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The journal would like to express its gratitude to the reviewers of 2022.

Even when they demonstrate a perfect command of the sentence formation rules of the target language, second language (L2) learners’ written productions are often perceived as distinct from native texts. A major feature frequently put forth to explain this divergent character of non-native writing is a lack of syntactic diversity undermining the cohesion and communicative dynamism of learners’ discourse. In German, varying one's syntactic repertoire implies in particular the ability to topicalize object complements, i.e. to introduce them in sentence-initial position in order to signal their role as thematic anchors for the information units to come. Focusing on the written production of L2 German learners representative of different proficiency levels, the present work has set itself two objectives: (i) to quantify the use of object-subject structures in non-native texts and to determine the extent to which the quality of discourse organization is dependent on the frequency of occurrence of these non-canonical structures; (ii) to identify the grammatical properties of the target language and the cognitive barriers that hinder the process of syntactic diversification at the interface with discourse organization. In view of these two lines of research, this work demonstrated that the use of non-canonical structures at a level comparable to natives is attainable in L2 German, and that this syntactic behavior can be favored by a better performance in other segments of the target language, starting with case morphology., (LALE - Langues et lettres) -- UCL, 2021

The present paper reports on a study which aims to explore the potential of using multimedia animations to make grammar principles of cognitive linguistic explanations more transparent to learners. Fourty-nine students of German received instruction on the German passive voice. A first group (CA) worked with a cognitive linguistic explanation of the German passive by means of multimedia animations and performed tasks that aimed to foster the relevant conceptualization processes. Another group (TA) was presented with a form-based explanation of the German passive mainly focusing on the syntactic features. The results show that the CA group significantly outperformed the TA group, especially in the tasks where the passive was tested in larger discursive contexts and made use of the different types of passive sentences in a more appropriate way.

In order to test the efficacy of using cooperation scripts in combination with animations to teach the passive in an advanced language classroom, we designed an intervention study with two groups. The first group received instruction with animations on the grammatical structure of the passive and the second group received the same instruction and animations as the first group, but they were given a cooperation script to use in their small group work. The study uses a quasi-experimental design with a post-test and delayed post-test. The learners were university students in advanced German who had received classroom instruction and spent time in a German-speaking country. Therefore, they had explicit instruction on the morphology and function of the passive as is customary in first- and second-year textbooks for English speaking learners. This paper reports on the quantitative results of the study with respect to our research questions.

Concept-based approaches to grammar teaching generally adopt the cognitive linguistic view of language and presents grammar as a conceptually motivated system that is rooted in embodied expe-riences (e.g. force, dynamics, space, etc.) and other principles of human perception (figure-ground) (cf. Langacker 2008). Although the potential benefits of concept-based explanations for the visualization of grammatical principles in the context of foreign language teaching has been amply described, empirical class¬room-based research so far has not been conclusive about their pedagogical added value, especially when compared to form-based approaches (cf. Niemeier 2017). In this vein, previous studies suggest that consi¬derable attention must be paid to other factors affecting the successful imple¬men-tation of such concept-based approaches in the classroom: On the one hand, concept-based explanations need a presentation mode that allows for an adequate illustration of the embodied nature of grammar and brings the learners’ attention to the relevant aspects of the material (e.g. multi¬media animations, cf. Roche & Suñer 2016). On the other hand, the presentation of such concept-based explanations should be supplemented with learning activities that adequately foster conceptualization processes as well as the internalization of functional meanings (Williams et al. 2013). In fact, the sole exposure to cognitive linguistic notions does not automatically make learners actively engage in a process of meaningful learning and develop the respective conceptual categories (Tyler et al. 2011). Against this backdrop, the present paper reports on a study which aims to investigate the potential of multimedia animations and learning activities based on sociocultural theory (Williams et al. 2013) to leverage a concept-based approach to teaching the German passive. To this end, forty-nine first-year students of German were divided into two groups: The experimental group was presented with a c

A major argument against the feasibility of reconstructing syntax for proto-stages is the widely discussed lack of directionality of syntactic change. In a recent typology of changes in argument structure constructions based on Germanic (Barodal 2015), several different, yet opposing, changes are reported. These include, among others, processes sometimes called dative sickness, nominative sickness, and accusative sickness. In order to tease apart the roles of the different processes, we have carried out a phylogenetic trait analysis on a predefined data set of twelve predicates found across the Germanic phyla using the MULTISTATE method. This is, as far as we are aware, the first application of the MULTISTATE method (Pagel et al. 2004) in historical syntax. The results clearly favor one of the models, the dative sickness model, over any other model, as this model is the only one that can accurately account for both the observed diversity of case frames and the independently proposed philological reconstructions. Methods of evolutionary trait analysis can be used to model evolutionary paths of argument structure constructions, and they provide the perfect testing ground for hypotheses arrived at through philological reconstruction, based on classical historical-comparative methods.