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Die Beitrage beschaftigen sich dem Grammatikunterricht an der Schnittstelle von Fachwissenschaft und Fachdidaktik. Arbeiten und Forschungsergebnisse ausgewiesener internationaler Experten werden zusammengefuhrt, die sich dem Spannungsfeld zwischen der Grammatik des Deutschen und ihrer Vermittlung in Lehr-Lern-Diskursen widmen. Die Beitrage reflektieren sowohl Ergebnisse aus empirischen Einzeluntersuchungen als auch zu kontrovers diskutierten theoretischen Themenkomplexen und hinterfragen aktuelle grammatische Ansatze, Forschungsergebnisse und Konzeptionen im Hinblick auf ihre moegliche Anwendung im schulischen oder universitaren Kontext. Damit sollen neue Impulse fur eine sowohl empirisch als auch theoretisch fundierte Reflexion des Grammatikunterrichts gegeben werden. Der Band enthalt Beitrage zu folgenden Themen: Grammatikunterricht und Varietatenlinguistik, Gegenwartsgrammatik im Spannungsfeld von Diachronie und Synchronie, emergente Grammatik und grammatische "Fehler", grammatische Varianten zwischen Norm und Usus, sprachliche Zweifelsfalle als Ausgangspunkt unterrichtlicher Reflexion uber Sprache, grammatische Prototypen, didaktische Potentiale einer Grammatik von Nahe und Distanz, kognitive Prozesse im Grammatikerwerb.

1. List of contributors 2. Introduction. The construction of meaning in language (by Radden, Gunter) 3. Part I: Metonymy and metaphor 4. Experiential tests of figurative meaning construction (by Gibbs, Jr., Raymond W.) 5. High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction (by Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez, Francisco Jose) 6. The role of metonymy in meaning construction at discourse level: A case study (by Barcelona, Antonio) 7. Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar: A cross-linguistic perspective on body-part terms (by Hilpert, Martin) 8. Arguing the case against coercion (by Ziegeler, Debra) 9. When Zidane is not simply Zidane, and Bill Gates is not just Bill Gates: Some thoughts on the construction of metaphtonymic meanings of proper names (by Brdar, Mario) 10. Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation (by Stefanowitsch, Anatol) 11. Part II: Mental spaces and conceptual blending 12. Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns (by Langacker, Ronald W.) 13. The construction of meaning in relative clauses: Indeterminacy and constraints (by Nikiforidou, Kiki) 14. Constraints on inferential constructions (by Koops, Christian) 15. The construction of vagueness: "Sort-of" expressions in Romance languages (by Mihatsch, Wiltrud) 16. Communication or memory mismatch?: Towards a cognitive typology of questions (by Schulze, Wolfgang) 17. Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans: Variety-specifc meaning construction in the into-causative (by Wulff, Stefanie) 18. Index of authors 19. Index of subjects 20. Index of metonymies and metaphors

The interpretation of empty elements, i.e. signs that have no phonetic realization, constitutes a "classical" problem in modern linguistics. Null elements have been postulated on various levels of the linguistic system and its pragmatic use, in particular, in morphology and syntax. An adequate theory of discourse comprehension also requires an account of what is not said but only conversationally implicated. In the last thirty years the interpretation of empty subjects in non-finite clauses, which is known as the "control problem", has attracted the attention of many formal syntacticians. It has however become increasingly clear that the interpretation of such empty elements is only minimally guided by syntactic principles; in addition, a number of semantic and pragmatic factors have to be taken into consideration. The aim of our contribution is to sketch a cognitively based theory of "obligatory" control that explains how general control principles interact with language-specific coding devices. We focus on German data; we surmise, however, that they also hold for other languages. In particular, we aim at elucidating the interplay of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information in the comprehension of empty subjects in non-finite complement clauses. Using German and, to a lesser extent, English examples, we will demonstrate that the control principles we postulate account for numerous control verbs and control verb classes.

This article contributes to a debate in the linguistic and psychological literature that centres around the representation of morphologically complex words in the grammar and in the lexicon. The issue is whether inflectional morphology is rule-based (i.e. symbolically represented), or whether the assumption of pattern association is more adequate to account for the facts. On the basis of the analysis of acquisitional data the article strongly argues for the latter alternative. In a classic experiment that helped shape the development of acquisition theory Berko (1958) reported substantial support for item-and-process rules in the acquisition of plural morphology in English. A large part of her results were zero responses (repetition of the stimulus). A reinterpretation of these zero responses in light of schema theory and the cue strength hypothesis shows a striking departure from randomness. Berko's subjects tended to repeat stimuli just to the extent that these already resembled a plural schema. A reinterpretation of data reported in Innes (1974) achieved compatible results. This data set is far more extensive than Berko's and is used in the present study to put the schema model to a more stringent test. A reinterpretation of a parallel experiment with German children, using the cue strength analysis of the more complex plural morphology of German yielded parallel results. Finally, natural acquisitional data obtained from seven German speaking children aged between 2;1 and 2;9 are analysed. Again, strong support is found for the schema model. It is suggested that a schema-learning mechanism may underlie the acquisition of morphology, even when the end product of the learning process involves item-and-process rules, as in the case of English plural formation. In a schema-learning model, the child builds schematic representations for possible singular and plural lexical items as whole gestalts, and attempts to map concrete forms onto these schemata in deciding whether the forms have singular or plural value.

The aim of the paper is to develop a uniform semantic-pragmatic theory of Controller choice for a numbei of German and English subject control verbs like promise/versprechen and object contiol verbs like request/bitten, recommend/empfehlen, force/zwingen, etc., which prototypically require a complement clause denoting an action performed by a human agent, who is left unexpiessed in the Infinitive clause (PRO). We propose the concept of Semanticpragmatic role* to account for a number of control phenomena which have hitherto been treated äs exceptions. We show that Controller choice and control switch heavily depend on two semanticpragmatic factors, i.e. 'degree of agentivity of PRO9 and 'role identity of a matrix N P and PRO9. Furthermore, at least in English, 'iconicity', i.e. the reflection of referential identity in formal closeness, plays an Import an t role. Our analysis is based on two experiments conducted with 35 native Speakers of German and 28 native Speakers of American English.

Gender has traditionally been cited as a paradigm instance of the arbitrariness of language. This paper builds on previous evidence provided by the authors showing that gender classification is not arbitrary in German, but rather forms a complex system based on phonetic and semantic organizing principles. Within the affect lexicon a set of compounds formed with the last member - mut is first experimentally evaluated and shown to have masc -gender or fem -gender assignment depending on the affective Extroversion or Introversion of the noun. The resulting classification is then applied to nouns with the derivational suffix - nis , which are shown to have a strong association between fem -gender and Introverted affect. Following this the classification is applied to a thorough sample of 177 affect nouns drawn from the entire lexicon. Here there is also shown to be a strong association between masc -gender and Extroverted affect, and between fem -gender and Introverted affect. An additional group of fem -gender nouns expressing arousal is uncovered. Thus the distribution of gender in the general affective lexicon supports the experimental results based on mut -compounds. Finally, historical evidence shows that (a) a number of nouns have undergone formal or semantic changes, and (b) a number of borrowed or newly coined nouns have received gender assignments in accordance with the hypothesized affect classification. It is concluded that the semantic organization of gender in the affective lexicon has a prototype structure as depicted e.g. by Rosch (1977).

The ordering of subject and object, especially in the so-called clause "middle-field," is a perennial problem both for the grammar of German, and for syntactic theories of linearization. While formalist accounts (e.g. Engel, 1977) and semantic accounts (e.g. Lerenz, 1977a) have made valuable contributions to an understanding of S/O order, their monocausal approaches have only limited descriptive adequacy. This paper presents evidence that the ordering of S and O in the clause middle-field in German results from the interaction of multiple cognitive performance factors: agency, animacy, situational definiteness, and contextual givenness.

In a structural theory of morphology based on an ‘Item-and-Process’ model the plural marking system of German appears to be a complex series of unmotivated rules and lists of exceptions. Experimental data show that at a general level adult speakers of German make use of certain tendencies in the existing nominal lexicon when asked to assign the plural to nonce words. However, on a specific level subjects deviate substantially from existing patterns in the lexicon. These deviations are accounted for by a psychological model of the ‘cue strength’ of specific morphemes based on their salience frequency, and cue validity, and a process of plural schema matching. Additional support for the plural schema approach is drawn from plural assignment to recent loanwords and from historical changes in the plural marking system of German.

In German, the apodosis of conditional sentences may be syntacticized as either VS (integrative word order) or TOP-V (non-integrative word order). In this article, we attempt to provide a semantically and pragmatically based explanation for this syntactic variation. We shall demonstrate that the speaker's communicative intentions correlate with the word order in the apodosis. In general, ‘content conditionality’ is syntacticized through VS-order in the apodosis, whereas ‘relevance conditionality’ corresponds to TOP-V-order in the consequent clause. However, this tendency is overridden by two principles which we term ego involvement and speaker's degree of certainty. In those cases in which the speaker of a content conditional intends to convey a strong ego involvement, s/he will resort to TOP-V; conversely, a relevance conditional may be grammaticalized as VS if the speaker wishes to communicate that the content of the apodosis does not constitute an item of factual knowledge, but rather his/her personal opinion about the truth of some proposition.