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This article explores how close one can come to a cultural-scientific perspective on the basis of a constitution-analytical methodology. We do this on the basis of a comparison of the celebration of Totensonntag in Zotzenbach (Southern Hesse) and Sarepta (Wolgograd). In both places, there are protestant churches that perform this ritual to commemorate the dead on this “Sunday of the Dead” as a part of their church service. Our scientific interest lies in the reconstruction of the rituality produced during the in situ execution. In both services, the names of the deceased are read out and a candle is lit for each deceased person. In Zotzenbach the priest reads out the names and an assistant ignites the candles for the deceased, whereas in Sarepta the bereaved are responsible for this. Since the ritual is organised in very different ways in terms of architecture-for-interaction (statically in Zotzenbach, spatially dynamic in Sarepta), we can reconstruct two completely different models of rituality: a demonstrative one (Zotzenbach) and a participative one (Sarepta). The demonstrative model works on the basis of a finely tuned coordination between the two church representatives and is aimed at a dignified execution. The model in Sarepta is not suitable for the production of formality due to its participatory structure. Here, however, the focus is also on the aspect of socialization, which goes beyond the church service and offers the Russian-German worshipers the opportunity to situationally constitute as a culturally homogeneous group.
This article summarizes results of an empirical study on the use of so called verbs of transportation in German and Brazilian Portuguese. Such verbs constantly cause dijficulties and mistakes in the language production of non-native Speakers. The paper presentsfour observations on the grammar (verb prefixes, prepositions), semantics (places and paths) and pragmatics (deixis) of verbs of transportation in the two languages. It leads to the conclusion that Brazilian learners tend to have more dijficulties with the morphology and syntax of German transportation verbs, whereas German learners tend to have more dijficulties with the pragmatics of the corresponding verbs in Brazilian Portuguese. Dijficulties with the specification of places and paths can be observed in both directions, but they lead to unidiomatic usage rather than to outright mistakes.
In Beispielen wie
(1) Du hast scheints / Weiß Gott nichts begriffen.
(2) It cost £200, give or take.
(3) Qu’est ce qu’il a dit?
werden verbale Konstruktionen (kurz: VK, hier jeweils die fett gesetzten Teile) in einer Weise gebraucht, die der Grammatik verbaler Konstruktionen zuwiderläuft. In (1) und (2) wird die verbale Konstruktion wie ein Adverb/eine Partikel gebraucht bzw. wie ein Ausdruck in der Funktion eines (adverbialen) Adjunkts/ Supplements. In (3) ist die verbale Konstruktion zum Bestandteil einer periphrastischen interrogativen Konstruktion geworden. Wie sind solche ‘Umfunktionalisierungen’ – wie ich das Phänomen zunächst vortheoretisch bezeichnen möchte – einzuordnen? Handelt es sich um Lexikalisierung oder um Grammatikalisierung? Oder um ein Phänomen der dritten Art? Die Umfunktionalisierung verbaler Syntagmen bzw. Konstruktionen – ich gebrauche die Abkürzung UVK für ‘umfunktionalisierte verbale Konstruktion(en)’ – ist ein bisher weniger gut untersuchtes Phänomen, etwa gegenüber der Umfunktionalisierung von Präpositionalphrasen, die sprachübergreifend zu komplexen, „sekundären“ Präpositionen werden können (man vergleiche DEU auf Grund + Genitiv / von, ENG on top of, FRA à cause de).
We investigate the optional omission of the infinitival marker in a Swedish future tense construction. During the last two decades the frequency of omission has been rapidly increasing, and this process has received considerable attention in the literature. We test whether the knowledge which has been accumulated can yield accurate predictions of language variation and change. We extracted all occurrences of the construction from a very large collection of corpora. The dataset was automatically annotated with language-internal predictors which have previously been shown or hypothesized to affect the variation. We trained several models in order to make two kinds of predictions: whether the marker will be omitted in a specific utterance and how large the proportion of omissions will be for a given time period. For most of the approaches we tried, we were not able to achieve a better-than-baseline performance. The only exception was predicting the proportion of omissions using autoregressive integrated moving average models for one-step-ahead forecast, and in this case time was the only predictor that mattered. Our data suggest that most of the language-internal predictors do have some effect on the variation, but the effect is not strong enough to yield reliable predictions.
The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).
This contribution presents a quantitative approach to speech, thought and writing representation (ST&WR) and steps towards its automatic detection. Automatic detection is necessary for studying ST&WR in a large number of texts and thus identifying developments in form and usage over time and in different types of texts. The contribution summarizes results of a pilot study: First, it describes the manual annotation of a corpus of short narrative texts in relation to linguistic descriptions of ST&WR. Then, two different techniques of automatic detection – a rule-based and a machine learning approach – are described and compared. Evaluation of the results shows success with automatic detection, especially for direct and indirect ST&WR.
The term “pivot” usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot’s action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action.
Comprehending conditional statements is fundamental for hypothetical reasoning about situations. However, the online comprehension of conditional statements containing different conditional connectives is still debated. We report two self-paced reading experiments on German conditionals presenting the conditional connectives wenn (‘if’) and nur wenn (‘only if’) in identical discourse contexts. In Experiment 1, participants read a conditional sentence followed by the confirmed antecedent p and the confirmed or negated consequent q. The final, critical sentence was presented word by word and contained a positive or negative quantifier (ein/kein ‘one/no’). Reading times of the two quantifiers did not differ between the two conditional connectives. In Experiment 2, presenting a negated antecedent, reading times for the critical positive quantifier (ein) did not differ between conditional connectives, while reading times for the negative quantifier (kein) were shorter for nur wenn than for wenn. The results show that comprehenders form distinct predictions about discourse continuations due to differences in the lexical semantics of the tested conditional connectives, shedding light on the role of conditional connectives in the online interpretation of conditionals in general.
The authors are pleased to present to the readers of the Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft a Special Issue in honor of Rosemarie Tracy.
Contents:
0. Frontmatter
1. Petra Schulz, Ira Gawlitzek, Angelika Wöllstein: Introduction, S. 1
2. Natascha Müller: Different sources of delay and acceleration in early child bilingualism, S. 7
3. Hubert Haider, Christina Schörghofer-Essl, Karin Seethaler: Quantifying kids prefer intersecting sets - a pilot study, S. 31
4. Petra Schulz, Rabea Schwarze: How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI, S. 51
5. Monika Rothweiler, Manuela Schönenberger, Franziska Sterner: Subject-verb agreement in German in bilingual children with and without SLI, S. 79
6. Holger Hopp: The processing of English which-questions in adult L2 learners: Effects of L1 transfer and proficiency, S. 107
7. Oksana Laleko, Maria Polinsky: Silence is difficult: On missing elements in bilingual grammars, S. 135
8. Artemis Alexiadou: Building verbs in language mixing varieties, S. 165
Mit dem hier besprochenen Band liegt eine Monographie zu Pennsylvania Dutch(Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania-Deutsch; im Weiteren auch PD) vor, die sowohl die Entstehungsbedingungen und -verläufe und den soziohistorischen, soziopolitischen und religionsbezogenen Kontext seiner Entwicklung als auch seine sprachlichen und literarischen Formen, seine historische und heutige gesellschaftliche Stellung und Verwendung umfassend und gründlich darstellt. Louden wendet sich dabei nicht nur an ein linguistisches Fachpublikum, sondern auch an LeserInnen ohne eine speziell linguistische Vorbildung. Dementsprechend werden für die Darstellung relevante linguistische Konzepte eingeführt und erklärt. Ein umfassendes Stichwortverzeichnis macht die Monographie gut erschließbar, und die umfangreiche Bibliographie ermöglicht es, sich weitergehend zu allen angesprochenen Themen zu informieren. Die Endnoten werden strategisch gut eingesetzt, da sie nicht nur fachwissenschaftliche ‚Unterfütterung‘ bieten, sondern auch dazu genutzt werden, alle zitierten Quellentexte sowohl auf Englisch als auch in der (pennsylvania-)deutschen Originalfassung zur Verfügung zu stellen.
Körperliche wie seelische Gesundheit ist ein hohes individuelles und gesellschaftliches Gut und Grundrecht. Häufig wird die Gesundheit durch ihr Gegenteil, d. h. in der Verständigung über Krankheit, thematisiert. Der gesellschaftliche Austausch über Krankheiten, Gesundheitsrisiken und Behandlungsmethoden ist untrennbar mit Sprache verknüpft (Busch/Spranz-Fogasy 2015); die Sprache ist „[…] das zentrale Medium, um medizinisches Wissen herzustellen, zu systematisieren, zu tradieren und auszutauschen.“ (Busch/Spranz-Fogasy 2015: 336). Ausgehend von dieser Prämisse wurde das Netzwerk „Linguistik und Medizin“ gegründet, um die Forschungstätigkeiten der verschiedenen linguistischen Disziplinen, die an den Verbindungslinien von „Sprache – Wissen – Medizin“ arbeiten, zu bündeln: Forschungsdesiderate sollen kooperierend bearbeitet und die interdisziplinäre Anschlussfähigkeit zwischen linguistischen und medizinischen, psychiatrischen sowie salutogenetischen Forschungsbereichen auf- und ausgebaut werden.
Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.
Language of Responsibility. The Influence of Linguistic Abstraction on Collective Moral Emotions
(2017)
Two experiments investigated the effects of linguistic abstractness on the experience of collective moral emotions. In Experiment 1 participants were presented with two scenarios about ingroup misbehavior, phrased using descriptive action verbs, interpretative action verbs, adjectives or nouns. The results show that participants experienced slightly more negative moral emotions with higher levels of linguistic abstractness. In Experiment 2 we also tested for the influence of national identification on the relationship between linguistic abstractness and emotional reactions. Additionally, we expanded the number of scenarios. Experiment 2 replicated the earlier pattern, but found larger differences between conditions. The strength of national identification did not moderate the observed effects. The results of this research are discussed within the context of the linguistic category model and psychology of collective moral emotions.
This paper offers an exploratory Interactional Linguistic account of the role that inferences play in episodes of ordinary conversational interaction. To this end, it systematically reconsiders the conversational practice of using the lexico-syntactic format oh that’s right to implicitly claim “just-now” recollection of something previously known, but momentarily confused or forgotten. The analyses reveal that this practice typically occurs as part of a larger sequential pattern that the participants orient to and which serves as a procedure for dealing with, and generating an account for, one participant’s production of an inapposite action. As will be shown, the instantiation and progressive realization of this sequential procedure requires local inferential work from the participants. While some facets of this inferential work appear to be shaped by the particular context of the ongoing interaction, others are integral to the workings of the sequence as such. Moreover, the analyses suggest that participants’ understanding of oh that’s right as embodying an implicit memory claim rests on an inference which is based on a kind of semanticpragmatic compositionality. The paper thus illustrates how inferences in conversational interaction can be systematically studied and points to the merits of combining an interactional and a linguistic perspective.