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The study examines the use of referring expressions in anaphoric contexts in a German-Polish bilingual child between age 2;0 to 4;0. The longitudinal corpus consists of 160 video recordings of spontaneous speech in both languages. There are fundamental differences in the way anaphoric reference is expressed in German and Polish. Speakers of German refer to discourse-given referents either with a definite NP, a personal or a demonstrative pronoun. Speakers of Polish – a pro drop language without articles – mostly use bare nouns or null pronouns. Overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners are restricted to specific information structure conditions. We found an overuse of overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners in Polish in comparison to a monolingual Polish child of the same age and also qualitative differences in the use of the relevant expressions. Despite the fact that the earliest child grammar in both languages rather resembles the Polish target (no articles, no pronouns), the reliable markers of discourse-givenness encountered in the German input are rapidly acquired and overextended to Polish, before the more implicit Polish system is in place.

This article addresses the question of how morphologically complex words are represented in the mental grammar of monolingual adult speakers of German. We contend that in perception, speakers assign a plural or singular meaning according to the degree of reliability to which a given shape is associated with the function singular or plural. In this article, we present the results of two lexical decision experiments with nonce words. In experiment 1, the nonce words presented are preceded by the article form die, and, in experiment 2, the same nonce words are presented as bare nouns. It turns out that the results for experiment 1 and 2 differ. Nevertheless, we argue that the results for both experiments can straightforwardly be explained by a schema account. More precisely, we distinguish between first- and second-order schemata. First-order schemata rely on the pure word form onto which a specific function is mapped. But, recent developments of the schema approach argue that in the speaker's representation of word forms not only single schemata are stored and mapped onto specific functions, but rather schema-pairs, e.g. a singular and its most likely plural partner, referred to as ‘second-order schema’. The results of our experiments support the assumption of first- and second-order schemata and their interaction.

This paper proposes a new solution to the age-old problem of defining the sentence and sentence types. Arguing against traditional definitions, we propose that the category SENTENCE exhibits a complex prototypical structure on the levels of morphosyntactic form, conceptual content, and pragmatic function. By positing that the central member of the category SENTENCE is the declarative sentence type, we can show how imperative sentences are related to the prototypical declarative sentence type and that imperatives exhibit an internal prototypical structure of their own. Finally, using a scenario approach, we show how the conceptual and pragmatic functions of declarative and imperative sentences may overlap.

Car names and car-referring expressions are analysed such as (a) “der Berlingo Multispace Ocean,” with characteristic default masculine gender in spite of the absence of a gender-bearing head; (b) “der Audi A3 TDI Ambition Automatik” with default masculine gender despite the presence of an apparent divergent gender-bearing head; and (c) “das weise BuickElektra-Cabrio” with divergent gender (feminine or neuter) conforming to its apparent gender-bearing head. These cause special problems for both a linguistic theory of lexeme-based gender assignment, and a psycholinguistic production theory for gender percolation to NPs. We suggest a motivated basis for considering types (a) and (b) to be syntactically headless, as opposed to type (c). Furthermore, we propose that NP types (a) and (b) receive their default masculine gender assignment through a pragmatic projection directly linked to the conceptualization of the referent as a car (and not from any Lemma in the NP), whereas NP type (c) inherits its gender from a Lemma that is lexically coded for gender; this suggests a revision to Bock & Levelt (1994) style production models. We support these claims with an extensive sample of car-referring expressions from a newspaper database. Finally, we suggest that lexical material in car-referring expressions such as “Siena,” “Oktavia,” or “518i” are instances of field-external lexemes which are either borrowed from another semantic field, or are not resident in any field at all; and thus do not bear lexical gender in carreferring expressions.

L'A. propose une classification des masculins faibles en allemand en les disposant sur un continuum situe entre deux prototypes bien definis. Ce continuum est caracterise par la combinaison systematique de trois traits morphotactiques (composition du nom en plusieurs syllabes, modele d'accentuation et schwa final) avec les traits semantiques [+humain] et [+/-anime]. Il s'agit ensuite de classer les schemas de masculins faibles qui partagent plus ou moins de proprietes avec les schemas prototypiques pour cette classe de declinaison