Open Access

The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).

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Between January 2020 and July 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary to enable communication under the new conditions that evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic. Medical and epidemiological vocabulary was integrated into the general language to a large extent. Suddenly, some lexemes from general language were used with very high frequency, while other words were used less often than before. These processes of language change can be studied in various ways, for example, in corpus linguistics with respect to the frequency or emergence of certain words in certain types of texts (e.g. press releases vs. posts in social media), in critical discourse analysis with respect to certain participants of the discourse (e.g. vocabulary of Covid-19 pandemic deniers), or in conversation analysis (e.g. with respect to new verbal interactions in greetings and farewells). The rapid expansion of vocabulary has notably affected also lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics. This article will focus on the ways in which a German neologism dictionary project has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Both challenges and advantages arise from lexicographic practice “at the pulse of time”. The Neologismenwörterbuch is presented as an example that lends itself well to such a discussion because its subject (neologisms) is characterized as new, innovative, and constantly changing.