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Native speakers deal with their phonological system without any knowledge of a lost contrast. To avoid neutralisations, speakers can only make use of their present phonological system of contrasts. Speakers of Old Alemannic (the dialect of Notker der Deutsche) had no contrast in voicing or fortis/lenis after the Second Consonant Shift had reduced the pre-OHG voiceless stops to fricatives and affricates. They had instead a quantity contrast, which they utilised to distinguish between an old coronal stop and a new one developed from *þ, thereby introducing a word-initial contrast only in coronal stops. This contrast was again later extended to other places of articulation through generations while adapting loans from donor languages which had a contrast in voicing. No new contrast was added due to loans. As a result, modern Alemannic dialects such as Thurgovian have a quantity contrast in stops in all positions of a word.

This article argues against the romantic notion that barbarian peoples organized themselves around internal identities which persisted essentially unchanged over centuries. The Alemanni comprised an amalgam of constituent groups whose identities and behaviour fluctuated according to situation and context. This loose association of groups was transformed into a more cohesively organized gentile configuration during the migration period, when Alemannic and Suebic elements formed a common Alemannic identity.

Objectives: This qualitative study examines the association between the somatic culture of heterosexual men and their choice of a protection strategy against HIV/Aids. Methods: Verbal data was generated in 23 specific interviews with Swiss German men in the age between 25 and 65 years. The analysis was based on an integration of open coding and documentary interpretation. Contrasting and systematic comparison of the cases led to a classification into types, on the basis of which the major research question could be examined. Results: The study identifies four different types of somatic cultures and demonstrates that they are highly relevant for the choice of a protection strategy against HIV/Aids. Conclusions: By introducing the concept of somatic culture as a explanatory factor, this study represents an important addition to the socio-cognitive models of protection and risk behaviour in HIV/Aids. It contributes to a theoretically broader understanding and better targeted prevention for heterosexual men.

In this study, genetic and non-genetic effects on behavioural traits were estimated, based on records of the field behaviour test of the Swiss German Shepherd Dog breeding club. This standardized test has been applied since 1949 and comprised the following seven traits: self-confidence, nerve stability, temperament, hardness, sharpness, defence drive and fighting drive. The analyses were based on the test results of 3497 German Shepherds between 1978 and 2000. Gender, age, judge and kennel had significant effects on all behaviour traits. The heritabilities were calculated using three different methods and ranged between 0.09 and 0.24, with a standard error varying between 0.04 and 0.06. Phenotypic correlations among the traits lay between 0.28 and 0.94, the genetic correlations between 0.34 and 1.0. No significant correlations between hip dysplasia scores and the behavioural traits were found (−0.04 to 0.01). The modest genetic improvement over the last 25 years in the studbook population of the German Shepherd dog (GSD) was due to the low heritabilities of the behaviour traits, but mainly because of the low selection intensities after the test (only 8% failed). Some recommendations were made to improve the test and selection response.

Two experiments examined the commonly held belief that regional varieties of German can be identified by intonational features alone. In both experiments, listeners were presented with regional intonational contours of German. In the first experiment, listeners judged contours of Hamburg urban vernacular compared with contours of Northern Standard German. In the second experiment, listeners judged contours of Berlin urban vernacular compared with contours of both Northern Standard German and Low Alemannic German. The performance of listeners was found to vary with their linguistic experience. Listeners who were familiar both with the local variety and with some nonlocal variety by personal contact performed better than listeners who were familiar with the local variety only. Moreover, also listeners not familiar with Hamburg German and Berlin German, respectively, were found to perform the identification test with some success. This led to the conclusion that overall success rates do not only depend on true recognition of local contours but may additionally be enhanced by using some kind of elimination strategy. A second factor that affected performance was the choice of speaker for generating the carrier utterances. In the first experiment, all carrier utterances were produced by a speaker of Northern Standard German. In the second experiment, two sets of carrier utterances were used. The first set was obtained from a speaker of Northern Standard German and the second set from a speaker of Berlin urban vernacular. As expected, Berlin contours were better identified when presented with an utterance that was produced by a speaker of Berlin urban vernacular. However, no uniform effect was found for the different contours that were ex a mined.

This paper investigates the sociolinguistic choices within a group of children in a Swiss elementary school. Due to the special socio-cultural status of the school, the children belong to non-native families moving in from other parts of Switzerland and Europe. The data show that after a time of about two years, the children use a relatively consistent Swiss German dialect in peer-oriented communication which may be different from the dialect used at home. Variation within this dialect co-varies with the social structure within the school class and not with the parents' speech. Interview data and classroom observations allow inferences about the individual child's possible intentions and motivations which are claimed to shape the linguistic repertoire. The 'model of idiolectal dissonance' provides a typology for the linguistic choices observed. The emerging classroom variety is shaped by ecological factors, by the social interactions within the group, and by internal linguistic constraints.

It is a well-known fact that most of the Germanic languages can use modal verbs with non-verbal complements. In the present paper I will focus on modals with directional PPs such as the German Ich muss nach hause (I must home). There are two ways to analyze such constructions. Either we say that the modal can (also) be used as a main verb, in which case it can have a complete theta-structure, a full-blown subcategorization frame (e.g., Barbiers (1995)), or we say that, among the verbal complements the modal verb can combine with, there is a super-light motion verb [e]GO. Swiss German presents us with two incontrovertible arguments to the effect that there has to be an empty GO. The first, due to J. Hoekstra (1997), is based on the distribution of PPs in verbal clusters. A second argument comes from Verb Doubling. Dutch and German differ from Swiss German in this respect. It is tempting to assume that these languages lack the empty GO. However, West Flemish confronts us with a paradox: according to one argument it must have empty GO, according to the other argument it must lack it. The only way in which the paradox can be resolved, it is argued, is to assume that all varieties (there are relevant additional data from Afrikaans, Alsatian, German, Frisian, and Luxemburgish) have the phonetically empty super-light motion verb GO but that the variation is due to a 'Pure Parameter'. This parameter, the Projection Parameter, is argued to regulate the licensing of empty light motion verbs as well as the occurrence of Verb (Projection) Raising.

Traditional data collection methods in dialectology have difficulty in gathering sufficient quantities of data from a sufficient range of localities to map phonetic variation at a national scale. By contrast, online surveys, whether browser-based or in the form of smartphone apps, allow researchers to gather much larger quantities of data very quickly. We present results from data collected through such smartphone apps for 100K + speakers of British English, German, and Swiss German. Our apps ask users a set of questions about their language use—such as do they pronounce the 'u' in ‘butter’ as /ʌ/ or /ʊ/ (eliciting the FOOT-STRUT split)—and uses their responses to predict their locality of origin. When selecting their regional variant, users essentially perform a perception task, as they listen to pre-recorded items to make their decision. Using this data we can perform analyses of language change, comparing contemporary data with historical surveys, such as the Survey of English Dialects form the 1950s. ...

Previous research suggests that the broad-band amplitude envelope (ENV) of speech is crucial for the perception of speech rate and timing. The present experiment tested this claim using non-manipulated and spectrally rotated speech (rotated around 2.5 kHz) with a bandwidth of 5 kHz which both contain identical ENV and reversed speech in which the temporal organisation of ENV is distorted. 44 listeners of Swiss German rated perceived speech tempo on a continuous scale reaching from “rather slow” to “rather fast” in 48 stimuli (4 sentences × 4 speakers × 3 signal conditions). Results revealed a significant effect of signal condition. Both reversed and spectrally rotated speech were perceived as significantly faster than clear speech but there was no difference between spectrally rotated and reversed speech. Results were consistent for all sentences and speakers. Results suggest that the intelligibility of the signal plays a higher role in the perception of speech rate than the presence of the ENV.Previous research suggests that the broad-band amplitude envelope (ENV) of speech is crucial for the perception of speech rate and timing. The present experiment tested this claim using non-manipulated and spectrally rotated speech (rotated around 2.5 kHz) with a bandwidth of 5 kHz which both contain identical ENV and reversed speech in which the temporal organisation of ENV is distorted. 44 listeners of Swiss German rated perceived speech tempo on a continuous scale reaching from “rather slow” to “rather fast” in 48 stimuli (4 sentences × 4 speakers × 3 signal conditions). Results revealed a significant effect of signal condition. Both reversed and spectrally rotated speech were perceived as significantly faster than clear speech but there was no difference between spectrally rotated and reversed speech. Results were consistent for all sentences and speakers. Results suggest that the intelligibility of the signal plays a higher role in the perception of speech rate than the presence of the ENV.

1. Aspects of Bavarian syntax (by Grewendorf, Gunther) 2. 1. COMP Phenomena 3. Syntactic and phonological properties of wh-operators and wh-movement in Bavarian (by Bayer, Josef) 4. Complementizer agreement (in Bavarian): Feature inheritance or feature insertion? (by Fuss, Eric) 5. The rise and fall of double agreement: A comparison between Carinthian and Kansas Bukovina Bohemian (by Wratil, Melani) 6. 2. Extraction Phenomena 7. Structures of 'emphatic topicalization' in Bavarian (by Lutz, Uli) 8. Gaps and parasitic gaps in Bavarian (by Grewendorf, Gunther) 9. Observations on relative clauses in Bavarian (by Kallulli, Dalina) 10. 3. Non-clausal Phenomena 11. Really weird subjects. The syntax of family names in Bavarian. (by Weiss, Helmut) 12. Austro-Bavarian directionals: toward a bigger picture (by Gruber, Bettina) 13. IPP-Constructions in Alemannic and Bavarian in comparison (by Schallert, Oliver) 14. 4. The Topography of Southern German Dialects 15. The Upper German differential: main Austrian-Bavarian vs. (High) Alemannic differences (by Abraham, Werner) 16. Index

Walliserdeutsch is a Swiss German dialect spoken in the south west of Switzerland. To investigate the potential of automatic speech processing of Walliserdeutsch, a small database was collected based mainly on broadcast news from a local radio station. Experiments suggest that automatic speech recognition is feasible: use of another (Swiss German) database shows that the small data size lends itself to bootstrapping from other data; use of Kullback-Leibler HMM suggests that phoneme mapping techniques can compensate for a grapheme-based dictionary. Experiments also indicate that statistical machine translation is feasible; the difficulty of small data size is offset by the close proximity to (high) German.

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 287-293

The acquisition of syntax - introduction, Marc-Ariel Friedemann and Luigi Rizzi the acquisition of the DP in German child language, Sonja Eisenbeiss early French postverbal subjects, Marc-Ariel Freidemann split inflection in neurolinguistics, Na'ama Friedmann and Yosef Grodzinsky an excursion into interrogatives in early English and Italian, Maria Teresa Guasti adult null subjects in non pro-drop languages, Liliane Haegeman the acquisition of constitutent questions and the requirements of interpretation, Cornelia Hamann accounting for morphological variation in second language acquistion - truncation or missing inflection? Philippe Prevost and Lydia White null subjects and root infinitives in child grammar of Grench, Lucienne Rasetti remarks on early null subjects, Luigi Rizzi the acquisition of verb placement in Lucernese Swiss German, Manuela Schonenberger.

The Austrian-Swiss-German (ASG) Traveling Fellowship, initiated in 1978, is considered to be the highest distinction within the German-Speaking Orthopedic Associations...

In Swiss German there are three paradigms for the definite determiner: a weak article, a strong article, and a proximal demonstrative. This chapter shows that these three paradigms not only differ with respect to their morphological form, but also with respect to their semantic function and their syntactic structure. It demonstrates that every paradigm has its prototypical semantic function. Like Standard German, Swiss German dialects have a definite determiner with distinct forms marked for gender, number, and case. The chapter argues for a strong correlation between morphology, semantics, and syntax for the three paradigms of definite determiners in Swiss German. It proposes a syntactic structure for the Swiss German noun phrase within the framework of generative grammar, which should explain the distribution of the three paradigms. The chapter concludes that the presented noun phrase structure mirrors the characteristic properties of the three paradigms in Swiss German. Keywords: definite determiner; generative grammar; morphology; semantics; Swiss German; syntax

The paper presents qualitative and quantitative analyses of expressions describing static topological relations in Frisian, Icelandic, and Norwegian (Bokmal), Swiss German, and Standard German. According to the literature, speakers of Germanic languages typically express more than just the bare minimum of spatial relational information when describing spatial scenes. As an example, they can add postural or other manner information as an unmarked choice in their spatial descriptions (the cup stands on the table vs. the cup is on the table). The main focus lies on a detailed description of the modalities and proportions of this additional expression of information on the spatial scene in the five languages. Distributed expression of spatial relational semantics, posture verb usage and resultative constructions are analyzed. Descriptive and inferential methods are used to show the similarities and differences across the five languages, on the level of group tendencies (means), of individual speakers, and of individual stimulus items. The analyses show considerable differences across the languages. Speakers of Standard German and Frisian are most prone to integrate additional manner information into the descriptions, whereas speakers of Icelandic, Norwegian or Swiss German only rarely integrate this kind of information into their spatial descriptions.

This paper describes experiments in detecting and annotating code-switching in a large multilingual diachronic corpus of Swiss Alpine texts. The texts are in English, French, German, Italian, Romansh and Swiss German. Because of the multilingual authors (mountaineers, scientists) and the assumed multilingual readers, the texts contain numerous code-switching elements. When building and annotating the corpus, we faced issues of language identification on the sentence and sub-sentential level. We present our strategy for language identification and for the annotation of foreign language fragments within sentences. We report 78% precision on detecting a subset of code-switches with correct language labels and 92% unlabeled precision.

Foreign-accented speech typically contains information about speakers' linguistic origin, i.e., their native language. The present study explored the importance of different temporal and rhythmic prosodic characteristics for the recognition of French- and English-accented German. In perception experiments with Swiss German listeners, stimuli for accent recognition contained speech that was reduced artificially to convey temporal and rhythmic prosodic characteristics: (a) amplitude envelope durational information (by noise vocoding), (b) segment durations (by 1-bit requantisation) and (c) durations of voiced and voiceless intervals (by sasasa-delexicalisation). This preserved mainly time domain characteristics and different degrees of rudimentary information from the frequency domain. Results showed that listeners could recognise French- and English-accented German above chance even when their access to segmental and spectral cues was strongly reduced. Different types of temporal cues led to different recognition scores – segment durations were found to be the temporal cue most salient for accent recognition. Signal conditions that contained fewer segmental and spectral cues led to lower accent recognition scores.

Swiss German is a dialect continuum whose dialects are very different from Standard German, the official language of the German part of Switzerland. However, dealing with Swiss German in natural language processing, usually the detour through Standard German is taken. As writing in Swiss German has become more and more popular in recent years, we would like to provide data to serve as a stepping stone to automatically process the dialects. We compiled NOAH’s Corpus of Swiss German Dialects consisting of various text genres, manually annotated with Part-ofSpeech tags. Furthermore, we applied this corpus as training set to a statistical Part-of-Speech tagger and achieved an accuracy of 90.62%.

Previous research argued that listeners can distinguish between languages of different rhythm class but not of the same class (class discrimination hypothesis). In the present research we tested the role of duration and pitch cues (intonation) in this process. In Experiment I we tested whether we could replicate previous findings on listeners’ language discrimination ability with native Swiss German listeners. Results showed that the discrimination of English and Japanese based on durational cues led to the same results as in previous experiments. In Experiment II we tested listeners’ ability to distinguish between languages belonging to different rhythm classes (English-French, French-Japanese, Spanish-Japanese) and the same rhythm class (Spanish-French). Results revealed that listeners’ distinction was not above chance level for all language contrasts. In Experiment III we added intonation to a French- English and a Spanish-French language contrast. Results revealed a significant effect of intonation for the French- English but not the Spanish-French contrast. The experiments showed that the primary cue for listeners to distinguish between languages of different rhythm class is not generally duration, as previously hypothesized, but it can also be intonation. Implications of the findings on the theory that languages can be classified according to their speech rhythm (rhythm class hypothesis) are discussed. Algunas investigaciones anteriores sostienen que los oyentes pueden distinguir entre lenguas de diferente ritmo pero, en cambio, no de la misma clase rítmica (hipótesis de la discriminación de clases). En la presente investigación examinamos el papel de la duración y de las claves tonales (entonación) en este proceso. En el Experimento I analizamos si podíamos replicar los resultados anteriores sobre la capacidad de discriminación lingüistica de los oyentes con jueces nativos de alemán de Suiza. Los resultados muestran que la discriminación de inglés y japonés basada en claves de duración conduce a los mismos resultados que en experimentos anteriores. En el Experimento II analizamos la capacidad de los oyentes para distinguir entre lenguas pertenecientes a diferentes clases rítmicas (inglés-francés, francés-japonés, español-japonés) y a la misma clase rítmica (español-francés). Los resultados pusieron de manifiesto que la distinción por parte de los oyentes no se encontraba por encima del nivel del azar para todos los contrastes entre lenguas. En el Experimento III añadimos la entonación a los contrastes entre francés e inglés y entre español y francés. Los resultados revelan un efecto significativo de la entonación para el contraste francés-inglés pero no para el contraste español-francés. Los experimentos muestran que la clave primaria que los hablantes usan para distinguir entre lenguas de diferente clase rítmica no es generalmente la duración, como previamente se había propuesto, sino que también puede ser la entonación. Por último, se analizan las implicaciones de los resultados para la teoría de que las lenguas pueden clasificarse según su ritmo de habla (hipótesis de la clase rítmica).

This paper presents evidence for two claims: (a) that the underlying contrast between stops in Swiss German dialects is based purely on quantity and (b) that the duration of the stop closure is its sole reliable phonetic reflex, i.e. there is a geminate–singleton opposition acoustically manifested in long–short closure duration. Using production and perception data on initial, medial and final stops in Thurgovian, a dialect spoken in north-eastern Switzerland, we show that the pattern of phrase-medial contrast neutralisation supports both arguments: when the extra phonological length position of a geminate is not syllabifiable, the closure duration shortens and underlying geminates and singletons become indistinguishable. The perception data in particular make evident that closure duration is the crucial cue of the underlying contrast, because, in the absence of this phonetic correlate, listeners can no longer discriminate an underlying geminate from a singleton. The results bear not only on central issues concerning the representation of geminates but also on some intricacies of the phonology–phonetics interface.

Nonsyndromic hearing loss is one of the most genetically heterogeneous traits known. A total of 30 autosomal dominant nonsyndromic hearing–loss loci have been mapped, and 11 genes have been isolated. In the majority of cases, autosomal dominant nonsyndromic hearing loss is postlingual and progressive, with the exception of hearing impairment in families in which the impairment is linked to DFNA3, DFNA8/12, and DFNA24, the novel locus described in this report. DFNA24 was identified in a large Swiss German kindred with a history of autosomal dominant hearing loss that dates back to the middle of the 19th century. The hearing-impaired individuals in this kindred have prelingual, nonprogressive, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss affecting mainly mid and high frequencies. The DFNA24 locus maps to 4q35-qter. A maximum multipoint LOD score of 11.6 was obtained at 208.1 cM at marker D4S1652. The 3.0-unit support interval for the map position of this locus ranges from 205.8 cM to 211.7 cM (5.9 cM).

This article describes an examination of the Swiss-German music books in the Luther Whiting Mason—Osbourne McConathy Collection, undertaken to learn about music education in nineteenth-century Switzerland and its influence on American music education. Pfeiffer and Nägeli introduced Pestalozzi's ideas to Swiss schools, teaching the elements of music separately and introducing sounds before symbols. Swiss educators in the mid-1800s published numerous songbooks and teachers' manuals for an expanding school system. Foreign travelers praised the teaching of Schäublin in Basel. In Zurich, a cultural center with choruses for men and women, music directors continued to produce materials for schools and community choruses in the 1800s. Because travelers like Luther Whiting Mason purchased these books, Swiss ideas on music education spread to other European countries and the United States.

The goal of this special issue is to report on new directions in our research that began with codeswitching, but increasingly includes other types of language contact phenomena. The issue consists of articles by the junior members of our research team and reports on their analyses and explanations for a variety of outcomes in bilingual production. Their approaches rely on the principles laid down in Duelling Languages (Myers-Scotton, 1993 [1997]). That is, their research looks for answers at an abstract level. Just like monolingual speech, bilingual speech is not best explainable only in terms of surface configurations. Duelling Languages presents an innovative model of structural constraints on codeswitching to explain the differential contributions of the participating languages in codeswitching. These constraints refer to the Matrix Language (ML) versus Embedded Language (EL) opposition and the content versus system morpheme opposition. Using these two oppositions, the model accounts for the bilingual structures observed in codeswitching data produced by proficient bilinguals. In addition to explicating the data in Duelling Languages, the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model also accounts for the bilingual constituents from such diverse language pairs such as Turkish/Dutch (Backus, 1996), Chinese/English (Wei, 1999), Hungarian/English (Bolonyai, 1998), Arabic/English (Jake & Myers-Scotton, 1997), Spanish/English and Italian/Swiss German (Myers-Scotton & Jake, 1998b), and Mandinka, Wolof/English (Haust, 1995). The MLF model was based largely on what Myers-Scotton and Jake have since termed “classic codeswitching,” that is, codeswitching by speakers proficient enough in all participating varieties that they could engage in monolingual discourse in any of them. In Section 2 below, we offer readers

The formant frequencies of a particular vowel vary according to the speaker group and to coarticulation. Therefore, overlapping formant patterns of different vowels are commonly related to sex and age differences and to coarticulation, and are considered to concern mainly the F1-F2 pattern of adjacent vowels. However, several studies have reported indications of a correlation between the lower formant frequencies and F0, as well as of the appearance of different formant numbers relevant to vowel identity. As a consequence, the overlap between formant patterns of different vowels might be more substantial than has traditionally been assumed. Within the present study, therefore, the extent to which a given formant pattern can represent different vowels was investigated for natural Swiss German vowels produced monotonously and in isolation by men, women and children at F0 of 85-870 Hz. Similar formant patterns were found for vocalizations of different vowels with both small and large phonetic distances, and within the entire frequency ranges of the formants relevant for phoneme identity. For vowel sounds displaying ambiguous formant patterns, the main spectral characteristics related to differences in their perceptual identity were found to concern F0 and relative formant amplitudes. Results are given in exemplary vowel series, and consequences for the psychophysics of the vowel are discussed.

When I first met Max in Zurich in the fall of 1974, “Switzerland” seemed to be written all over him. I had just arrived from the United States, and his reserved politeness, his aversion to jokes, and his habit of neither wasting nor mincing his words all fitted the cliche of the Swiss German. My impression was reinforced when he told me that his paternal ancestors had been gunpowder manufacturers and he himself had served as an artillery officer in the Swiss Army. It was only later that I learned that about half of his genes—and all of his mitochondrial ones—came from sea-faring Portuguese who had settled in Brazil sometime in the past.

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A group of Swiss informants of the trinational Basel region were asked to draw maps of the regional language borders. Thus, the subjective assessment of language borders could be visualized. By means of these maps, changes in the former Alemannic dialect continuum in the Upper Rhine Area become transparent, which have developed by nation building, standardizing processes and diglossia. The experiment demonstrates in what way linguistic landscapes are perceived and what means informants use to visualize them. On the basis of this material, a tentative typology of linguistic maps can be established, ranging from "cognitive" maps to "geographic" maps.

Bosco Gurin, the highest village in the Swiss canton of Ticino, was settled before the first half of the thirteenth century from the Wallis. It is an independent community which has about 60-70 inhabitants. The Alemannic dialect spoken in the village, Gurinerdeutsch, has been investigated since the nineteenth century. The author has used these previous studies and collected more material in five in the village. This produced a monograph published in 2002. There are four main language varieties used in the village: High German, for parts of church services, notices and some administration; Italian, used for school and administration; Ticinese dialect, used with non-Guriner, and Gurinerdeutsch, which is used with other Guriner. Some examples are given of the vowel and consonant system. Then to illustrate the grammar of the dialects the plural formation and inflectional forms of the verb are used. The dialect of Bosco Gurin is a typical, isolated alpine dialect which is clearly of Wallis origin but which also shows its independence in many innovatory changes.

Part I: Frisian A. G. H. Walker, Part II: Low German i) North Saxon R.H Goltz and A. G. H. Walker ii) Westphalian and Eastphalian M. Durrell, iii) East Low German, Including Brandenburgisch H. Schnfeld, Part III: Central German i) West Central German a. Central Franconian G. Newton, b. Hessian M. Durrell and W.Davies c. The Dialects of the Palatinate W. A. I. Green, ii) East Central German a. Upper Saxon G. Bergmann, b. Thuringian K. Spangenberg, Part IV: Upper German i) Low Alemannic M. Philipp and A.Bothorel-Witz ii) Swabian C. V. J. Russ iii) High Alemannic C. V. J. Russ iv) East Franconian A. R. Rowley, v) North Bavarian A. R. Rowley vi) Central and Southern Bavarian P. Wiesinger

Within the last two decades, text messaging by means of SMS has become a central tool of communication around the globe. The use of more than one language for composing a message is wide spread, but, to this day, is relatively underrepresented in research. This paper presents an analysis of the plurilingual nature of SMS communication in Switzerland with the limelight on the forms and functions of code-switching within a set of 345 messages, base language of which is French. Results show that SMS users regularly exhibit code-switching even if they are not members of a bilingual speech community. Code-switching most frequently consists of inserts, i.e. embeddings of single items or combinations of items within a message composed in another language, and this typically involves (only) a limited range of routinized expressions. While English is the most frequently used language for code-switching, German, Swiss German, Spanish and Italian are also recurrent, the latter two being particularly associated with terms of endearment. Code-switching regularly highlights the expression of actions that have a strong interpersonal (phatic) focus, such as greetings, good-byes or thanks. It elucidates the expressive character of the messages, and is also associated with the expression of affection. The specificity of the plurilingual SMS repertoire is discussed in the paper's conclusion.

The study draws on different lines of research on the influence of social and other information on the evaluation of language production in school contexts. On the one hand, names or other background information is well known to influence teachers and other gatekeepers’ evaluations, and on the other hand, code-switching and other non-standard features in pupils’ language production are also known to affect assessment outcomes not only of linguistic skills but also of general academic potential. Taking into account these two research traditions, this study investigates the influence of different ethnically marked names and code-switches on teachers’ evaluations of pupils’ oral proficiency in French as a foreign language. Three authentic oral texts were rerecorded once by inserting German words and once without such inserts. Additionally, these samples were presented either as stemming from a bilingual Swiss German native or from a multilingual Swiss-German Serbian boy. A total of 157 future teachers rated the speech samples with respect to different dimensions (fluency, correctness, but also the pupil’s academic potential in general). The analyses provide evidence for positive and negative stereotyping of the Serbian first name, and there is also an unexpected interaction with code-mixing into German: without insertional mixing, the texts with a Balkan name are perceived as being superior, but with such mixing this superiority is lost and turns into significantly lower assessment scores.

Switzerland has some distinctive sociodemographic and geographic features which influence prison psychiatric services: The Swiss resident population is about 7.7 millions of which about 1.7 millions are foreigners, mostly from southern Europe and the Balkan states. The four official languages are Swiss German (63.7 %), French (20.4 %), Italian (6.5 %) and Rhaeto-Romanic (0.5 %). Switzerland is slightly smaller than the Netherlands; the population lives rather scattered in the 50 % of land which is habitable, forming 5 cities with more than 100.000 habitants, the largest agglomeration being Zurich with 1.1 million. A small fraction of the whole Swiss population live in remote alpine valleys, some of touristic interest, with ‘Juf’ at 2,126 m above sea level being the highest all-year inhabited commune of the Alps. Although Switzerland has probably one of the best public transportation services worldwide, a journey from west to east takes more than 8 h due to the complicated alpine geography. These geographic characteristics, with a location not only in the centre of the Alps but also in the centre of Europe with some of the most important transport hubs from south to north and vice versa passing through, contributed historically to the characteristics of the Swiss state: Since Roman times many different principalities fought for their independence against each other and the large surrounding empires. In 1291 the first small federation was chartered in the centre of the later Switzerland as a military alliance against Austria-Hungary. Other so called ‘cantons’ joined in until Napoleon finally not only defined Switzerland’s frontiers in the Vienna congress in 1814/15 but also figured as godfather for the first Swiss constitution with its grounding in the principles of the French revolution. Switzerland then survived almost unharmed the heavy turmoils of the two World Wars and even emerged in a strong position leading to wealth and a high degree of social security. The Red Cross became probably the most iconic symbol reflecting Switzerland’s early efforts to promote human rights from a politically neutral position, a position that continues today.

L'A. examine la syntaxe de la subordination precoce et le retard dans l'acquisition de la regle d'insertion d'un complementeur dans 2 varietes d'allemand et en francais. Ce delai apparait comme une etape intermediaire ou la subordination est soit entierement absente, soit tronquee. En se basant sur l'hypothese de continuite forte, l'A. montre que l'acquisition de la regle d'insertion du complementeur est independante d'autres proprietes specifiques associees a la subordonnee de la langue cible, qui sont probablement acquises avant l'etape des mots multiples. Il constate que la regle est appliquee par l'enfant seulement apres que le contenu caracteristique de la position syntaxique COMP soit pleinement specifiee

In the light of current morphological theory, this paper examines the analogical levelling of long/short vowel oppositions in certain inflectional and derivational alternations in a number of modern Swiss German dialects. The regular occurrence of levelling is shown to depend on the extent to which the alternation in question is ‘perceptually salient’ (Chapman 1994). That is, if the semantic relation between base and derivative is transparent and the derivative is uniformly marked, analogical levelling occurs regularly. On the basis of this evidence it is argued that all morphological alternations, both inflectional and derivational, are listed in the lexicon and that each one is assigned a different status according to its degree of perceptual salience.

I would like to start off by thanking the British Orthopaedic Association for selecting me as the 2012 Austria Swiss German (ASG) Fellow from UK.

1. List of contributors 2. Comparative Germanic Syntax: The State of the Art 3. Modal complement ellipsis: VP ellipsis in Dutch? (by Aelbrecht, Lobke) 4. On the adverbial reading of infrequency adjectives and the structure of the DP (by Alexiadou, Artemis) 5. Crossing the lake: Motion verb constructions in Bodensee-Alemannic and Swiss German (by Brandner, Ellen) 6. Preposition-determiner amalgams in German and French at the syntax-morphology interface (by Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia) 7. Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis (by Danckaert, Lieven) 8. Cross-Germanic variation in binding Condition B (by Hicks, Glyn) 9. Development of sentential negation in the history of German (by Jager, Agnes) 10. Contact, animacy, and affectedness in Germanic (by Lundquist, Bjorn) 11. Syntactic change in progress: The Icelandic "New Construction" as an active impersonal (by Maling, Joan) 12. Cross Germanic variation in the realm of support verbs (by Platzack, Christer) 13. The shift to strict VO in English at the PF-interface (by Pysz, Agnieszka) 14. Deriving reconstruction asymmetries in Across The Board by means of asymmetric extraction + ellipsis (by Salzmann, Martin) 15. A morphologically guided matching approach to German(ic) relative constructions (by Struckmeier, Volker)

The present study examines how Swiss German learners cope with the contrast between voiced and unvoiced obstruents in L2 French. The feature [±voice]) is not exploited in Swiss German dialects, where pairs of obstruents sharing the same place and manner of articulation are basically differentiated in terms of longer or shorter duration (i.e., the feature [±tense]). Therefore, we expect that Swiss German learners of French would assimilate the non-native feature [±voice] to the native [±tense] contrast, due to the great similarity and the functional equivalence of the two features; devoicing is predicted to occur more often in universally preferred positions such as the prepausal context. The corpus consists of 20 sentences (containing 6 voiced obstruents in 6 different phonotactic contexts), which were read by 10 high school students. An acoustic analysis permitted to categorize the 340 tokens into three discrete types: fully voiced, fully unvoiced, partially voiced. Chi-square tests yielded significant effects of the factors “context”, “segment” and “speaker” on the variable “voicing”. In particular, speakers pronounced 58% of the intervocalic obstruents as fully voiced, whereas they devoiced 85% of the prepausal tokens (thus, revealing both L1-based and universally preferred patterns).

Errors play an important role in instructional settings in school and are thus very important for learning and comprehension processes. Teachers have to account for the learning processes of their students and are responsible for providing a cognitively stimulating and motivating learning environment. Thereby, mistakes and errors can be treated in a more or less sensible and useful way. In order to learn from errors, classroom conditions must exist which allow for students’ trial and error behavior and which accept that errors and mistakes may occur. Some studies indicate that how teachers handle mistakes, as well as students’ actual opportunities to learn from errors in school instruction, may vary from culture to culture. Two important prerequisites for errors to “enter the stage” are (1) the intention of fostering a learning-oriented approach towards errors, and (2) creating a supportive social climate (Spychiger, Journal fur Lehrerinnen- und Lehrerbildung, 3:31–38, 2003). This chapter presents findings from a video study in physics instruction conducted in Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. One major aim of the study was to investigate the role of classroom conditions which are important for errors to occur in instruction, as well as the extent to which students perceive a climate which fosters a learning-oriented culture with respect to errors and mistakes. Both video analyses and students’ questionnaires were used for this purpose and to identify distinctions between the two countries. The video analyses indicate some country-specific distinctions. The students’ ratings show that the Swiss students perceive their opportunities to learn from errors more intensively than their German colleagues. The findings corroborate the assumption of a better learning climate towards errors and mistakes in Swiss instruction.