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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.
Wer sich mit Kinderliteratur aus wissenschaftlicher Perspektive befasst, kommt nicht umhin, über age nachzudenken. Age spielt in seinen vielen Formen und Facetten im gesamten System Kinderliteratur eine entscheidende Rolle. In Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research beschreibt Hans-Heino Ewers den Beginn der Kinderliteratur als den Moment, in dem Kinder als die Adressaten eines Textes benannt werden (vgl. Ewers 2009, S. 10). Perry Nodelman geht in seinem Buch The Hidden Adult der Frage nach, warum Texte an Kinder adressiert werden und rückt Konstruktionen von Kindern als besonderer, literarischer Nachrichten bedürfend in den Fokus.
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.
Lange Zeit herrschte im Forschungsdiskurs die Meinung vor, dass Kinder- und Jugendliteratur »aus sich selbst heraus verständlich sei und keiner literaturwissenschaftlichen Interpretationskunst bedürfe« (Gansel / Korte 2009, S. 7). Aus diesem Grund standen Fragen nach der Machart der Texte im Verhältnis zu Fragen nach ihren »Inhalte[n], Themen, pädagogische[n] Strategien und so genannte[n] ›Botschaften‹« (ebd.) häufig im Hintergrund. Diese Vorstellung hat sich mittlerweile jedoch gewandelt, was nicht zuletzt auf eine grundlegende Veränderung in der literarischen Landschaft seit Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts zurückzuführen ist...
Alles Fake, reine Konstruktion. Oder? : narrativierte Unsicherheit in Tamara Bachs "Marienbilder"
(2019)
Im Strukturalismus wird Literatur verstanden als ein sekundäres modellbildendes System (vgl. Titzmann 1977, S. 69). Sekundär bedeutet, dass Literatur ein neues zeichentheoretisches System konstituiert, in dem die Signifikate der normalsprachlichen Zeichen eine neue Bedeutung bekommen; der Text erschafft folglich das Modell einer Welt und entspricht demnach nicht nur nicht der Realität, sondern soll es auch erst gar nicht (vgl. ebd., S. 65– 85). Dieses erschaffene Modell einer Welt meint das, was im Folgenden als Konstruktion bezeichnet wird. Was geschieht jedoch, wenn nicht einmal auszumachen ist, ob dem, was in der erzählten Welt geschieht, ein diegetischer Wahrheitsgehalt zugesprochen werden kann oder nicht? Und wie wird diese Unsicherheit narrativ erzeugt? ...
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.”
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.
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.
Editorial [2019, deutsch]
(2019)
Editorial [2019, english]
(2019)
Seit der Jahrtausendwende wird in den Kommunikations- und Kulturwissenschaften ein sogenannter pictorial turn bzw. eine ›visuelle Wende‹ diskutiert (vgl. Mirzoeff 1998; ders. 1999; Mitchell 2008). Inzwischen präzisiert Bucher:
»Der grundlegende Wandel der Kommunikationsverhältnisse besteht nicht darin, dass zunehmend Abbildungen die Textkommunikation ergänzen oder einschränken [...]. Der grundlegende Wandel besteht darin, dass neue und neuartige Mischformen der verschiedensten Kommunikationsmodi und Kanäle entstanden sind, die man als multimodale Kommunikationsformen bezeichnen kann.« (Bucher 2011, S. 123)
Gudrun Marci-Boehncke macht als wesentliche Ursache dieser Hybridisierungen die durch das Internet, den »Ort [...] der Medien schlechthin«, in immer umfassenderer Weise gegebene Medienkonvergenz aus (Marci-Boehncke 2013, S. 507)...
If They Only Knew : die Doppelidentität maskierter Superhelden zwischen Täuschung und Authentizität
(2019)
Zahlreiche Superheldenfiguren sind dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass sie nicht nur über Superkräfte verfügen, sondern auch eine Doppelidentität besitzen: In der äußerlich durch eine Maske sichtbar gemachten Heldenidentität vollbringen sie öffentlich Heldentaten, in der zivilen Identität dagegen verbergen sie ihre Kräfte und verschweigen ihrem Umfeld ihr Heldentum. Solche Figuren lassen sich als maskierte Helden und Heldinnen beschreiben; die Maskerade bzw. das Geheimnis um die Doppelidentität ist eine Grundlage ihres Heldentums.
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.
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.
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.
Am 1. April 1989 wird das Empire State Building von einem reichen Ölscheich gekauft, der es Stein für Stein, Stahlstrebe für Stahlstrebe, im Wüstensand wieder aufbauen lassen will. Der Schotte James Mac Killian reist von 1923–1925 in einem Heißluftballon um die Welt und berichtet davon. Und in den Fragmenten des Geographenvolks der Orbæ lassen sich versunkene Welten erahnen, die sich mutige Reisende erschlossen und dokumentiert haben. Irritiert mag man sich fragen, ob einem diese Fakten entgangen sind, oder ob David Macaulays Unbuilding (1980) fake news ist, Caroline Mac Killians Journey of the Zephyr (2010) eine Lüge und die beeindruckende Bildbandtrilogie von François Place, Atlas des géographes d’Orbæ (1996–2000), eine unverfrorene Fälschung. Oder sind alle drei ›einfach‹ Bilderbücher und somit ohnehin Fiktion, ja Kunst mit all den ihr zustehenden Freiheiten? ...
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.
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.