Open Access

Sagen ist das häufigste lexikalische Verb im gesprochenen Deutsch. Es tritt in zahlreichen verfestigten Wendungen mit besonderen Gesprächsfunktionen auf – beispielsweise um Aussagen abzuschwächen, Aufmerksamkeit zu steuern, Wissen anzuzeigen oder das Thema zu wechseln. Die Studie dokumentiert und systematisiert den Gesamtbestand dieser Ausdrücke aus interaktionslinguistischer und konstruktionsgrammatischer Perspektive. Im Fokus stehen der Zusammenhang ihrer verschiedenen Gesprächsfunktionen, ihre lautliche Reduktion sowie der Grad ihrer formalen Verfestigung bis hin zur Univerbierung.

This book explores the vibrant linguistic world of young speakers through their YouTube comments. Combining linguistics, youth language and digitally mediated communication, this study is anchored in the groundbreaking NottDeuYTSch corpus, a collection of over 33 million words taken from YouTube comments spanning a decade (2008-2018). The book examines lexical, morphological, syntactic, and orthographic phenomena through three detailed corpus linguistic case studies. From the development of iconic slang terms to non-standard syntax and the creative use of graphical characters, Abogeil! reveals how young people innovate and reshape language in digital spaces. Essential for linguists, educators and anyone interested in digital youth culture, this work highlights the intersection of language, technology and identity in the 21st century.

In a recent study, Bromham, Yaxley and Cardillo (BYC) assembled an impressive database of 1,197 languages spoken across 13,100 islands to examine how predictions from island biogeography theory (IBT) apply to linguistic diversity and whether islands act as drivers of language change. I commend the authors for the significant effort in compiling such a truly global dataset of island languages, and for quantitatively demonstrating that islands hold a disproportionately greater share of the world’s languages than expected based on their land area. However, I here contend that the core model used to test the predictions of IBT and the hypothesis that islands shape language evolution is empirically implausible and plagued by several critical issues.

The Christmas and New Year addresses of the Federal Presidents and Federal Chancellors have been an annually recurring political text formal since 1949. This makes it wellsuited for shortterm diachronic corpus analyses. In our contribution, we focus on the use of personal nouns with a special emphasis on gender-inclusive language. Using manual annotations, we show that 11 % of all tokens in the speeches refer to persons, not including proper names. Pronouns make up 69 % of person references, personal nouns 31 %. In the case ofpersonal nouns, we see that gender-neutral nouns or neutralisations predominate (58 %), followed by masculine generics (20 %). An important research question for this article is whether the use of gender-inclusive variants in language has increased over time. We can seefrom the data that this is the case: the use of masculine generics has been declining since 1995,while pair forms have been increasing from the beginning. This is especially true for explicit pair forms like Mitbürgerinnen und Mitbürger ('fellow citizens'). Gender-inclusive language has therefore long been a part of the addresses, especially in the form of neutralisations and pair forms.