structured, follow-up) as well as audio-recordings and participant observation. [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]

This article presents an empirical study on selected aspects of the orthographic performance of mono- and bilingual students in German. Particular attention is paid to the question whether a connection can be drawn between the orthographic performance of the bilingual students in German and their first language. For this purpose, a corpus is analyzed with data from approx. 800 test students. One group is monolingual in German, one is bilingual German–Turkish and one is bilingual German–Russian. A highly significant influence of Russian resp. Turkish on the performance to differentiate between tense and lax vowels is found. This corresponds to expectations insofar as in opposition to German, neither in Turkish nor in Russian, tense and lax vowels are distinguished phonologically. In other areas of orthography, this influence of the first language is not measurable or not to the same extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim This paper explores the experiences of older German Australians, with a focus on their support needs and preferences in later life. Methods Data were collected through qualitative semi-structured interviews. Data analysis incorporated a systematic concept matrix approach to content analysis. Results The findings of the study indicate that older German Australians have adapted well to the Australian way of life. Their high English language proficiency allowed them to source services without the barrier of language often reported in studies of older migrants. They did not show high interest in ethno-specific services. Conclusion Few studies have been conducted on older German Australians, and none focuses specifically on their experience of ageing in Australia. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on older migrants and, specifically, on those for whom language is not necessarily a major obstacle to obtaining aged care information or services. [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]

This paper presents results of contrastive research of phraseological neologisms in German and Ukrainian. The research aimed at a conceptual analysis of phraseological neologisms used in digital media during the coronavirus pandemic in Germany and Ukraine. It was conducted in two steps: the description of structural-semantic features of selected phraseological units in both languages, and, by contrasting them to existing neologisms, the determination of their equivalence types. The material basis is formed with 96 German and 60 Ukrainian phraseological neologisms from the years 2020-2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the prosody of rhetorical questions (RQs) and information-seeking questions (ISQs) in German for two question types—polar questions and constituent questions (henceforth " wh -questions"). The results are as follows: Phonologically, polar RQs were mainly realized with H-% (high plateau), while polar ISQs mostly ended in H-^H% (high-rise). Wh -RQs almost exclusively terminated in a low edge tone, whereas wh -ISQs allowed for more tonal variation (L-%, L-H%, H-^H%). Irrespective of question type, RQs were mainly produced with L*+H accents. Phonetically, RQs were more often realized with breathy voice quality than ISQs, in particular in the beginning of the interrogative. Furthermore, they were produced with longer constituent durations than ISQs, in particular at the end of the interrogative. While the difference between RQs and ISQs is reflected in the intonational terminus of the utterance, this does not happen in the way suggested in the semantic literature, and in addition, accent type and phonetic parameters also play a role. Crucially, a simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is insufficient to capture the realization of the different illocution types (RQs, ISQs), against frequent claims in the semantic and pragmatic literature. We suggest alternative ways to interpret the findings. [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]

In two paper-and-pencil studies on university students and trainees, we studied how general language competence and the motivation to use accurate language are linked to people’s actual and potential gender-fair language use. Overall, participants’ actual gender-fair language use was lower than their potential. The higher the participants’ language competence, the higher their potential. Trainees’ actual gender-fair language use was predicted by the interaction of language competence and motivation to use accurate language, those with relatively high language competence used less gender-fair language the higher their motivation to use accurate language was. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the experience of parsing other five, sensibly different, Romanian, French, and German largest dictionaries, to DMLRL (Dictionary of Modern Literary Russian Language) [18], using the optimal and portable parsing method of SCD (Segmentation-Cohesion-Dependency) configurations [7], [11], [15]. The purpose of the present paper is to elaborate the lexicographic modeling of DMLRL, which necessarily precedes the sense tree parsing dictionary entries. The following three SCD configurations are described: the first one has to separate the lexicographic segments in a DMLRL entry, the second SCD-configuration concentrates on the SCD marker classes and their hypergraph hierarchy for DMLRL primary and secondary senses, while the third SCD configuration hands down the same modeling process to the atomic sense definitions and their examples-to-definitions. The dependency hypergraph of the third SCD configuration, interconnected to the one of the second SCD configuration, is specified completely at the atomic sense level for the first time, exceeding the SCD configuration modeling for other five dictionaries [15], [14]. Numerous examples from DMLRL and comparison to DLR-DAR Romanian thesaurusdictionary support the proposed DMLRL lexicographic modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Perception of lexical stress is affected by pitch accent type. • F0 peaks temporarily render genuinely unstressed syllables metrically strong. • Stress identification and word recognition are impeded in case of peak-stress-misalignment. • Weighting of f0 peak as stress cue can be modulated by exposure phase. • A potential mechanism is the frequent association between f0 peak and stress. In intonation languages, pitch accents are associated with stressed syllables, therefore accentuation is a sufficient cue to the position of metrical stress in perception. This paper investigates how stress perception in German is affected by different pitch accent types (with different f0 alignments). Experiment 1 showed more errors in stress identification when f0 peaks and stressed syllables were not aligned – despite phonological association of pitch accent and stressed syllable. Erroneous responses revealed a response bias towards the syllable with the f0 peak. In a visual-world eye-tracking study (Experiment 2), listeners fixated a stress competitor with initial stress more when the spoken target, which had penultimate stress, was realized with an early-peak accent (f0 peak preceding stressed syllable), compared to a condition with the f0 peak on the stressed syllable. Hence, high-pitched unstressed syllables are temporarily interpreted as stressed – a process directly affecting lexical activation. To investigate whether this stress competitor activation is guided by the frequent co-occurrence of high f0 and lexical stress, Experiment 3 increased the frequency of low-pitched stressed syllables in the immediate input. The effect of intonation on competitor fixations disappeared. Our findings are discussed with respect to a frequency-based mechanism and their implications for the nature of f0 processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article reports the findings of a 2003 study involving 526 Hong Kong tertiary students, aiming to explore their motivation towards the learning of English, Putonghua and a chosen third language (French, German or Japanese). Based on Dörnyei’s and Csizér’s (2002) work [Dörnyei, Z., Csizér, K., 2002. Some dynamics of language attitudes and motivation: results of a nationwide survey. Applied Linguistics 23 (4), 421–462] on varying motivation towards different foreign languages among Hungarian school children, this study used an amended version of their questionnaire to examine possible varying motivation among Hong Kong respondents. Follow-up focus group interviews were also conducted; however, this paper focuses on the quantitative phase of the study. The results reveal quite distinct patterns of motivation towards the various languages, with the compulsory languages, English and Putonghua, being perceived as having a greater instrumental value than the chosen languages; but with English and the chosen languages being regarded more positively than Putonghua in affective terms. The paper describes these patterns, discusses the variables underlying them with suggested explanations from both inside and outside the socio-linguistic context of Hong Kong, and raises possible pedagogic implications. It also highlights similarities and differences between the findings of this study and those of Dörnyei and Csizér in a bid to contribute to the debate on models of motivation for L2 learning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Language is both a divisive and a unifying force in Brussels. Historically predominantly Dutch-speaking, surrounded by the officially Dutch-speaking federal state of Flanders, located in a majority Dutch-speaking nation-state, and with the majority of its Belgian citizens Francophone, Brussels has officially been bilingual Dutch-French since 1962. This paper reports the results of a survey undertaken to uncover the actual language usage and preferences in the Belgian capital. It shows that in a society where old divisions and sensitivities between French and Dutch speakers persist, English has emerged as the 'neutral third party'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals can vary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic embeddings among three different groups of Turkish-German bilinguals. The approach of the present paper is new in that different groups of bilinguals are compared with each other, and not only with monolingual speakers, as is common in most studies in the field. The analysis focuses on differences in the use of embeddings in Turkish, which are generally considered to be one of the more complex aspects of Turkish grammar. The study shows that young Turkish-German bilingual adults who were born and raised in Germany use fewer, and less complex embeddings than Turkish-German bilingual returnees who had lived in Turkey for eight years at the time of recording. The present study provides new insights in the nature of bilingual competence, as well as a new perspective on syntactic change in immigrant Turkish as spoken in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post-war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio-political discourses as well as in long-term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the socio-political changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio-political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of investigations into the historical development and status of academic prose have found that many national languages lose both prestige and distribution as a medium of expression in the sciences, while English progressively develops into the lingua franca of science. The investigation presented in this paper starts from the assumption that the status of English as a global lingua franca not only replaces the use of other languages but that the prestige associated with English styles of scientific writing can also influence text production in other languages in the sense that indigenous language- and culture-specific communicative conventions are superseded by the conventions operative in comparable English texts. Taking the example of macrosyntactic conjunction with and and und in English and German popular scientific texts, this article addresses the question of whether German communicative conventions are adapted to English communicative styles such that language-specific strategies of information organization in German change in the direction of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the German-speaking regions of Switzerland, dialect is spoken by all social groups in most communicative situations, Standard German being used only when prescribed. Swiss dialects rarely appeared in written form before the 1980s, apart from the genre of dialect literature. Due to the growing acceptance of informal writing styles in many European languages, dialect is increasingly employed for written personal communication, in particular in computer-mediated communication (CMC). In Swiss Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms, varieties of German are used side by side as all chatters have a command of both standard and dialectal varieties. Depending on the channel, the proportion of dialectal contributions can be as high as 90 percent. The choice of a particular variety depends on both individual preference and on the predominant variety used within a specific thread. In this paper I take a quantitative approach to language variation in IRC and demonstrate how such an approach can help embed qualitative research on code-switching in CMC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topic-comment structures are an important ingredient of the grammars of languages that are not normally thought of as topic-prominent or discourse-configurational. This paper presents an integrated topic-comment approach to a subtype of specificational pseudo-clefts and three constructions generally grouped under the rubric of relative clause constructions: ‘subject contact relatives’ in dialects of English, ‘V2 relatives’ in Dutch and German, and extraposed relative clauses. All are argued to have a syntactic structure in which the first clause is the topic, occupying the specifier position of a TopP whose head takes the second clause, the comment, as its complement. The restrictive or specificational relationship between the second clause and the focus of the first clause, common to all the constructions discussed under the rubric of topic-comment structures in this paper, is shown to be the interpretive reflex of the fact that the second clause is introduced as the complement of the abstract head ‘Top0&rsquo, and is thereby earmarked as a comment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to recent work examining the role of identity, and in particular the uses of language for self-presentation and the expression of individual identity, through the analysis of two sociolinguistic interviews from a community of German origin in southern Brazil. Drawing from a quantitative study of variation in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, we conducted a detailed analysis of the interviews of two women of different ages and social backgrounds. We first describe the social, cultural and historical context of the interviews, and then discuss how our two speakers use their linguistic resources to express varied, and at times conflicting, aspects of their identities. More specifically, we show how our participants seem to maintain certain in-group, German-linked features, yet also use out-group or Brazilian features in order to index both the(local) German and(regional) Brazilian aspects of their identities. Our data and analysis highlight how participants’ identity and language use patterns can be better understood through close analysis of the content of their discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the translation of sociolinguistic variation by examining the ways that African American English(AAE) is dubbed into German. In discussing this ubiquitous yet poorly studied area of language use, I show that ideas about language as an index to social groupings are transferable to the degree that the ideas overlap in the cultures in question. In the case of German, if the character being dubbed is young, male and tied to the street cultures of the urban inner city, then AAE is dubbed using a form of German that has links to the urban youth cultures of north-central Germany. The transferability of sociolinguistic variation is important to issues related to cross-cultural communication and the ideologies that may play a role in the outcomes of that communication as well as to linguistic creativity and language style more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the wh-copying phenomenon that is attested in a number of languages including German, Frisian, Afrikaans, and Romani, in the context of Chomsky''s (Chomsky, N., 1998. Minimalist inquiries: the framework. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 15. MITWPL, Cambridge, MA) phase-based approach to syntactic derivation. Wh-copying is traditionally thought to provide strong evidence for the successive-cyclic nature of wh-movement. Besides the more general problem of how intermediate movement steps are formally triggered, however, the wh-copying phenomenon raises the questions of what grammatical condition or conditions should permit (or possibly, force) the phonetic realisation of intermediate wh-copies, why the spelling-out of locally uninterpretable copies of a wh-operator does not cause the derivation to crash at the phase level, and to what extent their presence poses a problem for the principle of Full Interpretation and for Kayne''s (Kayne, R., 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Linear Correspondence Axiom. It is shown that an analysis of wh-copying in terms of the discontinuous spelling-out of a wh-expression''s ‘operator’ and ‘core’ parts, in conjunction with a convergence-based view of phases, not only helps provide answers to the above questions, but also accounts for some otherwise difficult-to-explain restrictions on wh-copying. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study investigated to what extent teacher and peer feedback promote L2 lexical stress perception skills and how gains are maintained over time. Eighty-two participants from 11 sections of first-year German courses at three universities were assigned to a teacher feedback group, a peer feedback provider group, a peer feedback receiver group, or a control group. After completing a pronunciation training on word stress in German–English cognates, the teacher group received feedback on their pronunciation from a teacher, the provider group gave feedback to peers, and the receiver group received feedback from peers. The control group did not complete the pronunciation training or receive feedback. Results comparing learners' pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest perception accuracy revealed that the teacher group and the provider group made significant gains in terms of their ability to perceive word stress in cognates, whereas the receiver group and the control group showed no improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to examine what kind of universals and parameters exist in Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), conducting a comparative study between Korean and German. First, we show that complements allowing MCP reveal a structural ambiguity between root or subordinating clauses, which implies that these cases of semi-Roots are only an optional operation in Korean. Second, we discuss the typology of MCP with respect to true Roots and semi-Roots in Korean. Third, we discuss three semantic properties of MCP in Korean: (i) non-presupposition is a prerequisite in triggering MCP, supporting earlier accounts; (ii) the (non-)presuppositional property reflected in complementizer selection precisely patterns with the (non-)factivity of matrix predicates; and (iii) various semantic–pragmatic sources for MCP such as illocutionary forces, expressive/emotional attitude, mirative evidentials, (anti)honorification, and mood choice in Korean are identified. Fourth, we show that Korean complements with MCP and German V2 constructions exhibit striking parallels in terms of distribution, which implies that MCP in these typologically unrelated languages can be captured by a single principle. Finally, we propose a unified account for the syntax of true Roots, semi-Roots, and non-Roots, building on Wurmbrand's (2012, 2014) timing-of-Merge account. This dynamic syntax allows us to capture the crosslinguistic variation such as structural ambiguity of MCP constructions in Korean and the mismatches between syntactic and LF/PF properties in V2 in German. The current analysis has important consequences: First, this study has empirical confirmation that the types of MCP-trigger must be extended to comprise the newly identified cases in Korean. Second, the structural ambiguity for MCP constructions in Korean gives us the generalization that MCP operate on syntax, even though they are semantically or pragmatically motivated. Finally, the comparative analysis of genetically distant languages opens the possibility to provide a principled account of the MCP-activating force heads across languages, incorporating the empirical findings of prior research on individual factors such as emotional attitude, evidentiality, or mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims at adding to the studies of Typological Linguistics, Contrastive Linguistics, and Acquisitional Linguistics, contributing, at the same time, to the debate on the relationship between language and cognition both in mother tongue and foreign language. The main objective is the analysis of the conceptualisation of dynamic space in Italian L1, German L1 and Italian L2 of German-speaking learners living in Germany. So, the study aims to analyse the spatial conceptualisation in the oral expression of three groups of informants: Italian speakers in L1, German speakers in L1 and German speakers in Italian L2. The main objectives of the contribution are: 1. typological, because the aim is to identify the type of behaviour of Italophones and Germanophones in relation to the conceptualisation of dynamic space, with reference to the classification of world languages initially proposed by Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000) and refined by Slobin (1996, 2004, 2006); 2. contrastive, as the two languages are compared, highlighting their similar features and especially their divergent ones; 3. acquisitional, as special attention is paid to the linguistic productions of German-speaking learners in Italian L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the degree of language balance in three groups of bilingual speakers of Portuguese and German: a group of Portuguese heritage speakers (HSs) living in Germany, another who returned to Portugal, and Portuguese late learners of German L2. Based on the DIALANG vocabulary size placement test, applied in German and in Portuguese, and on extralinguistic variables extracted from a background questionnaire, the results confirm high degrees of unbalanced language dominance favoring the societal language (SL) in HSs without the experience of return, and a leveling of language dominance in returnees. Language balance in returnees is the consequence of some loss of proficiency in the former SL (German) and reactivation of the heritage language (Portuguese). Current relative amount of contact with the two languages is correlated with language dominance only in the HSs and the late L2 speaker groups, whereas age of return and length of residence in Portugal explain language dominance in returnees. Self-reported proficiency is also predictive of language dominance and may be taken as complementary indicator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]