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© 2018 International Speech Communication Association. All rights reserved. We present an overview of the second edition of the Spoken CALL Shared Task. Groups competed on a prompt-response task using English-language data collected, through an online CALL game, from Swiss German teens in their second and third years of learning English. Each item consists of a written German prompt and an audio file containing a spoken response. The task is to accept linguistically correct responses and reject linguistically incorrect ones, with “linguistically correct” defined by a gold standard derived from human annotations. Scoring was performed using a metric defined as the ratio of the relative rejection rates on incorrect and correct responses. The second edition received eighteen entries and showed very substantial improvement on the first edition; all entries were better than the best entry from the first edition, and the best score was about four times higher. We present the task, the resources, the results, a discussion of the metrics used, and an analysis of what makes items challenging. In particular, we present quantitative evidence suggesting that incorrect responses are much more difficult to process than correct responses, and that the most significant factor in making a response challenging is its distance from the closest training example.

This article investigates the notion of complexity as it applies to two phonological characteristics of Heritage Bernese Swiss German, namely /l/-vocalization and /nd/-velarization. We survey literature on the role of complexity in language change generally, as well as how it applies to heritage languages specifically. We then present findings from our study of two groups of Heritage Bernese speakers, one in the United States and one in Argentina, with additional reference to the local contact languages. Our findings suggest that the loss of /nd/-velarization in Misiones, Argentina is most likely the result of an internally-driven reduction of complexity. For both the Ohio and Misiones communities, however, /l/-vocalization has been maintained. We conclude by discussing the importance of research into language dyads beyond those in the United States as well as pursuing research on lesser-studied heritage languages.

Objective Burnout experiences for management and subordinates can affect preventative interventions implemented by management. Our study investigated if these differences in experiences of burnout are (1) dimension specific (2) correspond to differences in perceptions of the effectiveness of burnout prevention methods. Methods Two hundred thirty nine managers and 217 subordinates completed an online survey that categorized their self-reported experiences into the three dimensions of burnout and investigated their perceptions of the effectiveness of burnout prevention techniques. Results Contrary to the literature, Swiss-German managers experienced greater exhaustion than subordinates. Despite this experiential difference, their perceived effectiveness of burnout prevention methods did not differ. Conclusions Contextual differences explain dimension-specific differences in self-reported experiences of burnout at different hierarchal levels; however, these did not contribute to leader distance or perception gap either due to foundational or context-specific factors.

This study investigates if and to what extent speakers change their vowel production after interacting with someone from a different dialect region. Phonetic accommodation was investigated for 14 mixed-dialect pairs in Swiss German. Vowels for each speaker pair were analysed acoustically before and after they interacted for about 20 minutes. Agent-based modelling was used to simulate the change in absence of social and interactional factors. The simulation predicted that convergence was not symmetric but depended on a vowel's variability and its orientation in the acoustic space prior to the interaction. No evidence of convergence was found for the accommodation study involving 14 real interactions. The lack of convergence is explained with reference to the specific sociolinguistic situation of German-speaking Switzerland, where dialects carry a high prestige and are mutually intelligible, and where mixed-dialect interactions are the norm.

Boltanski and Chiapello put forward the thesis that the spirit of capitalism has fundamentally changed in the course of the 20th century. According to them, diligence, discipline and orderliness are no longer at the core of the new spirit, but values such as passion, authenticity or creativity. Following this line of thought, this contribution analyzes whether the qualifications required in Swiss-German job advertisements suggest the existence of such a new spirit. The results point to a revival of discipline-related qualifications and show that passion-related qualifications are not demanded as their substitutes, but rather in addition.

This paper examines managerial perceptions of challenges for further food waste reduction within the restaurant industry. Although research gauged underlying drivers for food waste, the attitudes o...

The Alemannic dialects in linguistic islands in Northern Italy have been undergoing strong changes since the second half of the 20th century. One of these changes concerns the assignment of gender with persons. Generalized neuter abolishes the coupling of gender with male/female and transfers both female and male persons into neuter. This in turn has its effect on verbal inflection. The post-verbal subject clitics mutate in the 3rd person singular to verb endings void of male/female connotations. This change, as it is now spreading, is not in itself a recent phenomenon. In early written dialectal records it already occurs in single documents even at the beginning of the 19th century.

In Swiss German dialects first names are commonly used with a preceding article. Historically, the function of these so-called onymic articles was to show the name’s case. They first arose when inflection of first names had been omitted and case was thus no longer expressed in suffixes. The data gathered in 2016 in an online survey for the research project “Das Anna und ihr Hund” indicate that today the function of reflecting the case is hardly relevant. However, it is important to the speakers to emphasize the nameʼs grammatical gender. The three grammatical genders in (Swiss) German are feminine, masculine, and neuter. Typically, the ono­nymic articles’ grammatical gender corresponds to their referents’ biological gender, i. e. feminine articles for women’s names, masculine articles for men’s names. But sometimes neuter articles are used with female or, less often, with male names. Therefore, the same first name can have different grammatical genders that are indicated with an onymic article, e. g. d Anna (f.) or s Anna (n.). The choice of the article depends on the speaker, the situation, the referent, and other factors. Based on these observations, it is argued that marking grammatical gender is the onymic article’s main function and marking case is secondary.

The word formation pattern [ __-i]N mask. in Alemannic mainly derives masculine agent nouns from verbs resulting in output semantics of ‘someone who notoriously acts in the manner of base verb’. I analyse the pattern as an instance of evaluative morphology embedded in a more general output oriented schema and propose a scenario how the pattern may have developed from an OHG hypochoristic pattern primarily used in names. In a qualitative and quantitative analysis of two dialect dictionaries on Zürich German and Bernese German I look into the possible lexical fillings of the pattern and derive areas of stereotypisation. As the products of the pattern are masculine nouns, it is of interest whether the lemmas are flanked with a feminine form or not, and if they are, whether the feminine form follows or precedes the masculine form or is added as a separate lemma without a masculine pendant. The analysis also includes neuter forms ending in -i listed in the dictionaries. As the masculine products of the pattern already reflect stereotyped behaviour, the feminine (and neuter) forms included in the diction­na­ries are expected to sediment gender stereotypes to a high degree.

Despite being one of the official languages in Switzerland, the phonetic properties of Swiss Standard German (SSG) have been studied insufficiently. Regarding Alemannic (ALM) dialects, most of the available phonetic studies have dealt with consonants rather than vowels. To counteract this general lack of research, this study investigates the long-vowel inventories of four ALM dialects as well as their respective SSG varieties regarding vowel quality. The aim of the study is twofold: on the one hand, it provides the first comparative acoustic analysis of ALM and SSG vowels; on the other hand, it investigates to which extent interference from ALM dialects determines the vowel qualities of SSG varieties. To this end, four male and four female speakers from Bern, Chur, Brig, and Zurich were recorded producing each vowel three times, which resulted in a corpus of 1632 tokens. The results show that ALM vowel quality is basically transferred to the SSG varieties in two dialect regions: Chur and Brig. Instead, in the SSG varieties spoken in Bern and Zurich certain vowel qualities did not match the ALM ones, mostly for that was fronted in the SSG variety of either dialect. Additionally, the Bern SSG was produced as both [┋ː] and [ӕː], while was realised more in the back.

The article employs Walter Ballmer's experience as a Swiss graphic designer working in Milan in the second half of the twentieth century as a case study to think about national design discourses outside national borders, show their constructed nature, and explore their impact on individual lives and careers. Drawing on primary sources collected in the archive and through interviews, it maps out the socio-cultural network that gave meaning to Swiss graphic design and questions how this was perceived, understood, and performed in a specific time and place by Ballmer, his assistants, the broader graphic design community, and his clients.

This paper examines an annual anti-racism event in Bern, Switzerland, which, in 2016, was promoted with three posters designed around a distinctive kind of multimodal writing. In large black and white lettering, the posters voiced real and imagined immigrants in one of three statements including ĭ ŗĕđa o ɓaeřŋ d’űţśĉħ (I also speak Bernese). Each poster thereby combined the regional dialect of Swiss German (not usually written in official settings) with ostensibly nonsensical foreign diacritics. Drawing on interviews with the poster designer and the city administrator responsible for organizing the anti-racism campaign, I argue that it is the contrapuntal mixing of semiotic resources which is central to the political force of the posters. Superficially, their destandardized, embellished orthography bears the hallmarks of, inter alia, globalese, and “new writing.” However, the rhetorical impact of the posters lies precisely in the pointed, simultaneous deployment of a recognizable form of localese and in the skilful balancing of visual style and verbal substance. As such, and while complicating a number of common binaries in linguistic landscapes scholarship, this case study demonstrates the tactical intervention of an accomplished wordsmith in transforming or rewriting the city's typographic but also cultural landscape.

Aims To culturally adapt and translate the Evidence‐Based Practice Belief Scale (EBP‐B) and the Evidence‐Based Practice Implementation Scale (EBP‐I), explore the psychometric properties of their validated German versions and compare results with those of the original scales. Design Cross‐sectional descriptive study. Method The study was conducted on a sample of 131 Registered Nurses in a Swiss German hospital. Internal consistency was rated using Cronbach's alpha. Principal component analysis using varimax rotation was used to determine construct validity. The study was undertaken in accordance with the STROBE‐checklist in Appendix S1. Results German versions of the EBP‐B and EBP‐I showed good reliability. Their Cronbach alphas showed lower values than those of the original scales. Principal component analysis showed medium‐to‐high factor loading. Principal component analyses using varimax rotations of the EBP‐B's 16 items and the EBP‐I's 17 items resulted in four‐factor and five‐factor solutions, respectively.

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.*

The main objective of this paper is to describe semantic diversity of nationally labeled lexemes and peculiarities of their word formation mechanisms on the example of the Swiss German language. One of the central concepts is the concept of «the national variant of the language». The article briefly describes the most important stages of literary and linguistic works on the stage of fixing and studying the basic dialect of Switzerland – Alemannic. The Dictionary of Variability of the German Language is accepted as the main source of the research material. The methodological basis comprises the method of comparative analysis, the method of component analysis, the method of continuous sampling, the method of statistical data processing.The study has confirmed the working hypothesis that the nationally marked vocabulary is manifested in all thematic blocks, but its use for naming the national cultural realities of Switzerland is the most typical case. Word-formation models, while maintaining the constancy of the word formation general methods, demonstrate a wide variability found in the quantitative filling of the component composition of compound words. For the lexemes of the suffix model, a typical postfix segmental morpheme – the suffix –li – is identified. The future research may expand the empirical base of the language and reconstruction of fully aspectual communication model of the polycode space of Swiss German discourse.

The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) was applied to analyse the role of perceived benefits (PB) on intentions to book a sustainable hotel. Data for the research came from 2564 respondents to an on...

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 Germa...

Observations in specialist literature as well as the perception of lay people suggest that in Swiss German dialects in general and even more so in the dialects of Central Switzerland the unaccented vowel in words such as macha (‘make’), which is here referred to as schwa, is not a completely central vowel corresponding to [ə] but is closer to [ae] or [ɛ]. In order to verify whether these observations are correct, recordings from Central Switzerland and Zurich were analyzed and later also compared to recordings of speakers from Germany speaking Standard German. The results show that speakers of both Swiss German dialects pronounce schwa with a more open quality than the speakers from Germany. The analyses of different factors reveal that for the Swiss but not for the Germans the degree of openness of schwa correlates with a more deliberate articulation. It can, therefore, be assumed that the Swiss German schwa’s target is not a completely central but rather a slightly open vowel. Furthermore, in the dialects of Central Switzerland the vowel is articulated with more spread lips than in Zurich German. Nevertheless, the formant values lead to the conclusion that the Swiss German schwa is still fairly central and does not overlap with any front vowels. It is most precisely represented by the phonetic symbol [ɜ].

Dengan menjamurnya media sosial dan maraknya beredar berita palsu (hoax) di masyarakat, penting diadakan upaya untuk membekali generasi muda dengan pembekalan literasi media dan komunikasi. Oleh karena itu, pada tanggal 23 April 2019, Program Studi Ilmu Komunikasi, Swiss German University mengadakan loka karya bertema “Spread Your Wings And Prepare Yourself to Compete in the Globalised World” di Syafana Islamic High School, BSD, Tangerang Selatan. Kegiatan ini merupakan bagian dari mata kuliah Project Management and Leadership. Selain pembekalan literasi media, loka karya ini juga memberi pembekalan ilmu Public Relations, kepribadian, dan proses melamar pekerjaan kepada siswa-siswi Syafana. Di samping presentasi oleh dosen dan alumni, peserta juga melakukan praktek teknik wawancara jurnalistik dan wawancara pekerjaan. Kegiatan ini tidak hanya berdampak positif bagi peserta, tetapi juga bagi mahasiswa yang mengkoordiinasi program ini karena saat melakukan kegiatan pelayanan kepada masyarakat, mahasiswa juga mengembangkan keterampilan seperti: Kepemimpinan; Penyelesaian masalah; Kerja kelompok; Manajemen waktu; dan, Komunikasi, yang sangat berguna di dunia nyata.

This study examines the multimodal package “so” with a pointing gesture in Swiss German. The analysis shows that by using “so” concurrently with resources generally considered to be in the service of local deixis, such as pointing gestures, participants are directing their addressees’ attention to a domain of scrutiny where they should look for additional information to fill the lexico-semantic content of the modal deictic “so”. This lexico-semantic content is the outcome of an action, the correct way of accomplishing an action. Based on video-recordings of two different settings, and taking into account the details of embodied conduct, the paper discusses how local deictic resources when combined with modal deixis can be used to highlight the manner.

While German-speaking Switzerland manifests a considerable amount of dialectal diversity, until the present day the phonetic interrelation of Alemannic (ALM) dialects and spoken Swiss Standard German (SSG) has not been studied with an acoustic phonetic approach on the speaker level. In this study, out of a pool of 32 speakers (controlled for sex, age, and education level) from 4 dialectologically distinct ALM areas, 16 speakers with 2 dialects were analysed regarding SSG consonant duration (in words whose ALM equivalents may or may not have a geminate), 8 speakers from the city of Bern (BE) were analysed for vowel quality, and 32 speakers were analysed for temporal variables, i.e., articulation rate (AR) and vocalic-speech percentage (%V). Results reveal that there is much intradialectal inter- and intraspeaker variation in all three aspects scrutinised, but especially regarding vowel quality of BE SSG mid vowels and temporal variables. As for consonant quantity, while intradialectal interspeaker variation was observed, speakers showed a tendency towards normalised SSG consonant durations that resemble the normalised consonant durations in their ALM dialect. In general, these results suggest that a speaker’s dialect background is only one factor amongst many that influence the way in which Swiss Standard German is spoken., Aunque la Suiza de habla alemana cuente con una diversidad dialectal considerable, hasta hoy no se ha estudiado la interrelación fonética entre los dialectos alemánicos (ALM) y el alemán estándar suizo (SSG) con un enfoque acústico a nivel de locutor. La muestra para este estudio se compone de 32 informantes (controlados por sexo y edad) procedentes de cuatro distintas regiones dialectales ALM. De 16 locutores de 2 dialectos se analiza la duración consonántica en palabras SSG cuyos equivalentes ALM pueden tener o faltar una geminada. De 8 locutores de la ciudad de Berna se analizan distintos timbres vocálicos. Además, para todos los 32 locutores se calculan dos variables temporales, o sea la velocidad de articulación (AR) y el portentaje vocálico del habla (%V). <>Los resultados revelan que existe mucha variación inter- e intraindividual en todos los tres aspectos investigados, pero sobre todo en el timbre vocálico de las vocales medias en BE SSG y en las variables temporales. En relación a la cantidad consonántica, se ha observado cierta variación intradialectal entre varios locutores, pero al mismo tiempo muchos locutores muestran duraciones consonánticas normalizadas SSG que se parecen a las duraciones consonánticas normalizadas en su propio dialecto ALM. En general, estos resultados sugieren que el dialecto alemánico es solo uno entre varios factores que influyen en la pronunciación del alemán estándar suizo.

Based on a qualitative analysis of 127 sociolinguistic interviews with speakers of Alemannic from 22 villages and towns along the Franco-German border at the Upper Rhine in Baden (Germany), this contribution investigates the construction of trans-border identities. The paper explores how Badeners perceive the relationship with Alsace (France) with regard to three thematic fields: 1) regional ties with Alsace, 2) language choice in communication across the border, and 3) comprehension of the Alsatian dialect. Two factors are shown to play a major role for the construction of trans-border identities. First, identities vary between regions, which can be explained by historical differences, especially with respect to political circumstances. The closer the historical relationship between the respective region and Alsace, the stronger the trans-border identity. Second, there is an influence of the geographical distance to the border. The closer a village is located to the border (the Rhine), the stronger the (self- and other-)ascription of linguistic and regional ties to Alsace. Furthermore, analysis reveals a correlation between the perception of regional ties to Alsace and language choice in trans-border communication: Persons who construct a shared regional cohesiveness across the border tend to use the Alemannic dialect when interacting with Alsatians, whereas persons who do not perceive such a cohesiveness mainly use Standard German or French.

In this contribution, I describe the evolution of the role that Alemannic dialects and Standard High German play in the Swiss German educational context. Drawing on a content analysis of a collection of school-related documents from 1950 to 2014, I describe the change in the roles attributed to dialects and the standard language, respectively. The task of German-language education shifts from the two-fold goal of teaching standard-language literacy and cultivating the “pure” dialect in the 1950s to a clear prioritization of standard language skills both in orality and in literacy towards the end of the twentieth century. I discuss these changes in relation to the backdrop of the media discourse on identity, language, multilingual education, language norms, and other social issues such as migration.

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.

In this paper I discuss the tenses Doppelperfekt and Plusquamperfekt in spoken High Alemannic and Upper-Rhine Alemannic in south-western Germany with a usage-based approach and a statistical evaluation. I show that both Doppelperfekt and Plusquamperfekt have a past perfect meaning, i. e. they refer to a point of time in the past placed before another point of time in the past. Furthermore, I account for a language change in the timespan from 1974 to 2013 in which the Plusquamperfekt becomes more frequent in relation to the Doppelperfekt. Additionally, I show that speakers use the Doppelperfekt in the old data with both auxiliaries (sein and haben), and in the new data only with the auxiliary haben. In contrast to this, the Plusquamperfekt is used in the old data only with the auxiliary sein, and in the new data with both auxiliaries sein and haben. These results could lead to the conclusion that the Doppelperfekt und Plusquamperfekt cannot exist simultaneously in an equivalent manner.

Based on the material of the toponomastic dictionary of the Canton of Bern, or Ortsnamenbuch des Kantons Bern (BENB), this article first aims to describe how the final -i in today’s Swiss German dialects, as in müli ‘mill’, is represented in sources from the medieval era until the sixteenth century. It appears that the classical Middle High German -e grapheme is hardly found in our data, while -i is used throughout this entire period and beyond. However, it is shown that this becomes more complex whith respect to noun composition. Moreover, the historical relation between the short and long Swiss German forms loui – louene ‘avalanche’ and rüfi – rufene ‘landslide’ is discussed.

This paper examines the strategies for profiling the phonological word in Alemannic, applying the typology of syllable and word languages. The diagnostic criteria selected for assessing the relevance of the phonological word include syllable structure, phonotactic restrictions, and word-profiling processes. Following on from previous synchronic and diachronic analyses (Nübling/Schrambke 2004; Szczepaniak 2007), I will provide a detailed account of the phonological word in Old Alemannic and in modern Alemannic dialects, which include Upper-Rhine Alemannic, Swabian, and South Alemannic. It will be shown that the relevance of the phonological word gradually increased in Alemannic, as can be gleaned from processes such as unstressed vowel reduction, unstressed vowel deletion, and consonant epenthesis. While vowel reduction created strong asymmetries between stressed and unstressed syllables, unstressed vowel deletion and consonant epenthesis increased syllable complexity at word and morpheme boundaries. In addition, Swabian was found to contain more word-related features than Upper-Rhine Alemannic and South Alemannic. Thus, the typology of syllable and word languages contributes to a better understanding of language variation and change in Alemannic.

How can we measure dialectal constructional productivity? Which factors determine degrees of productivity and the acceptability of creative ad hoc coinages in the domain of derivational processes? Based on data from a pilot survey (n=80), we discuss a range of factors influencing degrees of productivity/creativity for the denominal -(e)le-verb pattern (e. g., käffele, apéröle, ipödle, kungfule) in Swiss German dialects. This morphological pattern is currently highly productive, as indicated by substantial numbers of creative ad hoc coinages (oral and written evidence) as well as our participants’ acceptability judgements (for both isolated verbs and verbs in sentences) and their elicited productions (meaning paraphrases and sentence contexts for ad hoc coinages). We discuss different types of evidence for constructional productivity, based on quantitative and qualitative data. Our data indicates that schema-based frequency/familiarity effects and analogy-based pattern extension contribute to the pattern’s productivity. The fact that the verbs’ constructional contexts partly influence their acceptability indicates that the derivational pattern stretches beyond the traditional domain of morphology such that morphological, semantic, and syntactic patterns jointly determine degrees of constructional productivity.

It is commonly agreed that the plural -s has become a part of Standard German inflection, yet in dialects such as Alemannic it is often seen as an intruder. We challenge this view based on data from a written survey amongst speakers of Swiss German dialects. Our analysis of pluralised loanwords (e. g. Mango) and abbreviations (e. g. WG ‘flat share’) shows a strong effect of both speakers’ age and grammatical gender that points towards a progressive integration of the plural -s into the dialectal system. While masculine and neuter nouns can express number syntagmatically (using articles that differ in singular and plural), feminine nouns rely heavily on suffixes (as the definite article is d’ in both cases). A comparison of the -s plural with traditional dialectal plurals shows clear advantages for -s plurals in both cue strength (output) and scope (input) of the plural schema. We argue that it is due to this that feminine nouns show a significantly higher percentage of -s plurals compared with masculine and neuter nouns in speakers aged 25 and above. The difference disappears for younger speakers while the overall number of -s plurals increases drastically. Combined, we have an apparent time scenario that shows how the -s plural is first borrowed with nouns that rely on overt plural markers, and later spreads to most loans and other words with non-native structure.

This paper addresses how morphosyntactic variation stemming from the Alemannic regional variety is perceived, evaluated, and judged in written and spoken language. Based on data from a questionnaire and speeded grammaticality judgments, this study examines which grammatical variants are salient to the listener as a function of speaker accent (regional vs. standard) and listener background (students from different school types and cities). The results show that, in addition to the regional morphosyntax, regional accent co-determines grammaticality judgements, in particular for naive listeners. Expert listener (students of language and literature) judgements are less affected by speaker accent, and appear to follow their subjective normative expectations concerning the prescriptive syntax usage. The most normative judgments on both syntactic and phonological levels were observed for dialectal variants within a group of high school students, despite being active users of the Alemannic variety. This result is a likely consequence of an explicit discard of dialect usage during classroom interactions.

This special issue of Linguistik online presents contributions to the 19th Arbeitstagung zur alemannischen Dialektologie (Conference on Alemannic dialectology). This conference was not restricted to a single research theme, but aimed to reflect the whole range of topically and methodologically diverse research currently being carried out in the field of Alemannic dialectology. This introduction briefly summarizes each of the 19 contributions to the special issue, organized according to the sections “variation and change”, “dialect, space, and identity”, and “project reports”.

The present study deals with the areal variation of /r/-realisations in the Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland. In particular, we provide a quantitative survey of recordings collected through crowdsourcing, i. e. by means of the smartphone application Dialäkt Äpp (Leemann/Kolly 2013). Each of the 2851 recordings of the word trinke (‘to drink’) was auditorily coded by at least two of the four authors. The resulting maps show a neat areal distribution of the realisations of /r/, with alveolar variants in most of the central Midlands and in the Alpine regions. Uvular variants, on the other hand, seem to prevail in the northeastern and northwestern parts of German-speaking Switzerland. Comparing our data with traditional dialectological sources, we find evidence for the hypothesis that the alveolar realisation of /r/ has been extensively replaced by uvular variants in large parts of the northeast; apparently, a similar sound change is now in progress in the rural areas around Basel.

Diglossic speakers of two varieties of a language switch between their language varieties as bilinguals do between their languages, instead of having the otherwise typical probabilistic distributions of variants across varieties. To investigate the mechanisms involved in diglossic language control and lexical access, we conducted two switching experiments, in which participants who were highly proficient in the two varieties, or languages, named pictures in Swiss German or Standard German (Experiment 1), or in Swiss German or Tamil (Experiment 2), with pictures having cognate or non-cognate names in Swiss German and Standard German. The overall magnitude of switch costs in diglossic switching was comparable to switch costs in bilingual switching. Switch costs were asymmetric, favouring switching into the sociolinguistically preferred variety (Swiss German) in Experiment 1 and the slightly less dominant language (Tamil) in Experiment 2. Cognate gains were higher for Swiss German than Standard German and occurred even for Tamil responses. These results are compatible with a model that assumes that diglossic switching is influenced by similar mechanisms of language control as bilingual switching, that inhibitory processes are involved, that the amount of lexical inhibition depends on the relative strengths of lexical representations and on top-down control, and that diglossic cognates have integrated lexical representations.

This contribution examines the linguistic perceptions and ideologies of an individual of Latin American origin, Jorge, based in the German-speaking region of Switzerland, through narratives to analyse how pre-existing normative linguistic discourses influence (linguistic) identities. Connecting the micro-level of Jorge’s narrative to the macro glottopolitical level is a way of showing how languages are charged with different values and are arranged hierarchically, proving that they respond to an ideological framework in which purist ideologies of national and colonial discourses are interwoven with other discourses that reveal the influence of late capitalism. Thanks to these linguistic values, Jorge is able to position himself closer to certain ethnic groups than to others. Thus, through the languages in question – German, Swiss German, English and French – Jorge reveals an identity that draws him towards the German collective, distancing him not only from the Swiss German collective but also from his own Latin American collective. This also demonstrates that the Latin American ethnic category cannot be analysed as a homogeneous group, and that in order to understand the identity dynamics of this group in Switzerland we must necessarily address their own life histories.

Deep geothermal energy projects offer low-carbon, renewable base-load resources for electricity and heat production. Siting such projects can be challenging because past projects have induced seismicity. This suggests siting projects in remote areas away from populated areas and infrastructure, with minimal seismic risks. However, deep geothermal projects are most viable when they use residual heat, which requires proximity to heat consumers and thus, ideally, a rather urban environment. Hence, siting options carry various risks and benefits. It is informative to see how the public responds to these risks and benefits. This study investigates how well the public accepts various heat benefits when induced seismic risks are comparatively high or low. Respondents rated their acceptance of four deep geothermal energy scenarios in an online survey (N = 814) conducted in Switzerland and Germany. Conjoint and mixed multivariate statistical analyses show that the public prefers projects sited in remote areas and using residual heat for industrial applications. The results in Switzerland and Germany were rather similar, but the Swiss public was generally more positive. Importantly, induced seismic risks affected acceptance ratings most strongly. Thus, policies to reduce the risk of induced seismicity must be given the highest priority to enable an open dialogue.

Abstract. 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.

This paper surveys the emergence of the categoryhumannessin the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Alemannic (southwest German) dialects. The first part shows that some Alemannic dialects have developed a human/nonhuman distinction in the 3rd person singular neuter personal pronoun: a marked form encoding the human direct object has emerged. The emergence of this form can be explained by the differential object marking hypothesis. The second part reports on a pilot study of the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Sense Alemannic on the basis of new data. In this dialect, humanness is distinguished not only in the neuter but also in the masculine and feminine. Additionally, some instances are observed that violate the differential object marking principle. Thus, both principles (humanness marking and the differential object marking) form part of the grammar, but the latter one may be violated.*

Many language change studies aim for a partial revisitation, i.e., selecting survey sites from previous dialect studies. The central issue of survey site reduction, however, has often been addressed only qualitatively. Cluster analysis offers an innovative means of identifying the most representative survey sites among a set of original survey sites. In this paper, we present a general methodology for finding representative sites for an intended study, potentially applicable to any collection of data about dialects or linguistic variation. We elaborate the quantitative steps of the proposed methodology in the context of the “Linguistic Atlas of Japan” (LAJ). Next, we demonstrate the full application of the methodology on the “Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland” (Germ.: “Sprachatlas der Deutschen Schweiz”—SDS), with the explicit aim of selecting survey sites corresponding to the aims of the current project “Swiss German Dialects Across Time and Space” (SDATS), which revisits SDS 70 years later. We find that depending on the circumstances and requirements of a study, the proposed methodology, introducing cluster analysis into the survey site reduction process, allows for a greater objectivity in comparison to traditional approaches. We suggest, however, that the suitability of any set of candidate survey sites resulting from the proposed methodology be rigorously revised by experts due to potential incongruences, such as the overlap of objectives and variables across the original and intended studies and ongoing dialect change.

Мазкур мақолада Швейцариянинг немис тилидаги адабиёти ҳақида сўз боради. Швейцария адабиёти тўғрисидаги баҳсли мунозаралар миллат адабиётининг битта яхлит адабиёт сифатида эмас, балки тўртта тилли адабиёт сифатида ўрганилиши ҳақидаги фикрлар келтирилган. Асосий эътибор, Швейцариядаги немис тилидаги адабиётнинг пайдо бўлиши, кичик наср йўналишининг шаклланиши, ривожланииши, гуллаган даври ва бугунги куни босқичларга бўлиб ўрганилган.

Vowel prothesis is a phonological process by which a vowel is inserted at the beginning of a word. Vowel prothesis before a rhotic is attested in a number of languages of the world and has been discussed by Hall (2011), where the instantiation of this phenomenon in the Walliser dialect of Swiss German received a theoretical treatment couched in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). In this paper, I revisit that process of vowel prothesis and discuss vowel prothesis before /r/ in light of the phonetics of such a development as well as the typology of such a change. It will be argued that vowel prothesis before a rhotic only comes about when that rhotic is a trill. This is because trilled rhotics in the world’s languages are known to involve a brief vocalic period (roughly 50 ms) prior to the onset of vibration. Furthermore, all languages with an attested change of #rV- → #VrV- e.g. Walliser German, Campidanian Sardinian, Basque, Gascon and Sakha (Yakut) have an alveolar trilled /r/. In terms of OT, I analyze this as due to a high-ranking constraint against trills in the prosodic-word initial position, formulated as *ω[Trill.

In recent years, a number of applications on Swiss German have been released. They all crowdsource dialectological data, yet until recently their main focus has been on lexical and phonological features. In 2018, we launched the app gschmöis, an app designed to (1) give users an insight into dialectological research, and (2) collect Swiss German data on all linguistic levels, but with a strong emphasis on morphosyntactic phenomena. At the beginning, three rounds were published. Since then new rounds were published periodically. By including not only lexical and phonological features, we want speakers of Swiss German to become aware of differences in the grammar of various Swiss German dialects.The same linguistic phenomena are covered by multiple questions, and some of the questions are duplicated from more traditional projects, like atlas projects on Swiss German. This allows for comparison across different question types (i.e. translation tasks vs. multiple choice questions), different collection methods (fieldwork methods used in the SDS, written questionnaires used in the SADS, and crowdsourcing via the smartphone application gschmöis), and different groups of informants (NORMs vs. speakers of Swiss German of various gender and age groups). Furthermore, the older data of previous projects can directly be compared with the crowdsourced data, so that recent dialect change can be detected.

Young children have difficulties in understanding untypical causal relations. Although we know that hearing a causal description facilitates this understanding, less is known about what particular features of causal language are responsible for this facilitation. Here, we asked two questions. First, do syntactic and morphological cues in the grammatical structure of sentences facilitate the extraction of causal meaning? Second, do these different cues influence this facilitation to different degrees? We studied children learning either Swiss German or Turkish, two languages that differ in their expression of causality. Swiss German predominantly uses lexical causatives (e.g., schniidä [cut]), which lack a formal marker to denote causality. Turkish, alongside lexical causatives, uses morphological causatives, which formally mark causation (e.g., ye [eat] vs. yeDIr [feed]). We tested 2.5- to 3.5-year-old children's understanding of untypical cause–effect relations described with either noncausal language (e.g., Here is a cube and a car) or causal language using a pseudo-verb (e.g., lexical: The cube gorps the car). We tested 135 Turkish-learning children (noncausal, lexical, and morphological conditions) and 90 Swiss-German-learning children (noncausal and lexical conditions). Children in both language groups performed better in the causal language condition(s) than in the noncausal language condition. Furthermore, Turkish-learning children's performance in both the lexical and morphological conditions was similar to that of Swiss-German-learning children in the lexical condition and did not differ from each other. These findings suggest that the structural cues of causal language support children's understanding of untypical causal relations regardless of the type of construction., NA

It might be helpful to situate Heidegger’s stance on language by turning to some of the most important poets he reads. In his later writings Sophocles, Rilke, Goethe, Trakl, George, and also the Alemannic poet Johann Peter Hebel are where Heidegger draws inspiration for his thought on language. Of course, Holderlin also remains crucial. For the poet Holderlin there is a “sovereignty of poetry over philosophy”, as Beiser has argued (Beiser 2008: 378). Beiser also points out that for Holderlin “poetry is the source of insights and ideas that philosophy presupposes but cannot express in its discursive language.” (ibid.) Heidegger responds to this stance by Holderlin with his poetic thought. With reference to George’s The Word Heidegger puts it as follows in The Essence of Language: “in a poem of such rank thinking is going on, and indeed thinking without science, without philosophy.” (GA 12: 154/61) Poetry can get behind the presupposition philosophy makes when it formulates its claims, for poetry speaks freely out of language itself. The freedom of poetry shows itself in the freedom it takes from grammar and by twisting free. In this chapter I first introduce these poets and show their influence on Heidegger’s understanding of both poetry and death.

This chapter focuses on the graphemic representation of names in early single-sheet charters from Anglo-Saxon England and from the abbey of St Gall. Personal and place-names in Latin charters are among the earliest written evidence for Old English and Old High German. Given their ambiguous lexico-semantic status, scribes could choose whether to treat names as vernacular items or as part of the Latin (con)text. This is reflected in the spellings which they use for the representation of specifically Germanic sounds as well as in their choice of inflectional endings. An analysis of the distribution of these features shows that there is a strong correlation between spellings/endings and different sections of the charters: Latinized spellings and case endings dominate in the dispositive section of charters, whereas more vernacular forms are used in the witness list and, for the St Gall charters, in the charter drafts. A second factor that influences the written representation of names is the social status of the people involved: the names of important people, such as kings, counts or bishops, are more often Latinized than those of more ordinary witnesses. Moreover, the type of name also plays a role as place-names generally display a higher degree of vernacular features than personal names. Thus, the graphemic variation attested in these charters turns out to be highly functional and is indicative of different communicative purposes attached to separate sections of the charters.

The purpose of this contribution is a comparative analysis of different “partitive markers” in the noun phrase of several Germanic varieties, with a special focus on areally peripheral non-standard or less standardized West Germanic varieties. Starting with the use of genitive case for the marking of partitive functions in various syntactic contexts in the older stages of German, we then take a closer look at those varieties for which the survival of at least some genitive forms and functions related to partitive meanings is reported in modern times. This is true for some Highest Alemannic dialects in Switzerland (Henzen 1932, 122–124; Szadrowsky 1937, 1940) and for Letzebuergesch, both the dialects and the Koine (Dohmer 2017).1 We would like to emphasize, however, that for Highest Alemannic recent data are lacking completely. While there is some recent research on the more widely existing pronominal remnants of partitive genitive forms (see Strobel 2017), there is in general much less information concerning the expression of partitivity within the noun phrase (see Glaser 1992, 1993; Grestenberger 2015)