Open Access

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.

The contributions of this special issue will look at video data documenting how participants use and adapt to technologies in and for social interaction. This special issue therefore focuses on multimodal, i.e., both verbal and nonverbal, communication practices of participants in a selection of social settings, both day-to-day and institutional, where various technologies, both well-known and more innovative, are present.

Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welche Akteure die Stellung des Deutschen im heutigen Europa beeinflussen (können). Als Grundlage für die Untersuchung wird die Sprachmanagementtheorie gewählt, die sich mit dem Verhalten verschiedener Akteure gegenüber der Sprache beschäftigt. Diese metasprachlichen Aktivitäten definieren das Schlüsselkonzept Sprachmanagement. Auseinandergehende sprachenpolitische Interessen und Konflikte werden in Abhängigkeit von der Macht des jeweiligen Akteurs gelöst. Es werden konkrete Beispiele analysiert, die sich auf der EU Ebene, der Ebene eines EU-Mitgliedsstaates wie auch in Regionen abspielen.

This article presents a revised version of GAT, a transcription system first devel-oped by a group of German conversation analysts and interactional linguists in 1998. GAT tries to follow as many principles and conventions as possible of the Jefferson-style transcription used in Conversation Analysis, yet proposes some conventions which are more compatible with linguistic and phonetic analyses of spoken language, especially for the representation of prosody in talk-in-interaction. After ten years of use by researchers in conversation and discourse analysis, the original GAT has been revised, against the background of past experience and in light of new necessities for the transcription of corpora arising from technologi-cal advances and methodological developments over recent years. The present text makes GAT accessible for the English-speaking community. It presents the GAT 2 transcription system with all its conventions and gives detailed instructions on how to transcribe spoken interaction at three levels of delicacy: minimal, basic and fine. In addition, it briefly introduces some tools that may be helpful for the user: the German online tutorial GAT-TO and the transcription editing software FOLKER.