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The aim of this paper is to investigate the features and functions of the linguistic pattern X oder Y, [X or Y] from a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspective. The pattern has specific context restrictions of importance for its meaning and functions. It appears exclusively in written language, more specifically in titles of books, movies or theatre plays as well as in headings of newspaper articles, blogs or online discussion threads. By means of a corpus triangulating all these contexts, the paper provides firstly a classification of X oder Y. It analyses secondly how the components’ semantic and syntactic features correspond within the pattern. Thirdly, the paper discusses the variable X oder Y as a communicative resource in written language. The integrative analysis of the pattern shows that the pragmatic meaning of X oder Y results from the pattern’s internal correspondence of the formal elements, the pattern’s external correspondence with media contexts and, on the in-between level, from the sequentially initial position of X oder Y in ‘text utterances’. The analysis shows that the disjunction of X and Y provides suggestions how the text belonging to the heading should be understood. It can also be seen that contexts of literality can be accomplished by using the pattern. As a result of conventionalising processes, the pattern even indicates certain genres and enables significant positioning in situations of epistemic imbalance and entertainment.

The distinction between core and periphery in language and grammar is a controversial issue for linguists. The essays in this compendium examine the relevance of this distinction for grammatical theory from different theoretical perspectives. They also consider empirical phenomena at the margins of grammar that pose particular challenges for the core-periphery distinction.

This paper deals with German idiomatic sentences of the type Da geht einem ja der Hut hoch! (‚This makes one’s hat go up’: „This is outrageous“), Das kannst du den Hasen geben! (‚You can give that to the rabbits’: „That is worthless“), Du hast wohl nicht mehr alle Tassen im Schrank! (‚(I guess) You don’t have all your cups in the cupboard any more’: „You are crazy“) etc. It is argued that those sentences are instantiations of certain productive patterns of construction. As opposed to Kay (2002), the paper argues that the productivity of constructions should be accounted for by a morphological rather than a syntactic approach. Therefore, productivity has to be seen as gradual and is to be measured empirically. Furthermore, productivity does not have to be contrary to idiomaticity. On the basis of a classification of German idiomatic patterns of construction, the paper examines in how far these turn out to be productive, whether there is any variation in profitability with regard to the different patterns, and if yes, due to which kind of linguistic factors. In my study, I carried out elicitation tests on the interpretation and production of new idiomatic sentences with 34 German native speakers. As a result, the tests show that the idiomatic patterns are potentially productive („available“) as more than half of the test subjects can produce new idiomatic sentences that are compatible with the patterns in question and more than half of the test subjects can interpret made-up new idiomatic sentences in correspondence to the patterns. The degree to which the patterns are productively exploited („profitable“) varies both with regard to production and interpretation of new idiomatic sentences. It is argued that this variation is due to structural, lexical, semantic and pragmatic features of the patterns.