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Proverbs (as Time is money) are conventionalized expressions that are "equivalent to a sentence" and "express generalized experiences or value judgements" (Steyer 2015: 209-210). This study aims at describing the lexical structure of the proverb inventory and at identifying 'proverbial keywords' which may be assumed to play an important role in storing proverbs in the mind (Lückert 2018). A database of American English proverbs was compiled and content words were tested for their contextual predictability (with COCA as 'normative corpus' using a 'goodness-of-fit' test). The results suggest that 59.4 % of the word lemmas are significantly over-represented in the proverb corpus (i.e. 'keywords'). This finding underpins the assumption that a considerable number of words are strongly associated with the proverb as a category. In the experimental part of the project it was tested whether the 'keywords' differ in how well they contribute to a strengthened memory representation of proverbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of this paper is a particular idiom category. It deals with idioms that contain determinative compounds of a special kind. The first element of the compound points to the figurative meaning of the idiom, while the second element is a part of the source concept of the metaphor and thus interacts with the literal meaning. An appropriate apparatus for describing idioms of this category is provided by the Conceptual Blending Theory. It is shown that, apart from metaphorization processes, the blending of mental spaces plays a significant part in bringing about the figurative meaning of the idioms. At the same time, the paper supports the recently discussed hypothesis that phrasemes can be constructed according to certain patterns as recurrent form-meaning pairs. Therefore, the paper contributes to Construction Grammar as well as to Blending Theory and clarifies some aspects of idiom semantics and motivation.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, the majority of native or near-native speakers of a certain language can easily identify a sentence as a proverb. They are able to do this due to different structural features, among others. These specific syntactic structures appear quite frequently in proverbs and serve as a warning sign that the particular text is deviant from the surrounding discourse and is, most probably, a proverb. The so-called proverbial formulae, e.g. Better X, than Y; When you X (you) Y; No X, no Y etc., are considered to be one of the most easily recognizable proverbial characteristics. They often serve as basic syntactic models and lend themselves readily for the insertion of new contents (cf. Taylor 1985: 16). In his study Structural Aspects of Proverbs, Mac Coinnigh has shown that proverbs from different languages, for instance English, Estonian, Finnish, German and Swedish, share the same or a very similar syntactic architecture (Mac Coinnigh 2015: 117-120). The Irish linguist, however, did not consider examples from the Bulgarian language. Therefore, one of the main aims of the present paper is to investigate which of the structural models recorded in previous paremiological works (Kuusi 1987 (1966); Rohrich and Mieder 1977; Permjakov 1979; Mieder 2006a and 2012 etc.) can be identified in traditional Bulgarian proverbs and in what frequency. Moreover, the study intends to test the widespread hypothesis that humorous proverb innovations and variations (anti-proverbs) are often created based on proverbial formulae (Litovkina 2015: 333). For the purposes of the study, two corpora of 649 proverbs and 370 anti- proverbs were analyzed. The corpora have been previously built by Hrisztova- Gotthardt and Gotthardt (Hrisztova-Gotthardt 2006 and 2010b; Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Gotthardt 2011 and 2012). The qualitative analysis has shown that 14 out of the 16 structural formulae listed by Rohrich and Mieder (1977) and Mieder (2006a and 2012) can be found in Bulgarian proverbs. The most common formula was He who Xs, Ys, serving as a syntactic model for 48 different commonly used proverbs. In case of anti-proverbs, the present structural model could be clearly identified in 30 out of 370 texts. The most prominent formulae were He who Xs, Ys, X is Y and Better X than Y. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will first present the current state of research regarding stereotypes and ideas of Germans and Danes about each other. This paper will then display research approaches of the SMiK-project. In the second half of the paper, the results of the questionnaire survey "Typically German - typically Danish" which reveal current German-Danish stereotypes will be presented. Last but not least, this paper includes a study of stereotypes that are used on German-Danish internet platforms and, thus, offer insights into chosen aspects of the linguistic analyses of the SMiK-project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Riemer, Heiko / Förster, Frank / Herb, Michael / Pöllath, Nadja (Hg.): Desert animals in the eastern Sahara: Status, economic significance, and cultural reflection in antiquity (Bespr. von Hartwig Altenmüller, Hamburg, E-Mail: altenmueller@uni-hamburg.de) Stefanović, Danijela: The Holders of Regular Military Titles in the Period of the Middle Kingdom: Dossiers (Bespr. von Uroš Matić, Münster, E-Mail: urosmatic@uni-muenster.de) Hasznos, Andrea: Graeco-Coptica. Greek and Coptic Clause Patterns (Bespr. von Ines Köhler, Leipzig, E-Mail: inko@zedat.fu-berlin.de) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a discourse-based approach that examines the history of Germanisms in British newspapers as of 2013. It compares a langue-based approach that focuses on the lexicological analysis and lexicographical documentation of Germanisms and parole-based approach that focuses on pragmatics of borrowed items and their functions in English texts and mentions that the discourse approach is based on both the approaches. Also outlined are cognitive approaches to lexical borrowing.

Two developments in computational text analysis may change the way qualitative data analysis in social sciences is performed: 1. the availability of digital text worth to investigate is growing rapidly, and 2. the improvement of algorithmic information extraction approaches, also called text mining, allows for further bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative text analysis. The key factor hereby is the inclusion of context into computational linguistic models which extends conventional computational content analysis towards the extraction of meaning. To clarify methodological differences of various computer-assisted text analysis approaches the article suggests a typology from the perspective of a qualitative researcher. This typology shows compatibilities between manual qualitative data analysis methods and computational, rather quantitative approaches for large scale mixed method text analysis designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study 1, a dictionary analysis of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish VP idioms, shows that there is a general trend for these idioms to pick their nouns from among the most frequent body-part nouns. Thus, the same overall cognitive domains tend to be favored in the lexical resources for idiomatic and non-idiomatic language. In Study 2 we used corpora to test the degree of literal versus non-literal use, in terms of textual frequency, of the three most idiom-prone nouns in the five languages, viz., 'hand', 'head' and 'eye'. Moreover, as text genres are expected to differ in their use of literal versus non-literal senses of words, two text types were pitted against each other, viz., fiction and newspaper language, entertaining the hypothesis that fiction would be more non-literal than newspaper texts. The reverse turned out to be the case. We explain the higher degree of non-literal (mostly metaphorical) use of 'hand', 'head' and 'eye' with the notion that in fiction the authors describe a world constructed in situ, while newspaper writers interpret the world already shared by them and their readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagrams are used to make complex relationships and proportions visually clear. Their underlying semiotic structure and their potential to generate an understanding of the complex phenomena they are referring to turn diagrams into distinctive media of representation and are the focus of a current debate in philosophy and cultural theory. Under the heading of 'diagrammatics' (Diagrammatik) or 'diagrammatology' (Diagrammatologie), the schematic iconicity (abstractivity) and the operational character (operativity) of diagrammatic reasoning - both central insights in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic philosophy - are promoted in the debate as key concepts for cultural analysis. The paper outlines the discussion and draws on these two central concepts to argue that visual shape is a constitutive dimension of textuality. Written texts, even purely 'verbal' ones, are not only designed to be read, but can always be interpreted - or 'seen' - in terms of spatial relationships on a page: the shapes of lines and paragraphs often suffice to identify the genre of a text before a single word is read. But serving on their own as contextualisation cues is merely a side effect of the functions that the visual relationships of verbal parts have within a text: these relationships primarily allow for a flexible form of coherence and help readers navigate their way through complex texts. The paper shows how a diagrammatically informed pragmatic analysis can account for these functions, which have rarely been addressed within the linguistics of written discourse so far and are largely overlooked by both recent typographic and multimodal approaches alike. The paper concludes by outlining three key areas for future research: (1) the relationships between verbal and visual units on the page (or the screen), (2) the pragmatics of lists and tables as prototypes of diagrammatically structured text-parts; and (3) the diagrammatic character of epistemic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the lateral and nonliteral meaning in placename idioms through a discussion on idioms of the form be/come from X-place, a placename containing an adjectival or verbal root. It considers the constructional properties of placename idioms as well as the aspects of their distribution by the use of examples from the web. Also discussed is verbs involved, syntactic flexibility, and status of their individual-level predicates.

Political linguistics is underrepresented in contemporary linguistics research for different reasons. In this article, the author outlines how discourse theory and computational linguistics can be applied to political linguistics to make it more relevant again to both linguistics community and the public. To that end, findings concerning the language use of the political parties in the German Bundestag between 2005 and 2009 are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Spotting, Collecting, and Documenting Negative Polarity Items" that was published in a 2010 issue is presented.