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The article deals with communicative failures of journalists in “YouTube” celebrity video interviews in the Ukrainian and German linguacultures from the point of view of social interaction and the theory of speech genres at all structural levels of the communicative genre construction, establishing common and distinctive features in both linguacultures. The analysis made it possible to conclude that behind a language (speech) failure there is a violation caused by a journalist, a respondent, or an external noise.
Mangelhafter Adressatenzuschnitt in ukrainischen und deutschen politischen Youtube-Interviews
(2019)
The article investigates Ukrainian and German YouTube interviews from the point of view of contrastive linguistics. The purpose of this paper is to separate out the interview as a communicative genre and to determine the main aspects of research on discrepancies in expectations among interview participants, in particular to clarify the role of poor recipient design as the cause of communication failures. Results indicate that poor recipient design is the most common source of communication failures in both languages.
„Unserdeutsch”, a creole spoken in a former German South Pacific colony, and what is now Papua New Guinea, is being extensively documented and studied by linguists for the first time. There is no time to lose, because after a chequered history the world's only German-based creole – long ignored – is facing extinction.
Einleitung
(2019)
Die lexikografische Behandlung von Neologismen aus der Perspektive hispanophoner DaF-Lernender
(2019)
Anhand von einigen medialen Kommunikationsverben wie mailen oder twittern wird das lexikografische Informationsangebot zu Neologismen auf seine Adäquatheit für die fremdsprachige Produktion untersucht. Die Untersuchung erfolgt aus der Perspektive eines spanischsprachigen DaF-Lernenden. Zur Analyse werden sowohl Neologismenwörterbücher und -datenbanken für das Deutsche als auch gängige, bilinguale Online-Wörterbücher für das Sprachenpaar Spanisch–Deutsch gezogen. Die Ergebnisse der lexikografischen Untersuchung werden exemplarisch mit korpusbasierten Daten aus einer Doktorarbeit verglichen. Die Befunde zeigen den Bedarf und die Notwendigkeit auf, die lexikografische Behandlung von (verbalen) Neologismen im spanisch–deutschen Kontext zu optimieren. Dabei soll — insbesondere — die fremdsprachige Textproduktion berücksichtigt werden.
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
Mehrsprachigkeitsdiskurse im Bildungskontext in Lettland zwischen Populismus und Weltoffenheit
(2019)
Unser Aufsatz diskutiert aktuelle Debatten zu Sprachen und Mehrsprachigkeit im Bildungssystem in Lettland. Theoretischer Hintergrund sind Debatten zur Mehrsprachigkeit, zu Spracheinstellungen und zur heteroglossischen Ideologie. Nach einer kurzen historischen Einführung in Fragen des sprachlichen Ökosystems Lettlands stellen wir Beispiele aus der aktuellen Reform der Schulcurricula vor, die Mehrsprachigkeitsansätze aufgreifen. Diese Reformversuche werden allerdings durch weit verbreitete Diskurse in der lettischen Gesellschaft abgelehnt. Anhand von Reaktionen von Bildungspolitikern und in journalistischen Texten zeigen wir, wie einflussreich traditionelle Vorstellungen vom Sprachlernen nach wie vor sind und wie eine Modernisierung des Lettischunterrichts mit Fragen von nationaler Identität verbunden wird, in denen bisweilen sogar offen xenophobisch argumentiert wird. Gleichzeitig wird deutlich, wie im Diskurs im Interesse der „Rettung der lettischen Sprache“ mit Mythen und Halbwahrheiten operiert wird. Der dritte Teil des Aufsatzes stellt in diesem Kontext zwei Studien unter Lehrern in Lettland vor, in denen explizit nach Einstellungen und Praktiken zu Code-Switching, Translanguaging und ähnlichen Phänomenen gefragt wurde. In den Antworten zeigt sich die Spaltung der Gesellschaft; jedoch zeigen die Ergebnisse auch, dass Perspektiven für einen modernen und mehrsprachigen Sprachunterricht in Lettland durchaus vorhanden sind.
This paper analyzes the LL in the city of Bautzen / Budyšin in Germany, a town which is frequently considered the “capital” of the Slavonic minority of the Sorbs. It focuses on the societal role of Sorbian in relation to practices and ideologies of mainstream German society. The vast majority of signs in Bautzen / Budyšin are in German only. Sorbian is essentially restricted to explicitly Sorbian institutions and to local and regional administration. Interviews conducted in shops and on the streets reveal that paternalistic attitudes common to perceptions of language policies and minority languages in Germany dominate; practices maintain the common monolingual habitus in German society. Members of the majority population show little awareness of Sorbian issues, and Sorbian signage is seen as a generous gesture but considered essentially unnecessary. Only in most recent times, a reaction by the Sorbian community has challenged these practices and attitudes.
Resistance and adaptation to newspeakerness in educational institutions: two tales from Estonia
(2019)
The term ‘new speaker’ has recently emerged as an attempt by sociolinguists not only to understand the diferent types of speaker profles that can be found in contemporary societies, but also to grasp the underlying processes of becoming a legitimate speaker in a given society. In this article, we combine the results from two studies situated in two educational institutions in Estonia in order to fnd out about speakers’ language attitudes and experiences in connection to learning and using Estonian. We concentrate on members of the international community who have relatively recently arrived to the country. Our results indicate that these speakers fuctuate between two prototypical discourses, which we broadly dub as ‘resistance’ and ‘adaptation’ to newspeakerness. Our study thereby adds to current debates on ‘new speaker’ and language policy issues by illustrating how tensions around language legitimacy are played out on the ground in a small nation state such as Estonia.
This paper focuses on so called syntactic projection phenomena in the German language. This term from the German Gesprächsforschung is used to define the fact that an utterance or part of it foreshadows another one. This paper aims at pointing out how such projection phenomena are consciously exploited for rhethorical purposes. This will be observed on the basis of excerpts from the Stuttgart 21 mediation talks. The linguistic analysis carried out in this paper will focus on syntactic projection phenomena involving the use of causal adverbial connectives deshalb and deswegen.
Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit dem Gebrauch von konnektintegrierbaren Konnektoren im gesprochenen Deutsch. Die Analyse wird am Beispiel der Adverbkonnektoren deshalb und deswegen als Korrelate zum Subjunktor weil und ausgehend von theoretischen Prämissen aus der traditionellen Grammatik und aus der Gesprächsforschung durchgeführt. Der Gebrauch der genannten Konnektoren wird innerhalb einer Auswahl von Korpusdaten gesprochener Sprache beobachtet, die mehrere verschiedene Gattungen der alltäglichen bzw. der institutionellen Kommunikation umfasst.
This paper aims at investigating the usage of present subjunctive (Konjunktiv I), which is traditionally labelled as a feature of standard written language and therefore as typically occurring in communication genres based on it such as press texts and reporting, in everyday spoken German. Through an analysis of corpus data performed according to theory and method of Interactional Linguistics and encompassing private, institutional and public interactional domains, the paper will show how this particular verb form expresses different epistemic stances according to its syntactic embedment.
Canadian heritage German across three generations: A diary-based study of language shift in action
(2019)
It is well known that migration has an effect on language use and language choice. If the language of origin is maintained after migration, it tends to change in the new contact setting. Often, migrants shift to the new majority language within few generations. The current paper examines a diary corpus containing data from three generations of one German-Canadian family, ranging from 1867 to 1909, and covering the second to fourth generation after immigration. The paper analyzes changes that can be observed between the generations, with respect to the language system as well as to the individuals’ decision on language choice. The data not only offer insight into the dynamics of acquiring a written register of a heritage language, and the eventual shift to the majority language. They also allow us to identify different linguistic profiles of heritage speakers within one community. It is discussed how these profiles can be linked to the individuals’ family backgrounds and how the combination of these backgrounds may have contributed to giving up the heritage language in favor of the majority language.
Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich mit dem computergestützten Transkriptionsverfahren arabisch-deutscher Gesprächsdaten für interaktionsbezogene Untersuchungen auseinander. Zunächst werden wesentliche methodische Herausforderungen der gesprächsanalytischen Arbeit adressiert: Hinsichtlich der derzeitigen Korpustechnologie ermöglicht die Verwendung von arabischen Schriftzeichen in einem mehrsprachigen, bidirektionalen Transkript keine analysegerechte Rekonstruktion von Reziprozität, Linearität und Simultaneität sprachlichen Handelns. Zudem ist die Verschriftung von arabischen Gesprächsdaten aufgrund der unzureichenden (gesprächsanalytischen) Beschäftigung mit den standardfernen Varietäten und gesprochensprachlichen Phänomenen erschwert. Daher widmet sich der zweite Teil des Beitrags den bisher erarbeiteten und erprobten Lösungsansätzen ̶ einem stringenten, gesprächsanalytisch fundierten Transkriptionssystem für gesprochenes Arabisch.
Speech planning is a sophisticated process. In dialog, it regularly starts in overlap with an incoming turn by a conversation partner. We show that planning spoken responses in overlap with incoming turns is associated with higher processing load than planning in silence. In a dialogic experiment, participants took turns with a confederate describing lists of objects. The confederate’s utterances (to which participants responded) were pre-recorded and varied in whether they ended in a verb or an object noun and whether this ending was predictable or not. We found that response planning in overlap with sentence-final verbs evokes larger task-evoked pupillary responses, while end predictability had no effect. This finding indicates that planning in overlap leads to higher processing load for next speakers in dialog and that next speakers do not proactively modulate the time course of their response planning based on their predictions of turn endings. The turn-taking system exerts pressure on the language processing system by pushing speakers to plan in overlap despite the ensuing increase in processing load.
Im Folgenden soll der Versuch unternommen werden, die bisherigen Forschungen zur Sprachgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im Lichte ihres Erkenntnispotenzials für gegenwärtige historiografische Fragestellungen zu diskutieren. In einem ersten Schritt wird die Forschungsgeschichte zur Sprache des beziehungsweise im Nationalsozialismus von der frühen Nachkriegszeit bis in die 1980er-Jahre skizziert. Deutlich wird hier vor allem, dass in dieser Phase zwar wichtige Arbeiten entstanden sind, jedoch methodische und theoretische Begrenzungen zahlreiche blinde Flecken bestehen ließen. In einem zweiten Schritt wird dargelegt, mit welchen Erkenntnisinteressen und Instrumentarien die jüngere Forschung sich auf diese blinden Flecken konzentriert und welche Ergebnisse sie zutage gefördert hat. Dabei sollen vor allem diejenigen Aspekte benannt werden, die nach Ansicht des Verfassers bei einer noch zu schreibenden Sprach- und Kommunikationsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus zu beachten sind. Es handelt sich konkret um eine Ausweitung der Perspektive in Richtung unterschiedlicher Kommunikationssituationen und heterogener Akteurskonstellationen, um Sprachgebräuche unter den Diskursbedingungen des Nationalsozialismus angemessen beschreiben zu können.
The use of digital resources and tools across humanities disciplines is steadily increasing, giving rise to new research paradigms and associated methods that are commonly subsumed under the term digital humanities. Digital humanities does not constitute a new discipline in itself, but rather a new approach to humanities research that cuts across different existing humanities disciplines. While digital humanities extends well beyond language-based research, textual resources and spoken language materials play a central role in most humanities disciplines.
In German oral discourse, previous research has shown that okay can be used both as a response token (e.g., for agreeing with the previous turn or for claiming a certain degree of understanding) and as a discourse marker (e.g., for closing conversational topics or sequences and/or indicating transitions). This contribution focuses on the use of okay as a response token and how it is connected with the speakers’ interactional state of knowledge (their understanding, their assumptions etc.). The analysis is based on video recorded everyday conversations in German and a sequential, micro-analytic approach (multimodal conversation analysis). The main function of conversational okay in the selected data set is related to indicating the acceptance of prior information. By okay, speakers however claim acceptance of a piece of information that they can’t verify or check. The analysis contrasts different sequences containing okay only with sequences in which change-of-state tokens such as ah and achso co-occur with okay. This illustrates that okay itself does not index prior information as new, and that it is not used for agreeing with or for confirming prior information. Instead it enables the speaker to adopt a kind of neutral, “non-agreeing” position towards a given piece of information.
The transfer of research data management from one institution to another infrastructural partner is all but trivial, but can be required, for instance, when an institution faces reorganization or closure. In a case study, we describe the migration of all research data, identify the challenges we encountered, and discuss how we addressed them. It shows that the moving of research data management to another institution is a feasible, but potentially costly enterprise. Being able to demonstrate the feasibility of research data migration supports the stance of data archives that users can expect high levels of trust and reliability when it comes to data safety and sustainability.
Zu den Beiträgen des Themenhefts.
Die in dem Themenheft versammelten Beiträge setzen sich unter verschiedenen Fragestellungen, im Rahmen unterschiedlicher methodischer Ansätze und jeweils eigener Datensets mit Öffentlichkeit, Privatheit und Anonymität im kommunikativen Handeln mit mobilen Medien auseinander.
This paper investigates self-initiated uses of mobile phones (such as texting or making a call) in everyday video-recorded conversations among Czech speakers. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis, it illustrates how participants publicly frame their own device use (for example, by announcements), and how co-present interlocutors respond to it. Previous studies have described how participants manage two concurrent communicative involvements, but have not provided detailed sequential descriptions of how device use can be negotiated and accounted for. This study shows that mobile device use in co-presence is not a priori problematic (or vice versa). Instead, participants frame their technology use in different ways according to various features of the social situation they treat as momentarily relevant. These features include the course of the conversation and how the device use relates to it, the overall participation framework and the opacity of the device use for co-present others.
Central complements: good arguments are self-explanatory.
Together with its central complements, verbs model basic patterns of interaction. The constellations of these complements in turn correspond to central patterns of the argument structure. Nominative and accusative complements formally occupy the first and second positions (subject and object), but they also have certain semantic preferences. The formal function of the dative is less pronounced, where it occurs (ditransitive verbs) the semantic imprint of the frame („transfer“) is very strong. This corresponds to the meaning of a core group of corresponding verbs. Other verbs that allow this pattern are used more often in other valence structures and the ditransitive use appears as a systematic way of personal extension of object‑related activities. This will be discussed with reference to the verbs zeigen and (in a different way) lehren.
Although the N400 was originally discovered in a paradigm designed to elicit a P300 (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980), its relationship with the P300 and how both overlapping event-related potentials (ERPs) determine behavioral profiles is still elusive. Here we conducted an ERP (N = 20) and a multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) experiment (N = 16) on distinct participant samples using an antonym paradigm (The opposite of black is white/nice/yellow with acceptability judgment). We hypothesized that SAT profiles incorporate processes of task-related decision-making (P300) and stimulus-related expectation violation (N400). We replicated previous ERP results (Roehm et al., 2007): in the correct condition (white), the expected target elicits a P300, while both expectation violations engender an N400 [reduced for related (yellow) vs. unrelated targets (nice)]. Using multivariate Bayesian mixed-effects models, we modeled the P300 and N400 responses simultaneously and found that correlation between residuals and subject-level random effects of each response window was minimal, suggesting that the components are largely independent. For the SAT data, we found that antonyms and unrelated targets had a similar slope (rate of increase in accuracy over time) and an asymptote at ceiling, while related targets showed both a lower slope and a lower asymptote, reaching only approximately 80% accuracy. Using a GLMM-based approach (Davidson and Martin, 2013), we modeled these dynamics using response time and condition as predictors. Replacing the predictor for condition with the averaged P300 and N400 amplitudes from the ERP experiment, we achieved identical model performance. We then examined the piecewise contribution of the P300 and N400 amplitudes with partial effects (see Hohenstein and Kliegl, 2015). Unsurprisingly, the P300 amplitude was the strongest contributor to the SAT-curve in the antonym condition and the N400 was the strongest contributor in the unrelated condition. In brief, this is the first demonstration of how overlapping ERP responses in one sample of participants predict behavioral SAT profiles of another sample. The P300 and N400 reflect two independent but interacting processes and the competition between these processes is reflected differently in behavioral parameters of speed and accuracy.
Gegenstand ist eine vergleichende empirische Korpusstudie zur Bedeutung des Ausdrucks geschäftsmäßig im (bundesdeutschen) Gemeinsprach- und juristischen Fachsprachgebrauch. Die Studie illustriert an einem aktuellen Fall strittiger Wortdeutung (hier zu § 217 StGB) die Möglichkeiten computergestützter Sprachgebrauchsanalyse für die Auslegung vor Gericht und die Normtextprognose in der Rechtsetzung.
In this paper we present the results of a survey conducted among students of German Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in the years 2015–2017. The target group was composed of first-semester students from whom we collected data about their lexicographical competence at the start of the program. The results contain some interesting findings, e.g. students prefer online dictionaries, but the number of students using print dictionaries is comparable and we have also observed the rising number of students who use smartphone applications. The aim of the survey is to provide information for university instructors who teach German as a foreign language (DaF) and lexicography.
Lebenslauf bis 2019
(2019)
Ulrich Engel schildert die einzelnen Stationen seines Lebens: als Kind im Vorkriegsdeutschland und als junger Soldat, anschließend seine Lehrertätigkeit und wissenschaftliche Laufbahn, insbesondere seine Funktion als Direktor des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Er hebt seine Tätigkeit als Leiter von mehreren Projekten von kontrastiven zweisprachigen Grammatiken sowie Valenzwörterbüchern hervor. Dabei schildert er seinen familiären Hintergrund als Spiegel des gesellschaftlich‑politischen Wandels im Vor‑ und Nachkriegsdeutschland.
Der Beitrag ist die Verschriftlichung der Laudatio, die die Autorin anlässlich des Festaktes zum 90. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Ulrich Engel am Leibniz‑Institut für Deutsche Sprache (=IDS) gehalten hat. Es handelt sich um eine persönliche Sicht auf fast drei Dekaden Forschungsarbeit, in denen zwischen Engel und der Germanistischen Abteilung der Universität Santiago de Compostela eine sehr enge Forschungskooperation bestand.
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.
Die Vermittlung von Fachsprache gewinnt in der heutigen europäischen Gesellschaft, die von 'Bewegungen' unterschiedlicher Art charakterisiert ist, immer mehr an Relevanz, aber die Lernergruppen werden immer differenzierter und die Lehrenden, die meist keine Experten auf dem Fachgebiet sind, haben Schwierigkeiten lernergerechte Kurse zu gestalten, da die Möglichkeiten zur Aus- oder Fortbildung selten sind. Fragen, die offen stehen oder nur teilweise beantwortet wurden, gibt es noch viele und eine einheitliche Antwort ist nicht immer möglich, aber wir möchten trotzdem versuchen, anstatt von Problemfällen auch Experimente und Lösungen vorzustellen. Wir möchten zeigen, wie und mit welchen Mitteln und Werkzeugen Fachsprachen beschrieben werden können und welche Auswirkungen dies im Unterricht haben kann. Nach einem Überblick über die unterschiedlichen Definitionsmöglichkeiten von 'Fachsprache', zeigen wir, welche Auswirkungen die unterschiedlichen Schwerpunkte in der Lehre haben können. Abschließend werden wir ein kleines korpuslinguistisches Experiment vorstellen (Korpus mit den Aufsätzen zum Themenschwerpunkt 'Fachsprache' ZIF 2019-1), um mögliche Anregungen zur Benutzung von Korpora zu geben, da sich Korpora in allen Phasen des Unterrichts (vor, während und danach) sowohl für Lehrende als auch für Lernende positiv auswirken können.
The DRuKoLA project
(2019)
DRuKoLA, the accompanying project in the making of the Corpus of Romanian Language, is a cooperation between German and Romanian computer scientists, corpus linguists and linguists, aiming at linking reference corpora of European languages under one corpus analysis tool able to manage big data. KorAP, the analysis tool developed at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (Mannheim), is being tailored for the Romanian language in a first attempt to reunite reference corpora under the EuReCo initiative, detailed in this paper. The paper describes the necessary steps of harmonization within KorAP and the corpus of Romanian language and discusses, as one important goal of this project, criteria and ways to build virtual comparable corpora to be used for contrastive linguistic analyses.
The present paper examines a variety of ways in which the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa) can be used. A multitude of examples intends to highlight a wide range of interrogation possibilities that CoRoLa opens for different types of users. The querying of CoRoLa displayed here is supported by the KorAP frontend, through the querying language Poliqarp. Interrogations address annotation layers, such as the lexical, morphological and, in the near future, the syntactical layer, as well as the metadata. Other issues discussed are how to build a virtual corpus, how to deal with errors, how to find expressions and how to identify expressions.
The user interfaces for corpus analysis platforms must provide a high degree of accessibility for ordinary users and at the same time provide the possibility to answer complex research questions. In this paper, we present the design concepts behind the user interface of KorAP, a corpus analysis platform that has evolved into the main gateway to CoRoLa, the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language. Based on established principles of user interface design, we show how KorAP addresses the challenge of providing a user-friendly interface for heterogeneous corpus data to a wide range of users with different research questions.
Little strokes fell great oaks. Creating CoRoLa, the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian
(2019)
The paper presents the quite long-standing tradition of Romanian corpus acquisition and processing, which reaches its peak with the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian language (CoRoLa). The paper describes decisions behind the kinds of texts collected, as well as processing and annotation steps, highlighting the structure and importance of metadata to the corpus. The reader is also introduced to the three ways in which (s)he can plunge into the rich linguistic data of the corpus, waiting to be discovered. Besides querying the corpus, word embeddings extracted from it are useful to various natural language processing applications and for linguists, when user-friendly interfaces offer them the possibility to exploit the data.
Introduction
(2019)
Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
Persuasionsstrategien in deutschen rechtsorientierten Zeitungen. Eine korpuslinguistische Studie
(2019)
Corpus Linguistics has often proved fruitful to examine different types of discourses, also the one of refugees. Aim of the paper is to show how language usage patterns can be focused on with the help of techniques grounded in Corpus Linguistics, giving information about themes and topoi. After showing what type of words (keywords, collocations) and what type of phenomena will be considered (topoi, metaphors and frames) in the article, the focus will shift on the methodology and the adopted criteria. After presenting the primary corpus (articles from right-oriented newspapers) and the comparison corpus (articles from 'Die Zeit') the main results of the analysis are presented and reflected on.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DEREKO and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.
This investigation targets a syntactic phenomenon of German which is commonly referred to as the absentive construction. The absentive is considered a universal grammatical category denoting absence. Its syntax is characterised by the occurrence of an auxiliary or copula verb accompanied by a non‐finite VP containing a main verb. The expression of absence, predicated over the clausal subject, is assumed to be based on a constructional meaning. Reviewing a wide range of syntactic and interpretive properties of this structure in German, we will demonstrate that certain empirical claims about the construction are not well founded and that its seemingly idiosyncratic properties are indeed available for compositional analyses. We will propose a structural analysis of its core syntactic and interpretive properties: The predication expresses the localisation of the subject at the location of the event, denoted by the infinitival verb. The interpretation of absence, then, can be explained by an implicature.
This article investigates the use of überhaupt and sowieso in German and Dutch. These two words are frequently classified as particles, if only because of their pragmatic functions. The frequent use of particles is considered a specific trait common to German and Dutch, and the description of their semantics and pragmatics is notoriously difficult. It is unclear whether both particles have the same meaning in Dutch (where they are loanwords) and German, whether they can fulfil the same syntactic functions and to what extent the (semantic and pragmatic) functions of überhaupt und sowieso overlap. There has already been linguistic research on überhaupt and sowieso by Fisseni (2009) using the world-wide web and by Bruijnen and Sudhoff (2013) using the EUROPARL corpus. In the present study we critically evaluated the corpus study, integrating information on original utterance language and discussing the adequacy of this corpus. Moreover, we conducted an experimental survey collecting subjective-intuitive judgements in three dimensions, thus gathering more data on sparse and informal constructions.
By using these complementary methods, we obtain a more nuanced picture of the use of überhaupt and sowieso in both languages: On the one hand, the data show where the use of both words is more similar and on the other hand, differences between the languages can also be discerned.
In diesem Artikel wird der Tempus-Modus-Gebrauch in indirekter Redewiedergabe im Niederdeutschen im Vergleich mit dem Hochdeutschen, Englischen und Norwegischen untersucht. Die hochdeutsche Standardsprache verfügt über eine voll ausgebaute Indikativ-Konjunktiv-Unterscheidung, wobei eine der Funktionen des Konjunktivs in der Markierung indirekter Rede besteht. Viele andere germanische Sprachen, hier vertreten durch das Englische und Norwegische, kennen keine vergleichbare Konjunktivkategorie (mehr). Indirekte Rede steht dort im Indikativ, wobei häufig das Phänomen der Tempusverschiebung zu beobachten ist. Das nördliche Niederdeutsche kennt ebenfalls keine distinkten Konjunktivformen, womit sich die Frage stellt, ob auch die Redewiedergabe wie in den anderen konjunktivlosen Sprachen funktioniert. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht dieser Frage im Rahmen einer empirischen Untersuchung nach. Als Datengrundlage dienen nordniederdeutsche Radionachrichten. Es zeigt sich, dass die Verteilung von Präsens und Präteritum in den niederdeutschen Radiodaten weiter ausfällt als in den konjunktivlosen Vergleichssprachen: Das Präsens tritt, wie im Hochdeutschen, auch dort auf, wo im Englischen und Norwegischen mit einer Verschiebung zum Präteritum zu rechnen wäre. Und für das Präteritum ergibt sich eine reportiv-konjunktivische Verwendung, die keine Entsprechung im Englischen oder Norwegischen hat.