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The present Special Issue features a selection of papers presented at the 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10), held from 18 to 21 July 2023 in Mannheim, Germany (https://iclc10.ids-mannheim.de). The aim of the ICLC conference series, running since 1998, is to promote fine-grained cross-linguistic research comprising two or more languages from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. The collection of articles included in this Special Issue of Languages in Contrast addresses central questions in the contrastive study of selected linguistic constructions as objects of investigation, equivalents to other linguistic expressions, or as diagnostics. In particular, these constructions and the related issues include: future constructions and the role of syntactic complexity in their usage; classifier and quantifier constructions as environments for distinguishing mass versus count nouns; external possession constructions with their case features, grammatical functions, distribution and semantic properties; embedded exclamative constructions as structures whose conventional meaning is claimed to be projected by their matrix clause; existential and presentational constructions and the differences between them in negative contexts; as well as converbs and their range of uses (also including a diachronic perspective). The studies of these constructions take a variety of language pairs into account, including typologically close as well as distant languages, and in some cases, the contrastive analysis is extended to further languages. The contrasted languages are English-Norwegian, English-French, Chinese-English, Korean-Spanish, German-Russian(-Italian) and French-Polish-Czech. All of the contributions are corpus-based and use either monolingual corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC), the Open American National Corpus (OANC), the Norwegian Speech Corpus, the BigBrother corpus, Wordbanks Online, Frantext, the Czech National Corpus (CNC), the German Reference Corpus DeReKo, the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) or multilingual corpora, in particular parallel corpora such as OPUS, InterCorp and a self-compiled Chinese-English parallel corpus. In most cases, the corpus data are analyzed using descriptive statistical methods.

Morphological structure is not a given. Whether speakers perceive and linguists analyze words such as splendid, bombard, whiting, ugly, happy, or struggle as morphologically complex or not can depend on a variety of factors. Contrastive research on related languages reveals the central importance of relationality: the availability of other lexical items with some amount of shared structure. An intuitively simple notion, relationality is not trivial if we try to put it on a systematic footing. When are two structures perceived as the same? What does this mean for our theoretical understanding of morphological knowledge? In this talk, I discuss these and related questions with data from the ‘Germanic sandwich’: English, Dutch and German. I use the framework of Relational Morphology (Jackendoff/ Audring 2020), a construction-based approach to the grammar of words, to make sense of situations where morphological structure is ambiguous or questionable

The term retrospective shift marker is used in description of temporal constructions, which include a TAME-marked finite lexical verb and a finite-origin item petrified from the 3rd person singular past tense form of the verb ‘to be’. This ‘was’-element functions as a shift marker that moves the interpretation of an event to past from the deictic location of the speaker. Constructions of this kind are found in several Eurasian languages, including Turkic, Uralic, Slavic and Northwest Caucasian.

English is currently the most widely spoken language in the world and exerts great lexical influence on other language systems (cf. Eisenberg (ed.) 2018, p. 46). Numerous expressions originating in English are borrowed into other languages and morphologically adapted to the rules of their own language system in the meanwhile. In both German and French, this process can be realised in such a way that an English root of a lexical item is taken over without any modification and the implementation into the respective language system is then made possible by the addition of indigenous inflectional suffixes. The German lexicon in particular is enriched with English lexical material and integrates a large number of embedded English roots this way (cf. Fleischer/Barz 2012, p. 102). English also has a relatively large influence on the French language system, which is significantly more hostile to the borrowing of exogenous expressions (cf. Neusius 2021, p. 409). The preservation of a vocabulary that is as indigenous as possible is striven for much more strongly here than is the case in German, so that translations rather than morphological embedding are predominantly used for the integration of foreign-language units; only a few English stems find their way into French dictionaries. Looking from a morphological perspective, especially verbs borrowed from English represent an interesting object of study between the two languages, so that the focus of this talk will be on the investigation of this word class. As an example, the integration of a total of 21 English-derived verbs will be examined, which became established after 1990 and emerged from the fields of technology and electronic interaction (to add, to chat, to download, to email, to ghost, to host, to leak, to like, to mail, to photoshop, to podcast, to post, to retweet, to roam, to scroll, to stream, to upgrade, to upload, to vlog) (cf. OWID-Neologismenwörterbuch 2006ff.). With regard to the integration into the German language system, it can be observed that the verbal roots of the English expressions studied have been adopted and indigenous inflectional affixes have been added (e.g. add-en, download-en, lik-en). Today, 19 of the 21 verbs are recognised as standard language1 (cf. Duden online). The integration process is not without idiosyncracies: For the past tense as well as for the past participle, fluctuations of norms can be detected in large German-language corpora (DeReKo 2022 and GermanWeb2020). These often result in German-English hybrid forms (e.g. leakte/leakete; gechattet/gechatted, gelikt/geliket/geliked; geupgradet/upgegradet). (1) «Ihr wurde vermutlich vom Palast gesagt, dass sie den Kontakt mit befreundeten Presseleuten beenden soll. Ich wurde buchstäblich von ihr geghosted», erklärt Lizzie den Bruch. (https://www.20min.ch/story/meghan-wollte-einen-beruehmten-briten-daten-908140072771, detected via GermanWeb2020). While in German the implemented verb stems of almost all the verbs examined are classified as standard language, in French dictionaries only a small proportion of such verbs are found where the English root has been adopted (e.g. retweet-er, scroll-er) (cf. LeRobert dico en ligne). In the majority of cases, purely French equivalents are created in order to cover the meaning of the English expression linguistically in their own system (e.g. télécharger for engl. to download); consequently, from the prescriptive side, only 6 of the 21 English verb stems are integrated morphologically. In contrast, the situation appears different in natural language use: In the examination of a French-language web corpus (FrenchWeb2020), affixed forms of all 21 English verb stems are also found for French. The prescriptive rejection of non-standard language forms does not lead to uncertainties in inflection: In the French study corpus, no variation of norms can be identified within the respective inflection paradigms. (2) Au départ, j’étais bien déterminé à lui parler de son problème, de pourquoi elle nous ghostait tous depuis presque un mois. (https://plumedargent.fr/chapitre/episode-7-partie-4-elliot, detected via FrenchWeb2020). This talk will focus on the possibilities of linguistic realisation in terms of morphologically integrated English word stems (normative vs. natural inflection). It will also illuminate the standard and usage-based language acceptance of the corresponding verb forms of both language systems.