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Modal verbs in German show phonologically unconditioned umlaut in the pres.pl versus pres.sg whose functional motivation is unclear. Based on a large sample of dialectological data, I explore the distribution of this umlaut as well as other irregularization strategies like contractions and/or consonant mutations in different paradigm cells. My observations point to the conclusion that these facets of irregularity are morphomic in that they serve no other function than signaling inflectional class coherence. A promising approach to capture these complex patterns of stem allomorphy is Information-based Morphology (IBM), an inferential-realizational approach to morphology developed in the context of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The concept of a stem space allows for expressing implicational or directed generalizations in stem formation and their mapping to phonology. In diachronic terms, however, transcategorial number marking, as proposed in the relevant literature, is a plausible functional motivation for the analogical extension of umlaut as a verbal plural marker.

Recent work found a correspondence between consonant clustering probability in monosyllabic lexemes and the three vowel types, short and long monophthong and diphthong, in German dialects. Furthermore, that correspondence was found to be bound to a North–South divide. This paper explores the preferences in consonant clustering of particular vowels by analyzing the PhonD2-Corpus, a large database of phonotactic and morphological information. The clustering probability of the diphthongs is positively correlated with frequency while the other vowels showed particular preferences that are not positively correlated with frequency. However, all of them are determined by a threefold pattern: short monophthongs prefer coda clusters, diphthongs onset clusters and long monophthong are balanced. Furthermore, it was found that this threefold pattern seems to have evolved from an originally twofold pattern (short monophthong prefers coda clusters and long monophthong and diphthong prefer onset clusters) in Middle High and Low German. This result is then further considered under the aspect of the compensation of the syllable weight and moraicity. Furthermore, some interesting parallels with the syllable vs. word-language typology framework are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the nowadays almost forgotten personality of Germanic linguistics Johann “Hanns” Wondratsch. An initial biographical medallion is followed by an overview of his dissertation, focusing on the influence of the Anabaptist community on the former German dialect of South Moravia. Finally, the article concludes with remarks on Johann Wondratsch’s other published work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work found a correspondence between consonant clustering probability in monosyllabic lexemes and the three vowel types, short and long monophthong and diphthong, in German dialects. Furthermore, that correspondence was found to be bound to a North–South divide. This paper explores the preferences in consonant clustering of particular vowels by analyzing the PhonD2-Corpus, a large database of phonotactic and morphological information. The clustering probability of the diphthongs is positively correlated with frequency while the other vowels showed particular preferences that are not positively correlated with frequency. However, all of them are determined by a threefold pattern: short monophthongs prefer coda clusters, diphthongs onset clusters and long monophthong are balanced. Furthermore, it was found that this threefold pattern seems to have evolved from an originally twofold pattern (short monophthong prefers coda clusters and long monophthong and diphthong prefer onset clusters) in Middle High and Low German. This result is then further considered under the aspect of the compensation of the syllable weight and moraicity. Furthermore, some interesting parallels with the syllable vs. word-language typology framework are noted.

The article deals with the detailed research of the German microtoponymy of the Volga region. The toponym source is the doctoral thesis of a famous Russian linguist A. P. Dulzon, with a special chapter, where a list of 1049 geographical names of the Volga Germans is presented. The linguistic heritage of A. P. Dulzon, which addressed the studying of the Volga region German dialects, is unjustly forgotten and partly lost due to his being exiled to Siberia in 1941, where he was the head of the scientific school of studying native peoples’ dialects and toponymy. The toponymic material collected by A. P. Dulzon has not been thoroughly studied either by the scientist himself or by the following generations of linguists. The main aim of our research, which is based on new factual material and carried out in the field of sociolinguistics, is to define some unique features common for German microtoponymy, resulting from living for many years in multi-lingual surrounding. In this article the primary attention is given not only to the semantics and structure of toponyms, but also to the influence of the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contacts. The research is focused on contact onomastics, the dynamics of cross-cultural interference, the problem of borrowings on the toponymic level, their adaptation in the language depending on the peculiarities of the German dialects of the language islands of the Volga region. It has been proved that borrowed Russian river names, geographical names, microtoponyms, and lexical units denoting Russian realia from the cultural and general sphere, were influenced by German island toponymy and underwent major grammatical and phonetical changes, becoming part of productive word-building models: composites and analytical structures. The research shows that the phenomenon of microtoponymy is characteristic for the German microtoponymy of the Volga region, which proved, together with various extra-linguistic factors, that the Germans led a secluded life on their confined territories. A conclusion is drawn that studying the island toponymy of the Volga Germans in the sociolinguistic aspect, i.e. taking into account all the social environments in which the language of this allochtonous community functioned, can be the foundation for the interdisciplinary investigation of toponymy established by A. P. Dulzon.

The paper is dedicated to the research of German names of the casters (Kannengießer, Rotgießer, Gießer, Buchstaben-/Schriftgießer, Rinckenmacher) and also their word-forms in Polish, Ukrainian and Byelorussian as a craftsman name and/or surname. The research on the etymology of German borrowings in the three Slavonic languages is analysed. On the basis of written recollection of German, Polish, Ukrainian and Byelorussian languages of the 14th - 18th centuries, it can be determined which German word-forms of the handicraft names were included into Slavonic languages and what their dialectal origins as well as ways and chronology of borrowings were. Phonetic, morphologic and graphic transformations are also analyzed, and the semantics of Polish rynkmacher and Ukrainian гисеръ/гисаръ is defined more precisely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study deals with levelling processes in the traditional Austrian dialects – on the one hand inter-dialectal levelling (= the reduction of variation between dialects), and on the other hand intra-dialectal levelling (= the reduction of variation within one dialect). The interplay of both processes is analysed for the realizations of postvocalic r (= variable (r)). Although a complex variability is stated for (r) – which is also relevant for Austrian dialect classification – there are no recent studies on (r). This desideratum is addressed in the present article by investigating data of 163 speakers from 40 localities. In doing so, 7,951 realizations of (r) in 50 lexical items are analysed. Based on a real- and apparent-time design the study reveals a significant spread of vocalized forms resulting in both inter- and intra-dialectal levelling. In the article, the interplay of both processes is discussed. This includes also their origins (horizontal and vertical contact) and developments (e.g. lexical diffusion). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Names for a Locksmith in German, Polish and East Slavic Languages This article analyses the names for a locksmith in German, Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian. The paper outlines previous explorations in this respect and identifies their shortcomings. The author presents the distribution of the forms under study in different groups of German dialects between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and traces their origins. He also discusses their orthographic, phonetic and morphological assimilation in the Slavic languages. The analysis of historical and linguistic sources has made it possible to identify selected phonetic and morphological processes which occurred in German and are visible in Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian. Nazwy ślusarza w języku niemieckim, polskim i językach wschodniosłowiańskich Niniejszy artykuł jest poświęcony analizie nazwy ślusarz w językach: niemieckim, polskim, ukraińskim i białoruskim. Opracowanie przedstawia dotychczasowe badania w tym zakresie i wskazuje ich niedociągnięcia. Autor opisuje dystrybucję badanych form w różnych grupach dialektów języka niemieckiego od XIII do XVI wieku oraz ustala ich pochodzenie. Następnie omawia ich ortograficzną, fonetyczną i morfologiczną asymilację w językach słowiańskich. Analiza źródeł historycznojęzykowych pozwoliła zidentyfikować wybrane procesy fonetyczne i morfologiczne, które zaszły w języku niemieckim i są widoczne w językach: polskim, ukraińskim i białoruskim.

This study presents a micro-typological description of German dialects, focusing on the structure of 13,492 tokens of monosyllables, across 182 locations within Germany. Based on data from the Phonetischer Atlas der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, systematic geographical differences in both the segmental and prosodic organization of syllables are explored. The analysis reveals a North–South contrast in the organization of syllable structure. While the North tends toward more simple CVC syllables, the South tends toward the clustering of obstruents. An analysis of sonority dispersion reveals that in southern German, final demisyllables tend to follow more closely the sonority scale. Based on Markov chain models, the study reveals geographical differences in transition probabilities between the segments within monosyllables in German dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this study, we examined whether the convergence in interlocutors' vowel acoustics leads to decreasing discriminability between interlocutors' voices. Ten pairs of Grison and Zürich German speakers produced lexical items before and after dialogue interactions with evidence of vowel convergence in post-dialogue productions. In Experiment 1, native and non-native Swiss German listeners discriminated pairs of speakers whose speech was obtained pre- and post-dialogue. Results showed that listeners' sensitivity (A') was higher for native than non-native listeners, but comparable for pre- and post-dialogue recordings. The observed negative correlation between voice discrimination and the acoustic distance in formant space was mainly driven by a single speaker pair. In Experiment 2, the speaker recognition performance of an i-vector-based software was compared in pre- and post-dialogue speech. Results revealed no difference in the system performance between the two conditions. The findings suggest that vowel convergence does not compromise voice discriminability under the given experimental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia z Filologii Polskiej i Slowianskiej is the property of Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies 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.)

Language is used as a tool of communication in all over the world, and each society or country may adopt a different language leading various dialects or language usages. In order to interrogate different aspects, multiple question types are utilized in a language. Also, questions are globally used to get information about a topic / issue, ask for confirmation, request something or clarify some controversial aspects almost in all languages.In addition, some questions are directed to speakers via question words such as what, where or how; on the other hand, some questions are conducted via helping verbs, adjuncts or question tags. Foreign language learners first learn affirmative, then negative and finally questions forms in the target language that is why it may be inferred that using questions in a language requires improvement and experience.The current study aims to find out some similar questions types in Turkish, English,Kurdish, Russian and German; hence, an analysis has been conducted on question samplesobtained descriptively in those languages.The results of the analysis indicated that there are some similar types of questions such as general questions, special questions, tag questions and alternative questions in those languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at tracing a reallocation process of a grammatical feature alongside the dialect-standard axis with the aid of corpus linguistics methods; more precisely with an integrative application of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The phenomenon under investigation is articles without the definiteness marker d- in German, usually ascribed to the Bavarian dialect area. Analyses show, however, that this apparently dialectal feature diffuses to other communication settings closer to the intended standard language use. This process is accompanied by a refunctionalisation of reduced article forms, indicating the relevance of language-internal relations for reallocation of grammatical features. The methodical approach should be easily applicable to other variants and – as many European languages show a diaglossic repertoire – relevant to other languages as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a use of the German third person neuter pronoun eses in the prefield, known as prefield-eses, which is characterized by being neither referential, nor an argument of the verb. According to Speyer’s (2008, 2009) optimality theoretic prefield ranking, this should only occur if a sentence contains no alternative element eligible to be moved to the prefield. This paper investigates a so far unnoticed use of eses in the prefield in combination with a demonstrative pronoun dies and a copula verb ist, which will be referred to as Es ist dies-sentence. This construction is an instance of prefield-eses, but contravenes the expectations about the use of prefield-eses postulated by Speyer, since Es ist dies-sentences do contain a suitable candidate to fill the prefield, the demonstrative pronoun dies. In a corpus study, Es ist dies-sentences are compared to a sample of Dies ist-sentences. According to the corpus data, Es ist dies occurs predominantly in southern dialects. Significant differences between the two samples concern 1) the distance to the antecedent of dies and 2) the type of content of the sentence. An online rating study, that compared acceptability judgments of Es ist dies-sentences between speakers from different regions, confirmed that Es ist dies-sentences are a phenomenon of southern dialects. In the light of these results, a modification of Speyer’s (2008, 2009) Stochastic OT model is proposed.

The article focuses on the German verb geben (lit. 'to give') functioning as a PUT verb, i. e. a basic verb of goal-oriented placement. While German has been classified as a PUT-less language in previous research, initial studies on the German language in Austria show that geben seems to be spreading increasingly as a basic PUT verb, starting from the language area of Vienna. The research desiderata of this thus far overlooked phenomenon include empirically substantiated findings on its areal-horizontal and vertical-social distribution in contemporary German. In order to close this research gap, the article draws on data from a survey throughout Austria. Therein, two different registers of the dialect/standardaxis of each participant were accessed in order to assess intra-individual variation on the lexical level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In German, gender is a strongly grammaticalized category and has the function of indicating grammatical agreement between syntactic units. Usually, each noun is assigned one of three grammatical genders. In standard German, nouns denoting women are typically feminine. However, Luxembourgish and some German dialects show a peculiarity: here, the gender of female first names and other parts of speech (e.g. pronouns) referring to women can be both feminine and neuter, depending on the nature of the interpersonal relationship between the speaker and the female referred to. In these varieties, gender assignment is governed by sociopragmatic factors. Sociopragmatic gender assignment is a result of de-grammaticalization, which is reflected in both syntagmatic and paradigmatic gender variability. The study shows that there is considerable diatopic variation in the use and function of gender in references to women. In some dialects, the neuter has become the default gender of female first names; this is a case of re-grammaticalization.

Using the Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden 'Corpus of Old German Original Charters' (Wilhelm et al. 1932–2004), we will show that charters offer valuable information on dialectological differences during the Middle High German period. This text genre is unsurpassed in terms of its geographical resolution even though it faces certain challenges due to its partially formulaic style. With two well-known phenomena, i.e. inflected forms of the infinitive ('gerunds') and so-called 'contracted' verbs like haben/hân 'have', we will show how these materials can be analysed and put into perspective with other sources like the new Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik by Klein, Solms & Wegera (2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study concentrates on the alternation between two dorsal fricatives: [x] and [ç] in Modern Standard German. The primary source of data for the analysis include both native German words and loanwords. Moreover, the discussion encompasses some strictly related processes such as g-spirantization [g] > [x]/[ç], e.g. Ber[ç] 'mountain' and Ta[x] 'day', and coronalization [ç] > [ʃ], e.g. mi[ʃ] 'me' found in various German dialects and colloquial variants. Finally, since it is responsible for the appearance of both alternants in an identical context, e.g. Frau[ç]en 'woman, dim' and rau[x]en 'to smoke', a brief look is taken at the historical development of the diminutive suffix chen. It is argued here that in contemporary German there are two palatovelar fricatives [ç] which differ in their internal organization of the melodic content. In loanwords and in the diminutive suffix -chen, [ç] is lexically specified for palatality, while after front vowels and coronal sonorants the same fricative shares the palatality element with the preceding segment. The analysis is couched in a recent version of Element Theory and it proceeds on two assumptions: a) front vowels and coronal sonorants [l Ê? n] in German are defined by the resonance element |I| and b) [ç] is a complex segment containing two resonants |I| and |U|. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of the phonemic-graphemic analysis of the official reports' entries from the early second half of the 16th century, which come from the town council of Sibiu (Hermannstadt) and the Concilium Transylvania Saxonicum. The reports constitute a part of the first liber civitatis of Sibiu (Hermannstadt). The aim of the paper is to answer the question how far the script fixes the features of the spoken language. Due to the analysis it could be unambiguously proved, the German used in the text corresponds to the level of development of the German language within the periodization of history of the language as it contains the standard Early New High German features as well as the dialectal structures and the sound changes, which are characteristic for the Silesian dialect. The text can therefore be classified as one of the linguistic monuments of the East Central German of Silesian tradition. All the results of the exploration are supported with the appropriate examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though it has been noted quite early that the conjunction UND may also serve as a relative/equative particle or even a subjunction in Middle High German and Early New High German, corpus-based empirical studies are lacking so far. Based on new empirical data, I show that non-coordinating UND originated in the Upper German dialect area during the 12th century, subsequently spreading to the Central German dialect area and reaching the peak of its use in the 14th century. In contrast to recent literature, I argue that the non-coordinating use of the conjunction originated from semantically and syntactically ambiguous constructions of the form UND-XP-VFIN. I also propose that the earliest instances of the phenomenon are (adverbial) relative constructions and that the temporal and the equative function developed via reanalysis of adverbial relative clauses with a temporal/modal head element. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers the semantic analysis of carpathism xVža. In our work we focused on semantic distinctive components - semantic features - classification, identification and specification. We compared the semantic structure in Questionnaire of the Carpathian Dialectological Atlas with the semantic structure of the Carpathian Dialectological Atlas. We also examined the etymology of selected carpathism in several etymological dictionaries, where our German origin was revealed. The aim of our paper is a semantic analysis of selected carpathism and its etymology from the aspect of interlingual contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violations of the Doubly-filled COMP filter (DFCs), most notably in the context of embedded questions, can be observed in Germanic, Romance, and even Slavic varieties in the Alpine regions. Using the direct survey technique, we examine DFC-phenomena in several dialects of Southern Bavarian (including language islands) and the adjacent Italian regions (Venetian, Friulian, etc.) in order to check for relevant similarities as well as differences. Whereas there is some indication for a structural parallelism between Germanic and Romance in terms of the wh-items involved, both language groups are set apart when it comes to DFCs in root sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the multiple reflexes of historical +[sk] clusters in Low German (Westphalian/Northern Low German) dialects. Original descriptions of over thirty varieties of those dialects spoken between the end of the 19th century to the present day reveal that there are a number of realizations of [sk] (e. g. [sk], [sx], [sç], [ʃx], [ʃç], [s]), whose occurrence depends on both the position within a word (initial, medial, final) and geography (the location of the dialect within a broad region in northwest Germany). The synchronic patterns are argued to reflect a series of diachronic stages: The change from any one of those stages to the next is shown to involve either the emergence of a new sound change (rule addition) or the extension of a preexisting change to a new context (rule generalization). A secondary goal of the present contribution is to show how the treatment of Low German sheds light on the change from historical +[sk] to [ʃ] in High German. In particular, it is argued – contrary to the position taken by the overwhelming majority of Germanicists – that the High German change involved the coalescence of two sounds into one without any intermediate stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speakers of Western Central German dialects frequently use the first person plural form of the possessive article unser with proper names (e.g. us Dietmar 'our Dietmar'). But conditions of use are so far totally unclear. This paper focuses on form and use of unser with proper names in Moselle Franconian dialects. The findings are based on interviews. They show that unser is primarily used to refer to blood relatives. However, consanguinity is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for unser. In particular, its use is triggered by social closeness and the assumption of responsibility by the speaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Das Thema der Ausbildung von Lehrenden wurde im DaF-Forschungsfeld, so Legutke und Schart (2016: 9), lange vernachlässigt. Es ist jedoch festzustellen, dass sich dies in letzter Zeit geändert hat. Angesichts des wachsenden Interesses seitens der Forschung und Praxis (ebd.) im Bereich der fremdsprachendidaktischen Professionsbildung widmet sich dieser Beitrag sowohl den Möglichkeiten als auch den Engpässen der subjektiven Professionsbildung von Studentinnen und Studenten im Studiengang „Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Portugiesisch-Deutsch" in Rio de Janeiro. According to Legutke and Schart (2016: 9) the subject of teacher training has been neglected in the German as a foreign language research field for a long time. However, it should be noted that this has changed in recent times. In view of the growing interest of researchers and practitioners (ibid.) in the field of professional qualification in foreign language didactics, this article is dedicated to analyzing both the possibilities and the bottlenecks of the subjective professional development of students in the undergraduate course "Portuguese-German Language and Literature Studies" in Rio de Janeiro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the study of southern German dialects and their genetic connections with modern German. The article focuses on the analysis of linguistic features of southern German dialects: phonetic, lexical, grammatical and their comparison with Standardsprache. By the example of the development of southern German dialects and their interaction with Standardsprache, it is concluded that the German language, based on the laws of linguosynergy, is a complex open information system that is constantly evolving while saving data on its past states. The totality of knowledge of the past and present makes it possible to identify the prospects for the future development of the system. The results of the research give reasons to predict further changes in the modern German language at all its levels -- phonetic, linguistic, grammatical -- taking into account various dialectological features that are introduced into the German language system. The received knowledge is of particular importance for studying and teaching the history of the German language, introduction to German philology, dialectology, as well as practical course of the German language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand a sentence, it is crucial to understand who is doing what. The interplay of morphological case marking, argument serialization, and animacy provides linguistic cues for the processing system to rapidly identify the thematic roles of the arguments. The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates on-line brain responses during argument identification in Zurich German, a High Alemannic dialect, and in Fering, a North Frisian variety, which both exhibit reduced case systems as compared to Standard German. Like Standard German, Zurich German and Fering are Continental West Germanic varieties, and indeed argument processing in sentences with an object-before-subject order engenders a qualitatively similar ERP pattern of a scrambling negativity followed by a P600 in all tested varieties. However, the P600 component—a late positive ERP response, which has been linked to the categorization of task-relevant stimuli—is selectively affected by the most prominent cue for argument identification in each variety, which is case marking in Standard German, but animacy in Zurich German and Fering. Thus, even closely related varieties may employ different processing strategies based on the language-specific availability of syntactic and semantic cues for argument identification.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Nasleđe is the property of University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Philology & Arts 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 deals with the misplacement of the infinitival marker zu 'to' in German. While this phenomenon only occurs in certain config-urations in the standard language, such as auxiliary fronting, it is common in dialects and shows quite a high degree of variability. I discuss the misplacement of zu in Standard German due to auxiliary fronting, as well as other types of zu -misplacement found in dialects. I propose two parsimonious options for the analysis of the standard language as well as dialect cases, namely, i) precedence rules and ii) a special kind of infixing operation that was first proposed in the framework of Categorial Morphology (Bach 1984, Hoeksema 1985). I show that even though the first approach has its merits, the second one is more advantageous.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German-speaking Switzerland is characterised by a type of diglossia where the ‘low variety’ is used in almost all domains of everyday communication. For children of immigrant workers, a Swiss German dialect normally constitutes one of their two first languages. Nevertheless, one can observe two different scenarios how the dialect enters the repertoire of these multilingual subjects.The first scenario entails the combined use of a heritage language (e.g. Italian) and a Swiss German dialect. Code-switching among peers of the same ethnic group serves a wide array of discourse and social functions, above all the expression of a composite bicultural identity, but the employed varieties do not differ structurally from those of monolingual speakers.The second scenario, instead, gives rise to a structural transformation of the traditional dialects. For instance, an individual speaker may be perceived as originating from a particular region of Switzerland on the basis of his or her vowel qualities, whereas at the same time the voicing of (normally unvoiced) plosives makes him or her recognisable as a person with an immigrant background. Our analysis focuses on these linguistic transformations of dialects into ‘(multi-)ethnolectal’ dialects, whose social function seem to lie in the signalling of an allochthonous (‘non-Swiss’) identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Swiss dialects of German are, unlike many dialects of other standardised languages, widely used in everyday communication. Despite this fact, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for linguistic, historic and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source. This work involved a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to motivate the use of the corpus for digital humanities in general and for dialectology in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates how to reconstruct an oral historical variety by using modern methods. The phonetic-phonological phenomens of the Regional High German in the 19th century are presented for Segeberg (a town in the North Low German dialect area). Afterwards, the spatial structures of this historical prestigious variety are analysed using statistical methods (cluster analysis and implication analysis). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the internal and external syntax of comparison constructions in the light of diachronic as well as dialectal German data. As far as the syntactic position of comparison particles is concerned, the data present evidence against the widespread analysis as prepositions or complementizers and in favour of a syntactic position above the standard-of-comparison CP. This is demonstrated in detail for the German comparison particles als and wie. Concerning the syntactic status of the standard of comparison, diachronic and dialectal data support the so-called direct analysis, according to which the standard of comparison may consist of the comparison particle and a mere DP, PP etc. without assuming an elided full clause in all cases. With respect to their link to the remainder of the clause comparisons show characteristics both of subordinate clauses, notably relative clauses, as well as of coordination. The diachronic and dialectal data underline this Janus-headed nature of comparison constructions which is tentatively attributed to a historically underlying correlative construction and syntactic reanalysis as an embedded clause on this basis.

The article demonstrates how to reconstruct an oral historical variety by using modern methods and different written sources. The phonetic-phonological phenomena of Regional High German in the nineteenth century are reconstructed for Swabia. Then, a method is presented for identifying mistakes (schriftsprachorientierte Fehlschreibungen) in Georg Wenker's Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs (1888-1923). These mistakes are based on the partial identity of dialect and Regional High German, and can be used to reconstruct the oral historical variety for the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article gives an overview of the form and function of negative concord in German dialects (Alemannic, Bavarian, Upper Franconian varieties, West Central German, East Central German, West Low German, East Low German, Silesian, East Pomeranian, Low Prussian), with a focus on Upper German. The study is based on spontaneous speech data from the 1950s until the 1980s and shows that negative doubling and negative spread (in German: 'doppelte Negation mit Satznegation' and 'doppelte Negation ohne Satznegation') are two different negation types, thus there is no correlation between them as generally assumed (Haspelmath 1997; Zeijlstra 2004). Furthermore negative doubling is not obligatory, but seems to be conditioned by pragmatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In various Swiss German dialects, the feminine gender is not the sole possibility when referring to women. Under certain circumstances, the article of female first names can also be neuter, e. g. s Doris. The gender assignment of names is determined by linguistic variables such as morphology or semantics, but also by social factors like age and social relationship. Neuter names have been shown to indicate social relations and encode certain concepts of gender roles in society. Based on data from an extensive online survey and fieldwork conducted in different places of Switzerland, the affective function of the neuter gender in the use of female names is explained. The focus lies on the definite article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The squib investigates the dialectal distribution of the Dutch construction type het kan/mag/moet, lit. 'it can/may/must', where a modal verb occurs 'independently' with an eventive subject and no infinitival complement. The construction is shown to be widely attested not only in traditional dialects of Dutch, but also in Frisian, Low German, and Afrikaans. We suggest that the construction, which does not occur in standard German or English, is an areal feature shared by the West Germanic vernaculars of northwestern Germany and the Low Countries, including the South African 'side branch' Afrikaans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will provide a new argument for post-syntactic morphology. The empirical evidence comes from so-called displaced morphology in German verb clusters, where the non-finite verb form selected by a given governor does not appear on the immediately dependent verb but rather on the linearly last verb of the selector's complement. The placement of the morphology thus partly depends on linear notions and not exclusively on hierarchical relations. I will provide an analysis within Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz in The view from Building 20. Essays in linguistics in honour of Sylvain Bromberger, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 111–176, 1993), where exponents for non-finite morphology are inserted into separate functional heads which are linearized after their VP-complements. At a late stage of the PF-derivation, the exponents are associated with their verbal hosts by means of Local Dislocation, an operation that applies under adjacency (Embick and Noyer in Linguist Inq 32(4):555–595, 2001). As a consequence, the non-finite morphology always comes last in the selector's complement. Displacement arises once the immediately dependent verb is not the last verbal element in the complement of its selector; this is generally the case in strictly ascending orders, while in the strictly descending 321 order the morphology is faithfully realized. The placement operation is thus always the same, displacement only emerges as a side effect of certain cluster orders. Further evidence for a post-syntactic approach to the placement of non-finite morphology and against a pre-syntactic perspective comes from the absence of semantic effects under displacement, the emergence of non-finite verb forms specified for more than one non-finite category under multiple displacement and the distribution of default forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If time is conceived of as a river, we either have the perspective of seeing ourselves as moving downstream toward the future (e.g., "We are approaching the future," called ego moving), or we have the perspective of the future as moving upstream toward us (e.g., "The future is approaching," called time moving). Most ego- and time-moving studies have been conducted by using an English ego/time-moving ambiguous question to implicitly measure a person's current time perspective (ego vs. time moving). In the current study, we replicate previous findings that in (Standard) German the time-perspective question is not ambiguous, while showing as a new finding that it is ambiguous in Swiss German. We attribute this difference to different normative uses in these two German variants. To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate dialectal differences in relation to cognitive processing of ego-/time-moving metaphors. Psychological and linguistic implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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