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In this article I explore the construction of singing child characters in Isaac Watts’ Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715) and Christopher Smart’s Hymns for the Amusement of Children (1771). The first part focusses on the nature of the lyrical persona within the lexical fields »voice and vocal sound« and »religion« and also looks at the possible addressees. The second part examines stylistic, phonetic, and formal elements, and explores their role in constructing the ›singing I.‹ To show the potential of Watts’ »Against Quarrelling and Fighting« to function as an invitation to playfully adopt behaviour opposed to Christian norms, the article examines a performance of Let Dogs Delight to Bark and Bite, a chorale by Matthew J. Zimnoch, whose text is taken from Watts’ hymn. Combining approaches from research on children’s poetry with ones from the interface of children’s literature and hymnody, the article also integrates a digitally supported close reading. The hymn texts were inputted into f4analyse, a software used in text linguistics and the social sciences, which allows for the assignment of categories, such as positive self-connotation of the ›singing I‹ or rhyme patterns. In conclusion, the article evaluates the potential of such a digitally supported research methodology for future research at the intersection of children’s literature and digital humanities.
Das Bilderbuch als Klangmedium : ästhetische, wissenschaftliche und künstlerische Perspektiven
(2021)
Musik und Klang können auf unterschiedliche Weise Eingang in ein Bilderbuch finden. Aus methodischer Sicht lassen sich auf der einen Seite außermusikalische Inhalte (v. a. Texte und Bilder) musikalisch darstellen (Verklanglichung, Vertonung), und auf der anderen Seite besteht die Möglichkeit, Musik in andere Medien zu transformieren (Bild und Visualisierung, Bewegung und Verkörperung, Text und Versprachlichung). Diese Interdependenzen finden sich auch in Gattungen und Kompositionstechniken, wie z. B. Oper und Programmmusik, in denen sich Handlung, Text und Musik wechselseitig beeinflussen und überlagern...
Seiten aufschlagen. Saiten anschlagen : Formen und Funktionen eines literarischen Soundtracks
(2021)
Zu den bitteren Erfahrungen einer Corona-Erkrankung kann der Verlust des Geschmackssinns gehören. Es hat sich jedoch gezeigt, dass Menschen auch aufgrund vorangegangener Geschmackserfahrungen schmecken können. Kann der Geschmack eines Gerichts im Gehirn erinnernd abgerufen werden, ist es also möglich zu schmecken, obwohl der Geschmackssinn (temporär) verloren gegangen ist? Ein solches Aufrufen sinnlicher Erfahrungen ist integrativer Bestandteil rezeptionsästhetischer Lektüreaspekte und kann die Bereiche aller Sinneskanäle umfassen: Wird eine innerdiegetische Saite angeschlagen, überträgt sich der Klang aufgrund von Erfahrungswerten in unsere Wahrnehmung...
Editorial [2021, english]
(2021)
Editorial [2021, deutsch]
(2021)
Editorial [2020, deutsch]
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Editorial [2019, english]
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Editorial [2019, deutsch]
(2019)
Das weisse Buch (2010) dient Rafael Horzon als Baustein seiner öffentlichen Inszenierungspraktiken, die, so die These dieses Beitrags, den kulturellen Techniken von hochstaplerischen Performances entsprechen. Es wird folgend der Versuch unternommen, Überlegungen zum Begriff der ‚Hochstapelei‘ mit vielversprechenden Ansätzen der autofiktionstheoretischen Forschung zu verbinden. Dabei arbeitet der Beitrag heraus, wie sich der reale Autor Rafael Horzon als gleichnamiger autodiegetischer Erzähler in Das weisse Buch inszeniert. Peritextuelle Angaben in Form von zugleich ironisierenden und täuschenden Gattungsbestimmungen sowie Wahrheitsbekundungen sind Teil einer textintern zum Vorschein kommenden hochstaplerischen Performance. Mit dem spielerischen Umgang zwischen Primärtext und Epitexten setzt der reale Autor Horzon diese Performance textextern fort und versperrt seinen Rezipient*innen letztlich den Zugang zur ‚echten‘ Person hinter dieser schelmischen Fassade.
The role of music in second-language (L2) learning has long been the object of various empirical and theoretical inquiries. However, research on whether the effect of background music (BM) on language-related task performance is facilitative or inhibitory has produced inconsistent findings. Hence, we investigated the effect of happy and sad BM on complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of L2 speaking among intermediate learners of English. A between-groups design was used, in which 60 participants were randomly assigned to three groups with two experimental groups performing an oral L2 English retelling task while listening to either happy or sad BM, and a control group performing the task with no background music. The results demonstrated the happy BM group’s significant outperformance in fluency over the control group. In accuracy, the happy BM group also outdid the controls (error-free clauses, correct verb forms). Moreover, the sad BM group performed better in accuracy than the controls but in only one of its measures (correct verb forms). Furthermore, no significant difference between the groups in syntactic complexity was observed. The study, in line with the current literature on BM effects, suggests that it might have specific impacts on L2 oral production, explained by factors such as mood, arousal, neural mechanism, and the target task’s properties.
This article examines Jamal Mahjoub's 2003 novel Travelling with Djinns from a transcultural perspective. Drawing on Wolfgang Welsch's definition of transculturality, I argue that the road trip plays an integral role in how the novel maps 21st century Europe as a heterogeneous construct. While driving from Germany through France to Spain, the main character Yasin adopts a fluid understanding of identity, informed by his experience of being on the move. Simultaneously, the novel conceptualises the European continent as irrevocably shaped by its history of migration, relating the road trip to other historic experiences of travel, migration and exile, some – but not all – of which linked to Europe's colonial past. Extensive intertextual references also support the novel's central idea that cultural encounters have shaped Europe for centuries. Since transcultural exchanges tend to be an ever-growing phenomenon in the face of mass migration, globalisation and communication technology, Travelling with Djinns sets out to underscore the continent's transcultural condition as both historic and ongoing.
Nature's non-material contributions to people are difficult to quantify and one aspect in particular, nature's contributions to communication (NCC), has so far been neglected. Recent advances in automated language processing tools enable us to quantify diversity patterns underlying the distribution of plant and animal taxon labels in creative literature, which we term BiL (biodiversity in literature). We assume BiL to provide a proxy for people's openness to nature's non-material contributions enhancing our understanding of NCC. We assembled a comprehensive list of 240,000 English biological taxon labels. We pre-processed and searched a subcorpus of digitised literature on Project Gutenberg for these labels. We quantified changes in biodiversity indices commonly used in ecological studies for 16,000 books, encompassing 4,000 authors, as proxies for BiL between 1705 and 1969. We observed hump-shape patterns for taxon label richness, abundance and Shannon diversity indicating a peak of BiL in the middle of the 19th century. This is also true for the ratio of biological to general lexical richness. The variation in label use between different sections within books, quantified as β-diversity, declined until the 1830s and recovered little, indicating a less specialised use of taxon labels over time. This pattern corroborates our hypothesis that before the onset of industrialisation BiL may have increased, reflecting several concomitant influences such as the general broadening of literary content, improved education and possibly an intensified awareness of the starting loss of biodiversity during the period of romanticism. Given that these positive trends continued and that we do not find support for alternative processes reducing BiL, such as language streamlining, we suggest that this pronounced trend reversal and subsequent decline of BiL over more than 100 years may be the consequence of humans’ increasing alienation from nature owing to major societal changes in the wake of industrialisation. We conclude that our computational approach of analysing literary communication using biodiversity indices has a high potential for understanding aspects of non-material contributions of biodiversity to people. Our approach can be applied to other corpora and would benefit from additional metadata on taxa, works and authors.
Sprach- und Sprechstörungen kommen bei zahlreichen Kindern vor und werden in der ICD-11 analog zur ICD-10 als Entwicklungsstörungen im Kapitel 6 (Psychische, Verhaltens- und Entwicklungsstörungen) klassifiziert. International sind bislang die ICD-10-Kriterien nicht von allen Professionen, die sich mit Sprach- und Sprechstörungen klinisch oder im Rahmen der Forschung beschäftigen, akzeptiert. Sie werden einerseits als zu wenig differenziert hinsichtlich der unterschiedlichen Sprachkomponenten vonseiten der Linguistik, Sprachtherapie oder Logopädie erlebt. Zum anderen wird die unklare Abgrenzung organisch bedingter Sprach- und Sprechprobleme von der Sprachentwicklungsstörung vonseiten der Medizin teilweise kritisch bewertet. In dem vorliegenden Artikel wird deshalb einerseits die Klassifikation von Sprach- und Sprechproblemen und -störungen in der ICD-11 im Vergleich zur ICD-10 vorgenommen. Wesentlich erscheint hier die in der ICD-11 neu eingeführte Differenzierung in „primäre“ und „sekundäre“ Neuroentwicklungsstörungen. Zum anderen erfolgt aber auch eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem DSM-5 sowie anderen Klassifikationsvorschlägen vonseiten der englischsprachigen Sprachtherapie (CATALISE-2) und der deutschsprachigen Pädaudiologie („phonologische Wahrnehmungsstörung“) sowie der Vorschlag einer Ergänzung der aktuellen ICD-11-Klassifikation hinsichtlich konkreter sprachlicher Einschränkungen bei einem Kind mit Sprachentwicklungsstörung, basierend auf einer ausführlichen Diagnostik. Wir hoffen, mit dem Artikel so den Weg für eine berufsübergreifende Klassifikation von Sprach- und Sprechstörungen nach ICD-11 zu bahnen, damit perspektivisch alle Berufsgruppen, die Diagnostik und Therapie der betroffenen Personen anbieten, eine vergleichbare Terminologie verwenden. Diese vergleichbare Terminologie soll sowohl die klinische Versorgung verbessern als auch die unterschiedlichen Forschungsansätze und -richtungen vergleichbarer machen.
In this work, we intend to investigate one fundamental aspect of language contact by comparing the distribution of subjects in German, Northern Italian dialects and Cimbrian. Here, we show that purely syntactic order phenomena are more prone to convergence, i.e., less resilient, while phenomena that have a clearly identifiable morphological counterpart are more resilient. The empirical domain of investigation for our analysis is the morphosyntax of both nominal and pronominal subjects, the agreement pattern and their position in Cimbrian grammar. While agreement patterns display a highly conservative paradigm, the syntax of nominal (vP-peripheral and topicalized) subjects is innovative and mimics the Italian linear word order.
There are two main approaches to change of state verbs. One adopts an approach in terms of a total change (becomeP, for base predicate P), i.e., a change from not being in the extension of the base predicate to being in it. The other adopts an approach in terms of a relative change (becomemore P, for base predicate P), i.e., a change for a theme in which it increases in the extent to which it holds the property denoted by the base predicate. Different languages have been analyzed using one or the other approach. I argue that both proposals are actually appropriate for analyzing related but not (completely) overlapping phenomena in the domain of derived change of state verbs in the very same language. This proposal is based on the discussion of change of state verbs in Southern Aymara that are derived with the suffixes -pta and -ra. I show that verbs with -pta convey the meaning of total change and that verbs with -ra convey the meaning of relative change. I further discuss how expressions with -pta and -ra interact: expressions with -ra implicate that the theme does not change from not being in the extension of the base to being in it. I propose an account in terms of scalar implicatures in which -pta and -ra are lexical alternatives, thus extending the domain of linguistic phenomena for which the computation of scalar implicatures is relevant.
Wie reagiert das Filmpublikum auf die anhaltende Infektionsgefahr? Lassen sich die Menschen mithilfe von Fantasy- und Romantik-Streifen in eine andere Welt entführen, um der Realität zumindest für kurze Zeit zu entkommen? Die Filmwissenschaftlerin Isadora Campregher Paiva hat überraschende Beobachtungen gemacht.
This paper investigates how French signals prominence in prosody in the post-verbal domain of sentences with two objects or two adjuncts that vary in information status and prosodic length. The information status of particular interest here is dual focus, defined as the presence of two foci in a mono-clausal sentence, but other information states are investigated as well. The controlled production experiment we report on allows for a detailed examination of prosodic prominence. High boundary tones at the end of non-final prosodic phrases are pervasive, as has been documented in many studies before the present one. An important but less documented result is the variation in different prosodic curs, in particular in the number and position of high tones, as well as the particular scaling relationship between them, providing a powerful tool for the expression of (dual) focus. We also report on a perception experiment with our data, showing a clear tendency for French listeners to select the intended context question, recognizing dual focus better than other information states. Overall, this article provides elements of answers as to why French prosody is so difficult to pin down, and why contradictory results and analyses have been proposed for this language.
In der Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes ergreift Friedrich Hölderlin Partei für die Moderne. Daraus ergibt sich eine Absage an die Tragödie als höchste Kunstform und ein Bekenntnis zur Lyrik. Hölderlin gelangt jedoch zu einem ganz anderen Lyrikkonzept als etwa Hegel, der Lyrik als Artikulation von Subjektivität begreift. Für Hölderlin ist die Lyrik kein Medium subjektiver Selbstvergewisserung, sondern die vorzügliche Gattung des Erinnerns, des geduldigen Ausharrens ‘in dürftiger Zeit’ sowie des Schreibens gegen die gefährliche ‘exzentrische Begeisterung’. Vom Schreiben erhofft er sich eine Revolution der ‘Vorstellungsarten’. Hölderlin möchte der Moderne unabhängig von der ausgedienten Sprache der Tradition ein autonomes ästhetisches Profil verleihen, und so wird die Sprache der modernen Dichtung bei ihm unvermeidlich zur Sprache der obscuritas, der Dunkelheit. Hölderlins Ringen um eine genuin moderne Diktion verfremdet die überlieferte Sprache und führt zu einer Entfremdung von ihr, was wiederum Befremden auf Seiten der Rezipienten bewirkt. Hier soll zum einen der Wechsel von der Tragödie zur Lyrik als gattungspoetischem Paradigma der Moderne seit dem späten 18. Jahrhundert rekonstruiert werden. Zum anderen wird Hölderlins Verflechtung von Subjekt- und lyrischer Sprachkritik studiert, um die Spur sichtbar zu machen, die sie bis zu Adorno auslegt.
Viele der rezenten Studien zur Ästhetik des Monströsen nehmen auf Michel Foucaults Vorlesungsreihe Les anormaux Bezug, in der er u. a. der diskursiven Transformation des Monsters von einem somatischen hin zu einem moralischen Abweichungsphänomen nachgeht. Dass Foucaults Ausführungen mitunter nur unzureichend differenziert sind, soll der vorliegende Beitrag nachweisen. Auch wenn die Literatur in Les anormaux eine untergeordnete Rolle spielt, eher als peripheres Beleg- oder Anschauungsmaterial dient denn als Gegenstand einer eigenen Untersuchung, ist gerade sie es, die Foucaults genealogische Analyse der notwendigen Komplexitätssteigerung zuführen und ihre Leerstellen ausfüllen kann. Zu diesem Zweck werden exemplarisch Ovids Lykaon-Mythos aus dem ersten Buch der Metamorphosen sowie Mary Shelleys Roman Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus herangezogen. Neben der gebotenen Korrektur von Les anormaux vermögen beide Texte Foucaults Befund von der diskursiven Produktivität des Monströsen zu bestätigen und anzureichern: Sowohl Ovid als auch Shelley dokumentieren eine Wertschätzung und Wertschöpfung des Monströsen und stehen damit quer zu konventionellen Narrativen, die das Monster als etwas rein Destruktives und Dämonisches oder als das radikal Andere des Menschen in Szene setzen, ohne auf die kulturellen Profite und anthropologischen Einsichten zu reflektieren, die sich aus jenem gewinnen lassen.
In German, the subject usually precedes the object (SO order), but, under certain discourse conditions, the object is allowed to precede the subject (OS order). This paper focuses on main clauses in which either the subject or a discourse-given object occurs in clause-initial position. Two acceptability experiments show that OS sentences with a given object are generally acceptable, but the precise degree of acceptability varies both with the object‘s referential form (demonstrative objects leading to higher acceptability than other types of objects) and with formal properties of the subject (pronominal subjects leading to higher acceptability than non-pronominal subjects). For SO sentences, acceptability was reduced when the object was a d-pronoun, which contrasts with the high acceptability of OS sentences with a d-pronoun object. This finding was explored in a third acceptability experiment comparing d-pronouns in subject and object function. This experiment provides evidence that a reduction in acceptability due to a prescriptive bias against d-pronouns is suspended when the d-pronoun occurs as object in the prefield. We discuss the experimental results with respect to theories of German clause structure that claim that OS sentences with different information-structural properties are derived by different types of movement.
Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.
This paper intends to provide some speculative remarks on how consistency and continuity in language use practices within and across contexts inform heritage language acquisition outcomes. We intend “consistency” as maintenance of similar patterns of home language use over the years. “Continuity” refers to the possibility for heritage language speakers to be exposed to formal education in the heritage language. By means of a questionnaire study, we analyze to what extent Italian heritage families in Germany are consistent in their use of the heritage language with their children. Furthermore, by analyzing the educational offer related to Italian as a heritage language across different areas in Germany, we reflect on children’s opportunities to experience continuity between home and school language practices. Finally, we interpret the results of previous studies on Italian heritage language acquisition through the lens of consistency and continuity of language experience. In particular, we show that under the appropriate language experience conditions (involving consistency and continuity), heritage speakers may be successful even in the acquisition of linguistic phenomena that have been shown to be acquired late in first language acquisition.
Anhand der Konstruktion von Joan of Arc in Saint Joan untersucht dieser Artikel, wie George Bernard Shaw die Position einer Außenseiterin nutzt, um seine geschlechtspolitischen und ästhetischen Ziele zu verdeutlichen. Im Vergleich mit älteren Darstellungen der französischen Nationalheldin wird Shaws spezifische Rezeption des Jeanne-d’Arc-Mythos skizziert und dargestellt, wie Shaw Joans geschlechtliche Differenz als Fortsetzung seiner Kritik an Geschlechternormen entwickelt. Aufbauend darauf präsentiert Shaw Joan zudem als mentale Ausnahmefigur, über deren Visionen ein anderer Begriff des Realismus stark gemacht wird, mit dem Shaw sein eigenes schriftstellerisches Wirken identifiziert.
Employing an intersectional approach—drawing on cultural and new kinship studies, (medical) anthropology, gender and media studies—this article analyzes how the 2013 MTV series Generation Cryo as cultural text deals with medicalized masculinities and (in)fertilities. It asks in what ways masculinities and also fathers, fathering, and fatherhoods are (re)presented and negotiated in a story which has sperm donation by an anonymous donor and the donor siblings and/in their respective families at its center. In the show, essentially an (auto)biographical narrative, all families emphasize social parenthood over genetic inheritance, yet there are also deep-seated insecurities (re)triggered by the donor who is literally and metaphorically a present absence transforming into a potential family member, thus shaking family tectonics and challenging familial/familiar gender and family roles. Generation Cryo is a story about donor conceived children, but also about clinically infertile men and their social roles as fathers, their struggles to narrate and embody individual forms of masculinities in the face of cultural normative templates of hegemonic masculinities— complex practices constantly oscillating between genetic essentialism and social parenthood.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the contribution of linguistic research on Portuguese as a heritage language in Germany to the general understanding of heritage language development. From 1955 to 1973, nearly 166,000 Portuguese migrants found work in Germany as so-called ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter). Because the aim of many Portuguese migrant families was to return to Portugal, their children met relatively good conditions for the acquisition of their heritage language. Nonetheless, second-generation heritage speakers (HSs) show some linguistic particularities in comparison to monolingual Portuguese speakers in Portugal. Based on the results of previous research, we show that the following factors shape the linguistic knowledge of this group of bilinguals: (1) Restricted exposure to the heritage language may cause a delay in the development of certain linguistic structures, (2) deviations from the standard norm may be related to the lack of formal education and the primacy of the colloquial register and (3) heritage bilinguals may accelerate ongoing diachronic development. We argue that apparent effects of influence from the environmental language can often have alternative explanations.
The question of 'Fantastic motion' is whether films in the 1910s and 1920s should be viewed as merely the forerunners of patriarchal cinema, which some colleagues believe, or whether they offered - and still offer - alternatives to a female audience. The author makes a case for the latter possibility and searches for explanations for the enjoyable and liberating sensations they, as women, experienced while becoming acquainted with early film. Using a historical and contextual approach, Schlüpmann investigates genres including non-fiction, comedy and romantic drama from the early 1910s, and describes how the significance of notions such as the beauty of nature, the culture of humour and love could have been adopted into the perception of women filmgoers at the time.
El objetivo de este artículo es el de mostrar el posible papel de los escritos de Nietzsche en la teoría del cine. La filosofía de Nietzsche se presenta en el contexto de la biografía de la autora, como una experiencia personal que, junto con el feminismo, influye en su vida y en su pensamiento. En el artículo se exponen la relación entre la obra de Nietzsche y el nacimiento del cine y la utilidad de estas obras para una teoría contemporánea del cine en el contexto de la sociedad actual.
Theoretical accounts agree that German restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are integrated at the level of syntax as well as at the level of prosody (; , ; ; ; ) in both the default verb-final and the marked verb-second variant (referred to as iV2). Both variants are assumed to show the same prosodic pattern, i. e., prosodic integration into the main clause, and not unintegrated prosody, which would signal a sequence of two main clauses. To date strong empirical evidence for this close correspondence between prosody and syntax in RCs is missing. Findings regarding prosodic integration of verb-final RCs are not consistent, and research regarding the prosody of iV2 structures is very scarce. Using a delayed sentence-repetition task, our study investigated whether subordination is signaled by prosody in RCs in both the verb-final and the V2 variant in adults (n = 21). In addition, we asked whether young language learners (n = 23), who at the age of 3 have just started to produce embedded clauses, are already sensitive to this mapping. The adult responses showed significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in the V-final and the iV2 structures, with no difference between the two conditions. Notably, the child responses mirrored this adult behavior, showing significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in both V-final and iV2 structures. The findings regarding adults’ prosodic realizations provide novel empirical evidence for the claim that iV2 structures, just like verb-final RCs, show prosodic integration. Moreover, our study strongly suggests that subordination is signaled by prosody already by age 3 in both verb-final and V2 variants of RCs.
Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.
Multilingual research could offer a unique perspective on how the languages already acquired by a person affect the online processing of a new language. But it is currently difficult to assess this issue because theoretical accounts of multilingualism have focused on acquisition rather than processing and most empirical research to date has gathered untimed (offline) evidence. To help bridge this gap, we formulate hypotheses that can help derive processing predictions from existing accounts of multilingualism. But crucially, and based on previous findings in second language processing, we identify ways in which assumptions about crosslinguistic influence may need to be revised to allow the separate treatment of lexical and syntactic processing, and to consider the role of variables such as language dominance and proficiency. In our view, the question of what's special about multilingualism is worth studying, but more research is needed before we can begin answering it.
We aim to understand whether Greek and Italian, two null subject languages, differ in the use and interpretation of null subjects, based on evidence from both a production and a comprehension experiment. The results of the two experiments show that the two languages differ in the extent to which they comply with the Position of Antecedent Strategy as formulated by Carminati (2002). In order to account for this difference, we introduce a principle which defines prominence of sentence constituents in terms of hierarchical height, elaborating on a recent proposal by Rizzi (2018). Then we show that the prominence of subject and object constituents in Greek and Italian reflects word-order differences between the two languages (Roussou & Tsimpli 2006). In more general terms, this paper argues in favour of a multi-factorial approach to reference interpretation, in that syntactic factors interact with discourse factors, leading to a gradient variety of reference possibilities.
Corrigendum zu: Memory studies 13.2020, issue: 5, S. 861-874, doi:10.1177/1750698020943014, ISSN 1750-6999
This afterword addresses the complex temporal and global dynamics of the coronavirus pandemic. After considering some of the new social rhythms that have emerged in the wake of Covid-19 around the world, it turns to the role of collective memory before, during and after corona. The aim is to provide a basic grid for how the Covid-19 pandemic could be addressed using memory studies expertise and concepts such as premediation, memorability, memory (ab)use, national memory, colonial memory, racial stereotypes, the digital archive, generational memory, or Anthropocene time.
Les données de l’effet d’affaiblissement de l’obviation (ou encore référence disjointe du subjonctif) dans la littérature linguistique sont soit fondées sur l’intuition des auteurs soit issues de publications d’autres chercheurs, bien que cet effet soit connu depuis longtemps et bien qu’il fasse partie de plusieurs modélisations théoriques. En conséquence, aucune réponse de nature empirique/expérimentale a été offerte à la question « A quel point les affirmations portant sur l'effet d'affaiblissement de l'obviation sont-elles solides ? ». Cet article se fixe en conséquence un double objectif : (i) mettre en oeuvre un jugement de grammaticalité afin de répondre expérimentalement à la question précédente, et (ii) proposer une analyse syntaxique provisoire des résultats obtenus. Ici, nous étudions six facteurs qui – selon Ruwet (1984/1991) – déclenchent l’affaiblissement. Les résultats montrent que seul un facteur (la coordination) déclenche l’affaiblissement. En conséquence, l’appareil théorique permettant de modéliser l’affaiblissement peut être réduit radicalement, et nous proposons des pistes de modélisation syntaxique n’intégrant que le facteur de coordination
Les trois auteurs et voyageurs étudiés dans cet article (Albert Londres, André Gide, Michel Leiris) ont prêté leurs voix à l’anticolonialisme. Ils ont critiqué les effets du colonialisme européen en Afrique noire de la fin des années 1920 au début des années 1930. Toutefois, pour des raisons diverses allant d’aspects institutionnels aux sensibilités personnelles, leur engagement ne paraissait pas tout à fait le bienvenu, d’où leur hésitation à placer la parole politique au premier plan et à assumer le rôle d’intellectuel engagé. Ils ont alors justifié leur démarche par l’expérience personnelle et singulière du voyage et par l’urgence du sujet de leurs récits. Les formes littéraires qui en résultent (grand reportage, journal intime de voyage, journal ethnographique) ont profondément modernisé le genre du récit de voyage dans un moment critique de son évolution.
The present paper aims at providing empirical evidence for dialectal variation concerning the perception of the central vowel [ɐ] in European Portuguese (EP). More concretely, this study compares the perception of the contrast between [a] and [ɐ] by native speakers of two varieties of EP: 23 speakers of a northern Portuguese dialect (from the city of Braga) and 23 speakers of the Littoral Center variety of EP (from the city of Lisbon, defined as Standard European Portuguese (SEP)). Based on a discrimination test, the results show that the two groups of speakers differ with respect to the perception of the contrast between the two central vowels under investigation. The speakers of the northern variety differentiate less between the two central vowels compared to the speakers from Lisbon.
Memoirs by women (from the Global North) who have employed a gestational host (from the Global South) to become mothers are situated in a force field of intersecting discourses about gender, race and class. The article sheds light on the characteristic dynamics of this special sub-genre of ‘mommy lit’ (Hewett), labelled ‘IP memoirs,’ with a special emphasis on memoirs featuring transnational cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in India. These texts do not only present narratives of painful infertility experiences, autopathographic self-blame, and scriptotherapeutic quests towards happiness, i.e. (a) child(ren), but also speak back to knotty issues such as potential exploitation, commodification, colonisation and disenfranchisement, as well as genetic essentialism in the context of systemic inequities.
This article investigates the L1 acquisition of different types of direct objects in European Portuguese (EP). Previous research has revealed that although children have early syntactic and pragmatic knowledge of objects across languages, the adequate use of pronouns and null objects is protracted in the acquisition of EP (Costa et al. 2012). The present study shows that children acquiring the distribution of direct objects are aware of universal pragmatic hierarchies but struggle with the interpretation and feature bundles of null objects. Assuming that arguments are linked to left-peripheral C/edge linkers (Sigurðsson 2011), we argue that children need more time to discover the adult-like feature composition of null objects in EP because they involve phi-silent features. Relative accessibility (Ariel 1991) is universal and available early, whereas the absolute accessibility of null objects, i.e. their feature content, is acquired relatively late.
Wozu VB?
(2017)
Die eifrigste Bestrebung der Kinder besteht darin, so hat es zumindest Sigmund Freud einmal behauptet, "zu erfahren, was die Eltern miteinander tun, woraus dann die Kinder werden." Was treibt die Kinder in die Welt? Haben die Kinder Juristen als Eltern, dann dürften sie bald eher nach den Gründen als nach dem Treiben fragen.
Die gleichgeschlechtliche Ehe wurde vom Gesetzgeber endlich anerkannt, auch das Verfassungsgericht wird dagegen nichts mehr unternehmen können, das hoffe ich zumindest. Wer seine Zeichen und Gesetze dennoch exklusiv halten will, sollte darum darüber nachdenken, auf Alternativbegriffe zur Ehe umzusteigen.
Die Verkleidung des Richters und die Verkleidung der Muslima sind ähnlich, weil sie beide aus einer Abschirmung rühren, die auf gleiche Weise dogmatisch besetzt ist. Auch wenn, zumindest in der deutschen Übersetzung des Koran, mit der Bedeckung der Haare die Keuschheit, Sittsamkeit oder Schamhaftigkeit der Frau und mit der Verkleidung des Richters seine Neutralität symbolisiert oder umgesetzt werden soll, gibt es doch eine Entsprechung, und die liegt in der Abschirmung. Wenn man hijab mit Absperrung oder Verhüllung übersetzt, wie das einige vorschlagen, dann tragen Richter auch einen hijab.
Professionalization of service-learning in higher education – an academic development approach
(2018)
In an attempt to professionalize service-learning in higher education, teachers and their teaching skills are considered a determining factor and require particular attention. To promote the teaching skills necessary for service-learning courses, an academic development approach addressing these specific requirements has been implemented at Goethe University Frankfurt as part of the academic development program for teaching staff. This article presents the particularities of this approach and illustrates one of its central elements, i.e., the concept of a workshop on planning service-learning courses. Both practical and research implications are discussed.
Wenn Rechtstexte auf literarische Texte treffen, dann treffen Wahrheitsformen aufeinander. Es treffen unterschiedliche Weisen, Wahrheit zu produzieren, aufeinander. Zu den zahlreichen Unterschieden gehören, historisch bedingt, unterschiedliche Stile, die sich um die Objektivierung und "Subjektivierung" der Aussagen bilden. Das fängt bei den banalen "wir" und "man" rechtswissenschaftlicher Texte an, geht über allgemein gehaltene, enthistorisierende und systematisierende Definitionen bis zu einem Fussnotenapparat, der in manchen Rechtstexten beinahe jede Aussage als nachweisbare Aussage absichern soll. Die Rechtswissenschaft, zumal die deutsche, pflegt bei ihren Wahrheitsformen objektivierende Stile, die Literaturwissenschaft tut das nicht, nicht in dem Maße, sie lässt das Subjekt stärker in die Aussage einbrechen. Die Lage zwischen diesen beiden Disziplinen ist allerdings kompliziert, weil wiederum das Recht eine wirksame Subjektivierungsinstanz ist, die eben die Instrumente zur Verfügung stellt, um Aussagen an Subjekte zu binden. Sie hat die Unterschrift und den Urheber erfunden. In dieser Lage kann man also nicht einfach das Subjektive gegen das Objektive ausspielen. Von Anfang aber über das Zusammentreffen von Literatur und Recht in objektivierenden Stilen zu schreiben, schafft eine asymmetrische Ausgangslage, die ich gerne zugunsten einer symmetrischen Ausgangslage umgehen möchte – soweit das möglich ist. ...
Mir fällt in dieser Woche, in der nicht nur im Netz darüber diskutiert wurde, was eigentlich gefährlich sei, Menschen in Schlauchbooten oder die Lifeline, und in der darüber diskutiert wurde, ob man nicht lieber ein paar absaufen lässt, damit die anderen gewarnt seien, nicht viel mehr ein, als in die Gründe und Abgründe Europas zu schauen.
This article serves as both an état présent of emerging scholarship in the interdisiplinary field of Memory Studies and a conference report following the first MSA Forward interactive workshop which preceded the second annual conference of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) in December 2017. MSA Forward is the postgraduate arm of the Memory Studies Association and offers a platform for exchanging ideas amongst a cohort of emerging scholars engaging with recent developments in Memory Studies and interacting with key academics in the field. The idea of engagement, with its political undertone, draws attention to the political valence and ethical sensitivity of emerging research as evidenced in this article, which contends that if Memory Studies is to be moving forwards as well as looking back, then it is important for emerging scholars as well as established academics to be at the forefront of the field.
Cellular mobile networks, in which devices constantly relay their location and their movements, are formed by the motion of end devices in relation to the position of radio towers. As a matter of principle, it is this motion that allows the location of devices to be identified within the network. The article argues that the emergence of mobile media based on cellular triangulation has introduced an ontology in which, by technical necessity, the position of every object is constantly registered and objects that do not have an address do not exist. The location and movement of all participants are, at all times, a known technical variable. With Xeros PARC’s “ubiquitous computing” as a reference case, the article scrutinizes how movement triggers the process that registers the locations of mobile phones or smartphones, a development it situates against the cybernetic imagination of determining the location and the movement of an object at the same time.
This article traces the representation of love, gender and national identity in Shani Mootoo’s creative work in general and her most recent novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) in particular. In all her work, Mootoo describes the phenomenon of otherness as a part of the negotiating process of the protagonists' selves.Challenging xenophobia, homophobia and all forms of prejudices the author works with the concept of lesbian and bisexual love, cross-racial relationships in order to write identity and to create a home.
The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well as socio- economic black-boxing (schemes that monopolize inherently non-scarce resources), so as to open our imagination to skills and tactics that would allow us to navigate the rich but volatile flows of social, political, and economic abundance.
This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism’s logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.
This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo’s novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism.
A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants’ working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.
Ascribing to the premise that film festivals are crucial to the production of cultural memory, this article explores different parameters through which festivals shape our reception of films. In its focus on the Asian American film festival CAAMFest, the article reveals that festivals are part of a complex network of actors whose different agendas influence the narratives produced around the film, direct its role as memory object and encourage memories to travel. What is more, it shows that festival locations—from the city in which a festival takes place to the concrete venue in which a film is screened—play a significant role in shaping our experience and understanding of films. Finally, it establishes that festivals create frames for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media and live performances at the festival events. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies, the article makes use of an interdisciplinary approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of acts of framing, locations and networks of actors shaping the festival’s memory production. It also draws attention to the understudied phenomenon of Asian American film festivals, showing how such a festival may actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group’s collective identity and memory.
This introduction outlines new developments in the field of cultural and media memory studies in the wake of the transcultural turn. It pays specific attention to the twofold dynamics of memory’s travel and locatedness. While in recent memory studies discourse there has been a tendency to see travel as the inspiration for innovative research, locatedness has become associated with old-fashioned, bounded approaches. Rather than reproduce the positive charging of travel and negative charging of locatedness, this special issue aims to emphasise the complexity of memory dynamics resulting from the interaction of the two poles and to make visible that the production, (re)mediation, and reception of the past in the present is constituted by both travel and locatedness.
Rebecca Walkowitz’s observation that contemporary novels tend to be “born translated” involves the notion that they equally tend to be “born in motion”; they are often already, conceptually, on the road to faraway readers during their moments of conception. A first, more narrowly defined objective of my essay is to examine the narrative strategies used in Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (2007) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) that facilitate and respond to this dimension of motion in particular travels of memory. In a broader scope, this analysis will be embedded into an appraisal of the potentials of recent theorizing both in narratology (i.e. the study of narrative) and in memory studies to understand the dynamics at play in the reception of far-travelled narrative memory media. It is a central proposition of this essay that the two research fields share an amplitude of common concerns with regard to questions of reception and should therefore be brought into a close dialogue. The present study explores how some of these intersections between narratology and memory studies can be approached through the notions of “distance” and “proximity.”
Language use before and after Stonewall: a corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives
(2019)
This study presents a contrastive corpus linguistic analysis of language use before and after Stonewall. It uses theoretical insights on normativity from the field of language and sexuality to investigate how the shifting normativities associated with the Stonewall Riots (1969) – widely considered the central event of gay liberation in the Western world – have shaped our conceptualization of sexuality as it surfaces in language use. Drawing on two corpora of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives dating from two time periods (before and after Stonewall, called PRE and POST), the analysis combines quantitative (keyword analysis, collocation analysis) and qualitative (concordance analysis) corpus linguistic methods to examine discursive shifts as evident from narrators’ language use. The study identifies the terms homosexual and normal as central contrastive labels in PRE, and gay and straight as corresponding terms in POST. Other discursive shifts detected are from sexual desire/practices to identity (and vice versa), from an individualistic to a community-based conceptualization of sexuality, and from unquestioned heteronormativity and gender binarism to a weakening of such dominant discourses. The findings are discussed in relation to the desire-identity shift, which is traditionally assumed to have taken place at the end of the 19th century, and shed new light on Stonewall as a central event for the development of an identity-based conceptualization of sexuality as we know it today.
"Che tempo, che tempo": Geology and Environment in Max Frisch’s 'Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän'
(2016)
Critical readings of Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän [Man in the Holocene] have tended to read its heterogeneous and inter-medial form as a code for the mental disintegration of its protagonist. This paper argues instead that this feature can be seen as a poetological engagement with geological and climatic timescales. Due to its hybrid form, the incorporation of a multiplicity of textual fragments and pictorial representations, the text undermines both conventional definitions of narrative and representations of nature. Holozän’s non-linear structure establishes an aesthetic of slowness that ushers in an awareness of the utterly different time schemes of geological and climatic processes. Furthermore, the importance of the material features, such as an interplay between text and image and the disconnected, paratactical arrangement of sentences mirrors the novel’s focus on natural phenomena. Frisch’s narrative establishes a poetics that tries to reach beyond the confinements of an anthropocentric perspective and thereby subverts the borders between culture and environment.
In this article we present experimental findings on the acceptability of different argument orders in the German middle field. Our study pursues two goals: First, to evaluate a number of surface constraints on German argument order that have been proposed in the literature, and second, to shed new light on how gradient constraints jointly determine sentence acceptability. In four experiments, we investigated the impact of surface constraints relating to animacy, thematic roles, definiteness and case. While we are able to confirm an influence of most constraints under investigation, the resulting constraint hierarchy does not coincide with any hierarchy put forward so far in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. With regard to gradience, our results can be accounted for either by an OT variant incorporating a notion of markedness, or by a fully quantified model using constraint weights. For the latter, however, we provide evidence against uniform penalties associated with constraint violations.
Does linguistic rhythm matter to syntax, and if so, what kinds of syntactic decisions are susceptible to rhythm? By means of two recall-based sentence production experiments and two corpus studies – one on spoken and one on written language – we investigated whether linguistic rhythm affects the choice between introduced and un-introduced complement clauses in German. Apart from the presence or absence of the complementiser dass (‘that’), these two sentence types differ with respect to the position of the tensed verb (verb-final/verb-second). Against our predictions, that were based on previously reported rhythmic effects on the use of the optional complementiser that in English, the experiments fail to obtain compelling evidence for rhythmic/prosodic influences on the structure of complement clauses in German. An overview of pertinent studies showing rhythmic influences on syntactic encoding suggests these effects to be generally restricted to syntactic domains smaller than a clause. We assume that, in the course of language production, initially, clause level syntactic projections are specified; their specification is in fact the prerequisite for phonological encoding to start. Consequently, prosodic effects may only touch upon the lower level categories that are to be integrated into the clausal projection, but not upon the syntactic makeup of the higher order projection itself.
This paper investigates the interpretation of overt and null subject pronouns in the heritage language (European Portuguese, EP) of Portuguese heritage bilinguals (children and teenagers) in Germany and Andorra with German (Ger) and Spanish/Catalan (Span/Cat) as environmental languages and compares it to the outcomes of age-matched monolingual Portuguese children and monolingual adults. The results of an offline sentence interpretation task show that all groups of speakers differentiate between overt and null subjects. They are also sensitive to the syntactic context (intrasentential vs. intersentential) and the directionality of the anaphoric relation (anaphoric vs. cataphoric), although to different degrees. We argue that the interpretation of differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers needs to take into account these different syntactic contexts of pronominal resolution in order to gain a better understanding of the role of language-internal factors and cross-linguistic influence (CLI). With respect to the latter, the comparison between the Ger-EP and the Span/Cat-EP groups reveals no differences between these populations and shows that for the speakers’ knowledge of anaphora resolution in EP it is not decisive whether the contact language is a null subject language or not (confirming thus the results in Sorace et al. 2009).
In this paper, I investigate the suppletion patterns that are found in languages that make a clusivity distinction. I will show that in the triple 1SG-1EXCL-1INCL, ABA patterns do not arise, consonant with other work on suppletion patterns (Bobaljik 2012, Smith et al. 2016). That is, it is not possible for the exclusive pronoun to supplete on its own whilst the singular and inclusive share a common base. All other patterns are attested. I will argue that the lack of ABA patterns supports the view that the inclusive is the most marked category in this set (Noyer 1992, Siewierska 2004, Cysouw 2003, a.o.), and propose that there is a containment relation such that the feature set that makes up the inclusive properly contains the features that form the exclusive, following the reasoning laid out in Bobaljik (2012). I further consider the makeup of person features, and argue that the lack of ABA patterns in clusivity suggest that clusivity features are privative, rather than binary ('cf'. Harbour 2016).
Despite a large body of research, the linguistic nature of exhaustivity in single wh-questions is unresolved. Moreover, little empirical evidence exists as to which related structures pattern with bare wh-questions regarding exhaustivity. This paper explores the felicity of various exhaustivity violations in unembedded single bare wh-questions in German and compares them to related structures. In two novel felicity judgment experiments, a total of 441 participants rated exhaustive as well as non-exhaustive plural and non-exhaustive singleton answers to wh-questions or statements in a questionnaire. Answers were based on picture stimuli depicting individuals performing various actions. The felicity of non-exhaustive answers was compared across four main test conditions: bare wh-questions (wer ‘who’), wh-questions with a lexical exhaustivity marker (wer alles ‘who all’), plural definite descriptions contained in a restrictive relative clause (e.g., “the people who are fishing in the garden”), and the scalar quantifier “some” (e.g., “some people who are fishing in the garden”).
We employ a novel methodological approach to improve the interpretability of statistical differences between experimental conditions by using the statistical measure of Minimal Important Difference (MID). Our results from estimated MIDs reveal that adults’ felicity judgments of non-exhaustive plural answers to bare wh-questions pattern with those to wer alles-questions and to plural definite descriptions: exhaustivity violations in the bare wh, the wer alles and the plural definite conditions were rated as less felicitous than exhaustivity violations in the some-condition.
This paper investigates multi-valuation, i.e. cases where one probe agrees with multiple goals thus obtaining multiple feature values. Focusing on number agreement, I look at the cross-linguistic patterns on multi-valued Ns in the nominal Right Node Raising construction (Nominal RNR) reported in Belyaev et al. (2015); Harizanov & Gribanova (2015); Shen (2016) as well as multi-valued Ts in TP RNR construction reported in Yatabe (2003); Grosz (2009; 2015); Kluck (2009). I show that three types of languages are attested: languages like Serbo-Croatian that show singular marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, languages like Russian that show plural marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, and languages like English that show singular marking on multi-valued Ns and plural marking on multi-valued Ts. No language is attested that shows plural marking on multi-valued Ns and singular marking on multi-valued Ts. I use this 3/4 pattern to argue that multi-valuation shows the effect of the Agreement Hierarchy discussed by Corbett (1979; 2006) among others.
German free relative constructions allow for case requirement mismatches under two types of circumstances. The first is when the case required in the embedded clause is more complex (NOM < ACC < GEN < DAT) than the case required in the main clause, and the relative pronoun takes the form of the embedded clause case. The second type of circumstance is when the form that corresponds to the two required cases is syncretic. I propose an analysis that combines Caha’s (2009) case hierarchy in Nanosyntax with Van Riemsdijk’s (2006a) concept of Grafting. By placing case features as separate heads in the syntax, a less complex case can be Grafted into a different clause, explaining the first type of circumstance. The second type makes reference to the fact that syncretic forms are inserted via the same lexical entry (Superset Principle). A cross-linguistic comparison shows that it is language-specific whether a more complex case requirement in the main or embedded clause causes non-matching non-syncretic free relatives to be grammatical. For all languages it holds that the relative pronoun appears in the most complex case required, which provides additional evidence for case being complex and more complex cases being able to license less complex cases.
This essay discusses the current Europeanization of national museums in different European countries and considers it against the background of media theories and feminist epistemologies. Taking the example of the European Solidarity Centre Gdansk, the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin and the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée Marseille, it suggests two approaches to the dynamics of travel and locatedness in the museum. Firstly, using the concept of what I call “Europoeic media” this essay shows how “Europe” as a travelling memory is shaped by and in media. Secondly, I argue that the locatedness both of memories and the memory researcher are not detrimental but instead produce “situated knowledges”. Thus, in combining media-sensitivity and standpoint-reflexivity, the paper proposes new ways of taking into account the travels and locatedness of both memories and memory research.
Der vorliegende Beitrag diskutiert, wie mithilfe von Unterrichtsvideographien die Reflexionskompetenz angehender Englischlehrkräfte bereits in der ersten Ausbildungsphase angebahnt und geschult werden kann. Er geht von der Annahme aus, dass praktizierenden Lehrkräften häufig die Gelegenheiten oder auch die Kompetenzen zur systematischen Reflexion fehlen (vgl. Kittel & Rollett, 2017) und diese bereits vorher grundgelegt werden müssen. Anhand von zwei Seminarbeispielen aus der Englischdidaktik, welche sich auf die disziplinspezifischen Heterogenitätsdimensionen Mehrsprachigkeit (vgl. u.a. Elsner & Wildemann, 2012; Niesen, 2018) und Transkulturalität (vgl. u.a. Viebrock, 2018; Kreft, 2019a, 2019b) beziehen, werden praktische Umsetzungsmöglichkeiten bzw. die wechselseitige Integration theoretischer Konzepte und unterrichtlicher Handlungen/Interaktionen illustriert. Die vorgestellten Aufgabenformate beziehen sich auf die kasuistische Fallarbeit (nach Lindow & Münch, 2014) sowie auf VierSchritt-Analysen (nach Santagata & Guarino, 2011). Als grundlegende Struktur für die Entwicklung von Reflexionskompetenz in videobasierten Lernsettings wird eine adaptierte Fassung des Modells von Aeppli und Lötscher (2016) mit den Verfahrensschritten „Erleben“, „Erkennen“, „Darstellen“, „Analysieren“ und „Alternative Szenarien entwickeln“ verwendet. Es zeigt sich, dass die gewählte Vorgehensweise Studierende in die Lage versetzt, die konzeptionelle und unterrichtspraktische Bedeutung von sprachlicher und kultureller Heterogenität im Englischunterricht zu erkennen und, in einem weiteren Schritt, Möglichkeiten zur Förderung von transkulturalitäts- bzw. mehrsprachigkeits-sensitivem Handeln zu identifizieren und somit ihre Reflexionskompetenzen zu schulen.
L'osservazione secondo la quale lo scarto come oggetto di ricerca sia allo stesso tempo un effetto della sua ricerca è ciò che l'articolo traccia in tre studi sulla spazzatura: Rubbish! di William Rathje e Cullen Murphy, Un mondo usa e getta di Guido Viale e Das Miill-System di Volker Grassmuck e Christian Unverzagt. Questi tre studi esemplificano tre modi di presentare lo scarto: esplorazione, problema e ricie/aggio. Guardarli come argomenti scientifici ci permette di discutere di ciò che è considerato scarto ponendo domande di presentazione testuale e, allo stesso tempo, di chiedere quali conseguenze abbia la presentazione per il concetto scientifico dello scarto.
This paper offers a description and account of the patterns of 'ex-situ' focus in Dagbani. We show that there are two syntactic strategies for creating 'ex-situ' focus in the language, one involving A’-movement to the left periphery, and the second involving base generation in the left periphery combined with coreference to a resumptive pronoun. Furthermore, we argue that subjects are difficult to move from Spec,TP to Spec,CP in the left-periphery because of 'anti-locality', which creates a tension when trying to focus subjects, which are required to derivationally fill the specifier of both positions. We further show that what looks to be a two-way distinction between the behaviour of subjects and non-subjects in the language is in fact a three-way distinction between subjects that are focussed to a local left-periphery, subjects that are focussed to a non-local left-periphery, and non-subjects. These distinctions arise due to there being two methods for Dagbani to resolve the antilocality problem of subject movement, and so local subjects solve the problem differently to non-local subjects.
Vom Terror : [Szene aus einer Montage-Fassung des Dramenfragments "Moloch" von Friedrich Hebbel]
(2004)
Szene aus einer Montage-Fassung des Dramenfragments "Moloch" von Friedrich Hebbel. Die Szene steht als Einschub zwischen dem Ersten und Zweiten Akt der Tragödie, als eine Art Interludium. Im Laufe des Stückes wechselt die Perspektive mehrmals zwischen den Schauplätzen Germanischer Wald und Rom, dem Zentrum des Imperiums. Geplant ist eine Aufführung der Gesamtbearbeitung an der Volksbühne Berlin, voraussichtlich Ende 2004.
Am anderen Ende derWelt, in einem argentinischen Städtchen im Bundesstaat Buenos Aires, versetzten die epochalen Ereignisse in Europa nach dem Fall des Eisernen Vorhangs den Bürger Dinko Šakić in Entzücken. Fünfzig Jahre nachdem er aus seiner Heimat geflüchtet war, führten die tektonischen Umwälzungen nach dem Ende des Kommunismus und der europäischen Teilung sogar zur staatlichen Verselbständigung seiner einstigen Heimat Kroatien – zu einer jahrzehntelang nicht einmal im Traum denkbaren Entwicklung. Dinko Šakić setzte sich daraufhin öffentlich für seine frühere Heimat ein. Es fiel ihm gar nicht ein, dass ihn seine Vergangenheit einholen könnte. Wahrscheinlich weil er "ein gutes Gewissen" hatte, ein von ihm gern benutzter Ausdruck, oder weil er in der jungen Republik Kroatien eine Art Fortsetzung jenes Staatsgebildes sah, dem er in seiner Jugend "gedient" hatte (auch ein beliebter Ausdruck Šakićs). In der größten lateinamerikanischen Kroatengemeinde in Argentinien gab es wahrscheinlich nichts, was ihn zur Vorsicht hätte mahnen können. Er schien die Öffentlichkeit geradezu gesucht, womöglich sogar eine Anerkennung erwartet zu haben. Bei einem Empfang zu Ehren des kroatischen Präsidenten während dessen Staatsbesuchs in Argentinien wurde Šakić von Journalisten beobachtet, wie er Tudjman nicht von der Seite weichen wollte, was diesen sichtlich irritierte und zu Hause für Empörung sorgte. Šakić, der sich selbst bei mehreren Gelegenheiten als glühenden kroatischen Nationalisten schilderte, weshalb er schon als Jugendlicher Anhänger der Ustascha-Organisation geworden sei, ahnte offensichtlich nicht, dass seine Art der Heimatliebe dort Entsetzen hervorrufen würde. ...
Das rhetorische Ensemble
(2006)
Auf dem Tisch liegt die zweite Auflage von Systemdenken und Systembegriff in der Jurisprudenz (1968) von Claus-Wilhelm Canaris, erschienen Berlin 1983. Die schriftliche Fassung basiert auf einem rhetorischen und mündlichen Ereignis, seinem Habilitationsvortrag. Spuren davon finden sich noch im Text. Das gilt für die Spuren, die Rhetorik immer schon in nicht-mündlichen Texten wie der Schrift hinterlassen hat, also etwa in den Kompositionsregeln und den Regeln des Umgangs mit Figuren und Stil. Die rhetorische Spur findet sich darüber hinaus an herausragenden Stellen in den kurzen Hinweisen und Adressen, die scheinbar außerhalb der eigentlichen Schrift selber stehen. In einem Fall findet sich z. B. in Kursivschrift eine Widmung an den verehrten Lehrer Karl Larenz, in einem anderen erinnert der Autor daran, dass der Vortrag am 20. Juli gehalten wurde. Es sind kurze und knappe Hinweise auf denMoment, an dem ein Jurist eigenständig, zu seinem autonomen System wird und eine eigene Lehrbefugnis erhält. Sie sind noch rhetorisch, weil sie in ihrem Aufspüren von Referenzen an den Lehrer und an historische Daten vollziehen und reflektieren, was sich in solchen Augenblicken geziemt. Sie begegnen einem an der Schwelle des Textes – also kurz bevor man sich auf die sachliche Ordnung des Textes einlässt. An der Schwelle wird die letzte Gelegenheit ergriffen, dem Text eine genealogische Adresse zu verleihen. Es sind (um selbst rhetorisch zu werden) letzte Tankstellen vor der Autobahn. Sie markieren keine Systembrüche, sie markieren den Eingang in den Text, der sich in einer rhetorischen Transmission positioniert. In der Architektur der Argumentationsführung sind diese Stellen der Bogen, der durchschritten wird, unmittelbar bevor die Lektüre beginnt – oder mit denen die Lektüre beginnt. Das hängt schon davon ab, wie man Rhetorik vom System abgrenzt. ...
Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader's text comprehension: (i) the (low-level) rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. “too”) in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, concomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment.
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
This paper describes work on the morphological and syntactic annotation of Sumerian cuneiform as a model for low resource languages in general. Cuneiform texts are invaluable sources for the study of history, languages, economy, and cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia and its surrounding regions. Assyriology, the discipline dedicated to their study, has vast research potential, but lacks the modern means for computational processing and analysis. Our project, Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages, aims to fill this gap by bringing together corpus data, lexical data, linguistic annotations and object metadata. The project’s main goal is to build a pipeline for machine translation and annotation of Sumerian Ur III administrative texts. The rich and structured data is then to be made accessible in the form of (Linguistic) Linked Open Data (LLOD), which should open them to a larger research community. Our contribution is two-fold: in terms of language technology, our work represents the first attempt to develop an integrative infrastructure for the annotation of morphology and syntax on the basis of RDF technologies and LLOD resources. With respect to Assyriology, we work towards producing the first syntactically annotated corpus of Sumerian.
Der Schriftsteller Georg Büchner gilt bis heute als ein glühender Revolutionär und unerbittlicher Kämpfer für Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit: Seine Texte thematisieren formal und inhaltlich gesellschaftliche Konflikte, die zeitlos erscheinen und doch ihre Gegenwart genau in den Blick nehmen. An der Goethe-Universität forscht der Germanist Prof. Roland Borgards zu Büchner.
Talking about emotion and sharing emotional experiences is a key component of human interaction. Specifically, individuals often consider the reactions of other people when evaluating the meaning and impact of an emotional stimulus. It has not yet been investigated, however, how emotional arousal ratings and physiological responses elicited by affective stimuli are influenced by the rating of an interaction partner. In the present study, pairs of participants were asked to rate and communicate the degree of their emotional arousal while viewing affective pictures. Strikingly, participants adjusted their arousal ratings to match up with their interaction partner. In anticipation of the affective picture, the interaction partner’s arousal ratings correlated positively with activity in anterior insula and prefrontal cortex. During picture presentation, social influence was reflected in the ventral striatum, that is, activity in the ventral striatum correlated negatively with the interaction partner’s ratings. Results of the study show that emotional alignment through the influence of another person’s communicated experience has to be considered as a complex phenomenon integrating different components including emotion anticipation and conformity.
Beauty is the single most frequently and most broadly used aesthetic virtue term. The present study aimed at providing higher conceptual resolution to the broader notion of beauty by comparing it with three closely related aesthetically evaluative concepts which are likewise lexicalized across many languages: elegance, grace(fulness), and sexiness. We administered a variety of questionnaires that targeted perceptual qualia, cognitive and affective evaluations, as well as specific object properties that are associated with beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness in personal looks, movements, objects of design, and other domains. This allowed us to reveal distinct and highly nuanced profiles of how a beautiful, elegant, graceful, and sexy appearance is subjectively perceived. As aesthetics is all about nuances, the fine-grained conceptual analysis of the four target concepts of our study provides crucial distinctions for future research.
Background: Task switch protocols are frequently used in the assessment of cognitive control, both in clinical and non-clinical populations. These protocols frequently confound task switch and attentional set shift. The current study investigated the ability of adult ADHD patients to shift attentional set in the context of switching tasks.
Method: We tested 38 adults with ADHD and 39 control adults with an extensive diagnostic battery and a task switch protocol without proactive interference. The experiment combined orthogonally task-switch vs. repetition, and attentional set shift vs. no shift. Each experimental stimulus had global and local features (Hierarchical/"Navon" stimuli), associated with corresponding attentional sets.
Results: ADHD patients were slower than controls in task switch trials with a simultaneous shift of attention between global/local attentional sets. This also correlated significantly with diagnostic scales for ADHD symptoms. The patients had more variable reaction times, but when the attentional set was kept constant neither were they significantly slower nor showed higher task switch costs.
Conclusion: ADHD is associated with a deficit in flexible deployment of attention to varying sources of stimulus information.
In this paper, we investigate whether timing in monolingual acquisition interacts with age of onset and input effects in child bilingualism. Six different morpho-syntactic and semantic phenomena acquired early, late or very late are considered, with their timing in L1 acquisition varying between age 3 (subject-verb agreement) and after age 6 (case marking). Data from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) whose mean age of onset to German was 3 months are compared with data from early second language learners of German (eL2) whose mean age of onset to German was 35 months as well as with data from monolingual children. To explore change over time, children were tested twice at the ages of 4;4 and 5;8 years. The main findings were that 2L1 children had an advantage over their eL2 peers in early acquired phenomena, which disappeared with time, whereas in late acquired phenomena 2L1 and eL2 children did not differ. Moreover, 2L1 children performed like monolingual children in early acquired phenomena but had a disadvantage in the late acquired phenomena with the amount of delay decreasing with time. We conclude that age of onset effects are modulated by effects of timing in monolingual acquisition. Contrary to expectation, input in terms of language dominance, measured as the dominant language used at home, did not affect simultaneous bilingual children’s performance in any of the phenomena. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hypothesis that acquisition of late phenomena is determined by input alone and suggest an alternative concept: the learner’s internal need for time to master a phenomenon, which is determined by its complexity and cross-linguistic robustness.
Twilight, Tintenherz, The Hunger Games und – auch 20 Jahre nach Erstpublikation des ersten Bandes ist an ihm kein Vorbeikommen – Harry Potter: Wir kennen sie alle, die großen kommerziellen Erfolge der Literaturbranche der Gegenwart. Seit dem durchschlagenden Erfolg von J.K. Rowlings Romanserie um den Zauberlehrling ist der Markt geradezu überschwemmt von seriellen Erzählungen, die im öffentlichen Diskurs als Fantasyerzählungen wahrgenommen beziehungsweise beschrieben werden. Deren Popularität dokumentieren seit nunmehr 20 Jahren in Deutschland die Jahresbestsellerlisten des Spiegel: Während im Jahr 2000 die deutschen Übersetzungen der ersten drei Harry Potter-Bände die Plätze 1 bis 3 belegen (vgl. Der Spiegel 2000, S. 206), ist auch das postHarry Potter-Deutschland diese Art von Romanserien nicht leid. Im Jahr 2008 finden sich unter den meistverkauften Romanen unter anderem Cornelia Funkes TintenherzTrilogie (2003–2007), Stephenie Meyers Bis(s)-Romane (2005–2009), Bände von Christopher Paolinis Eragon (2004–2011), der Romanserie House of Night (2009–2014) des Mutter-und-Tochter-Teams Casts, Kerstin Giers Liebe geht durch alle Zeiten- (2009–2010) und Silber-Serien (2013–2015) und Suzanne Collins’ Die Tribute von Panem (2008–2010) (vgl. Der Spiegel 2009, S. 131). Die ehemals der Allgemeinliteratur vorbehaltene Belletristik-Bestsellerliste des Spiegel kann sich Romanen nicht länger erwehren, die LeserInnen in den Kinder- und Jugendbuchabteilungen ihrer Buchhandlungen finden können. ...
Bilderbücher verfügen über einen Körper im Raum. Sie haben ein bestimmtes Format und Gewicht, bestehen aus Papier, einem Rücken, Vorsatzblättern und Knickkanten. Wie Druckmedien generell sind sie jeweils auf eine bestimmte Art gemacht und konstituieren sich durch eine Form, Gestalt und Oberfläche. BüchermacherInnen weisen in ästhetischen Reflexionen auf die verwandte Struktur der Architektur mit ihrem Metier und Medium hin. Der Typograph Jan Tschichold etwa versteht Druckwerke als eigene architektonische Ausdrucksform von Linie, Fläche und Raum und fasst seine Rolle bei der Reform der Penguin Books »als verantwortlicher Architekt der Bücher« auf (zitiert in Fleischmann 2013, S. 49). Dass Ideen nicht einfach in der Luft liegen und Künstlerisches der Konstruktion bedarf, hebt der Autor Hermann Burger in Die allmähliche Verfertigung der Idee beim Schreiben hervor. In seiner Poetik-Vorlesung geht Burger darauf ein, wie der Autor eine Situation entwirft, einen Gegenstand mit Wörtern anpackt, dreht und wendet, und schreibt, dass er während seines abgebrochenen Architekturstudiums, »im architektonischen Entwerfen[,] mehr für das spätere Schreiben gelernt habe als während der ganzen Germanistikausbildung« (Burger 1986, S. 12). ...