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Besides English, Afrikaans is considered “the [Germanic] language which deviates grammatically the farthest from the others” (Harbert 2007: 17). But how exactly do we measure “grammatical deviation”, and how deviant is Afrikaans really if we compare it not just to other standard languages but also to non-standard varieties? The present contribution aims to address those questions combining functional-typological and dialectometric perspectives. We first select data for 28 Germanic varieties showing vastly different speaker numbers, grades of standardisation and amounts of language contact. Based on 48 (micro)typological variables from syntax, morphology and phonology, we perform cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling and present ways of visualizing and interpreting the results. Inter alia, the analyses show a major divide between Continental West Germanic and North Germanic (as might be expected) and they also identify a number of outliers, including English and pidgin and creole languages such as Russenorsk or Rabaul Creole German. Afrikaans appears to cluster with the other West Germanic languages rather than the outliers. Within West Germanic, however, it does indeed emerge as rather deviant and, according to our metric, it is, for example, typologically closer to other high-contact varieties such as Yiddish than it is to Dutch.
Post-field syntax and focalization strategies in National Socialist political speech. This paper deals with a syntactic feature of spoken German, i.e. post-field filling, and with its occurrence in one specific discourse type – political speech – throughout one significant period of the history of German language – National Socialism. This paper aims at pointing out the communicative pragmatic function of right dislocation in the NS political speech on the basis of some collected examples.
This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas:
1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation.
2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language.
3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis.
By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing.
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.
In der Arbeit wird ein Verfahren zur Ermittlung der Zweitsprachkenntnisse bei der Einschulung behandelt, das auf der Profilanalyse basiert. Zuerst werden allgemeine Fragen der Sprachstandsdiagnose bei Kindern ohne Schriftsprachkenntnisse und einige Aspekte des Zweitspracherwerbs, unter ihnen Regelbildungsprozesse behandelt. Dann wird die linguistische Basis der Profilanalyse vorgestellt, wie sie aus dem ZISA-Projekt heraus für Deutsch als Zweitsprache entwickelt wurde. Im Kern des Verfahrens steht die Erkenntnis, dass die Stellung verbaler Elemente in bestimmten Schritten erworben wird. Aus der Kritik an dem ursprünglich von Clahsen vorgelegten Entwurf werden Grundlagen für eine revidierte Vorgehensweise entwickelt. Daran schließt sich eine Diskussion des Verhältnisses zwischen den Phrasenstrukturen und damit zusammenhängenden Eigenschaften der Lernersprache an. Mit den Mitteln der funktionalen Pragmatik wird die Stellung vor dem Finitum (Prä-V2) in ihrer Funktionalität für die deutsche Sprache behandelt. Diese Zusammenhänge werden in einem empirischen Teil exemplarisch an Lerneräußerungen überprüft und herausgearbeitet, die für die jeweiligen Erwerbsstufen stehen. Der Beitrag schließt mit einem Resümee und Vorschlägen für die weitere Forschung. Im Anhang wird ein revidierter Profilbogen und ein von LehrerInnen vereinfachtes Modell eines Profilbogens dokumentiert. Weiterhin enthält der Anhang die
vollständigen Transkriptionen der untersuchten Lerneräußerungen.
This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (“semantic reversal anomalies”). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003, Kuperberg et al., 2003), but a biphasic N400 – late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identification of argument roles. The overall pattern of results reveals two separate dimensions of cross-linguistic variation: (i) the presence vs. absence of an N400, which we attribute to cross-linguistic differences with regard to the sequence-dependence of the form-to-meaning mapping and (ii) the presence vs. absence of a late positivity, which we interpret as an instance of a categorisation-related late P300, and which is observable when the language under consideration allows for a binary well-formedness categorisation of reversal anomalies. We conclude that, rather than reflecting linguistic domains such as syntax and semantics, the late positivity vs. N400 distinction is better understood in terms of the strategies that serve to optimise the form-to-meaning mapping in a given language.
Agreement between the verb and its arguments as a predominant phenomenon in language has received major attention in the theoretical literature. One specific aspect under discussion concerns differences between number and person agreement, with the latter being the more restricted one (restricted by Baker’s 2008 SCOPA, by variants of the Person Licensing Condition of Béjar & Rezac 2003, or by multiple agreement see Schütze 2003; Ackema & Neeleman 2018). In this paper we address the restrictions on person agreement with a nominative noun phrase in a low position by investigating a relatively little-discussed configuration, namely specificational copular constructions in Dutch such as dat de inspiratie voor deze roman niet jij %bent / ??is. We provide data from both a production and a rating study comparing 3/2 person agreement and show that what initially looks like a “person effect” in Dutch turns out to be a pronoun effect.