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In the present paper, I will argue that even in a language like German, where the verb system does not contain a grammaticized aspect distinction, aspectual features do underlie the early form-function-mapping of verb forms in L1-acquisition. Furthermore, it will be argued that it is not only past tense forms that may receive an aspectual interpretation in early child language but also other forms of the verbal input. In the case of German, these are the forms of the present tense paradigm and the past participle. Showing and discussing various piecesof evidence for this assumption should strengthen the "aspect before tense" or "primacy of aspect" hypothesis. In general, the paper aims at a deeper understanding of the hierarchical relation between tense and aspect whereby aspect is the basic category and, therefore, aspectual features are the inevitable starting point of the acquisition of grammar.
This paper deals with the emergence of verb morphology in one German child up to the time mini-paradigms occur in the data. I will focus on the role of protomorphology as a transitional stage between rote learning and the productive use of morphological distinctions.
Eine wesentliche morpho-syntaktische Eigenschaft pronominaler Formen ist ihre Kongruenz mit dem Nomen. In den Grammatiken werden die pronominalen Paradigmen deshalb anhand der Kategorien des Nomens konstruiert. So wird traditionellerweise im Deutschen für all die verschiedenen pronominalen Elemente wie bestimmter/unbestimmter Artikel, Negationsartikel, Possessiv- und Demonstrativpronomen, starke/schwache Adjektive ein und dieselbe Struktur des Paradigmensystems zugrundegelegt. Die 3 Genusklassen konstituieren je ein Paradigma im Singular sowie ein gemeinsames Pluralparadigma. Jedes dieser 4 Paradigmen hat 4 Kasuspositionen, Nom., Gen., Dat., Akk. Dies ergibt ein Paradigmensystem mit 16 Paradigmenpositionen. Jede Position beschreibt eine der möglichen syntaktischen Umgebungen von nominalen Einheiten auf der Äußerungsoberfläche. Nicht nur im Deutschen existiert nun aber keineswegs für jede dieser Positionen auch eine eigenständige pronominale Form. Die Diskrepanz ist bekanntlich beachtlich. Das Paradigmensystem des bestimmten Artikels - das hier exemplarisch diskutiert werden sol1 - weist mit 6 Formen noch den größten Formenreichtum auf. Das Demonstrativpronomen dies und der Negationsartikel kein z.B. haben 5 distinkte Formen, die schwachen Adjektive schließlich nur 2.
Die Frage, die sich unmittelbar aufdrängt, ist, welche (grammatische) Ratio steckt hinter diesem hohen Maß an Formidentitäten. Inwieweit haben wir es hier mit motivierten Synkretismen, d.h. auf inhaltlich begründeten Neutralisationen beruhenden Formidentitäten, und/oder zufälligen Homonymien zu tun?
The distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word
(2000)
In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.
Identity effects in phonology are deviations from regular phonological form (i.e. canonical patterns) which are due to the relatedness between words. More specifically, identity effects are those deviations which have the function to enhance similarity in the surface phonological form of morphologically related words. In rule-based generative phonology the effects in question are described by means of the cycle. For example, the stress on the second syllable in cond[ɛ]nsation as opposed to the stresslessness of the second syllable in comp[ǝ]nsation is described by applying the stress rules initially to the sterns thereby yielding condénse and cómpensàte. Subsequently the stress rules are reapplied to the affixed words with the initial stress assignment (i.e. stress on the second syllable in condense, but not in compensate) leaving its mark in the output form (cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968). A second example are words like lie[p]los 'unloving' in German, which shows the effects of neutralization in coda position (i.e. only voiceless obstruents may occur in coda position) even though the obstruent should 'regularly' be syllabified in head position (i.e. bl is a wellformed syllable head in German). Here the stern is syllabified on an initial cycle, obstruent devoicing applies (i.e. lie[p]) and this structure is left intact when affixation applies (i.e. lie[p ]Ios ) (cf. Hall 1992). As a result the stern of lie[p]los is identical to the base lie[p].
The paper proposes structural constraints for different adjunct classes in German and English. Approaches in which syntax has only the task to provide adjunct positions and in which principles of scope are supposed to explain the distribution of adjuncts are rejected as incomplete. The syntactic requirements are not as rigid as other approaches require, such that there is just one possible position for a given adjunct. Rather the syntactic constraints may be fulfilled in different positions.
In this paper, we deal with the semantic interaction between ung-nominalizations of different event types and temporal prepositions like wiihrend 'during', vor 'before', nach 'after', bis 'until' and seit 'since'. According to the two-level-approach to selnantics (Bierwisch 1983, Bierwisch / Lang 1989), we will argue that the meaning of ten~poral prepositions is determined on the level of semantic form (SF). When combined with an event nominal, the period in time required by the preposition has to be inferred on the level of conceptual structure (CS). Very often, the exact nature of the period in time is determined by pragmatic factors. There are, however, some important restrictions to this inference procedure which rely on the event noun's Aktionsart. In Ehrich/Rapp (2000), it was claimed that eventive ungnominals inherit the Aktionsart of their base verb. This assumption receives strong support by the data presented in this paper.
In this paper I argue that there are three distinct constructions in Modern German in which a 'topic constituent' is detached to the left: (left-)dislocated topic ('left dislocation'), (left-)attached topic ('mixed left dislocation'), and (left-)hanging topic ('hanging topic'). Presupposing the framework of Integrational Linguistics, I provide syntactic and semantic analyses for them. In particular, I propose that these constructions involve the syntactic function (syntactic) topic, which relates the topic constituent to the remaining part of the sentence. Dislocated and attached topic constituents function in addition as a strong or weak (syntactic) antecedent of some resumptive 'd-pronoun' form.
Dislocated topic, attached topic, and hanging topic are in turn contrasted with 'free topics'. Being sentential units of their own, the latter are syntactically unconnected to the following sentence. In particular, they are not topic constituents.
In this paper I investigate the usage of the adverb and particle 'so' in spontaneous speech (interviews) collected from 21 speakers of the urban multi-ethnolectal youth language Kiezdeutsch. Speakers from the neighborhoods Kreuzberg and Wedding in Berlin are ranging in age from 14 to 18. The 1454 tokens of so available in the corpus (about 5 hours of speech) were classified into 10 different categories; some were structurally defined while others were defined along dimensions of meaning. Our current results indicate that there are differential usages patterns depending on the speaker's gender and age for some of these categories. Further, it appears that some patterns that have been attributed grammatical meaning may not appear frequently enough to establish a separate meaningful grammatical category. Rather, most instances of this kind of use of so appear to have a hedging function, indicating speakers' non-commitance to a specific circumstance.
The German word also, similar to English so, is traditionally considered to be a sentence adverb with a consecutive meaning, i.e. it indicates that the propositional content of the clause containing it is some kind of consequence of what has previously been said. As a sentence adverb, also has its place within the core of the German sentence, since this is the proper place for an adverb to occur in German. The sentence core offers two proper positions for adverbs: the so-called front field and the middle field. In spoken German, however, also often occurs in sentence-initial position, outside the sentence itself. In this paper, I will use excerpts of German conversations to discuss and illustrate the importance of the sentence positions and the discourse positions for the functions of also on the basis of some German conversations.
This paper presents psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing the resolution of German personal pronouns. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential antecedents, two interpretation-preference tasks were designed. Their specific aim was to disentangle salience factors conflated in previous research on pronoun interpretation, such as linear or-der, first mention and topicalization. Experiment 1 tested pronoun resolution to non-sentence-initial position (scrambling) and Experiment 2 tested pronoun resolution to sentence-initial position (topicalization). The results across different verb types and across different syntactic contexts in Experiments 1 and 2 show that grammatical function, yet neither linear order, first mention nor topicalization predicts pronoun resolution in German.
The German causal preposition durch ('by', 'through') poses a challenge to formal-semantic analyses applying strict compositionality. To deal with this challenge, a formalism which builds on recent important developments in Discourse Representation Theory is developed, including a more elaborate analysis of presuppositional phenomena as well as the integration into the theory of unification as a mode of composition. It is argued that that the observed unificational phenomena belong in the realm of pragmatics, providing an argument for presuppositional phenomena at a sentence- and word-internal level.
This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the self-paced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.
This paper discusses results from a corpus study of German demonstrative and personal pronouns and from a reading time experiment in which we compared the interpretation options of the two types of pronouns (Bosch et al. 2003, 2007). A careful review of exceptions to a generalisation we had been suggesting in those papers (the Subject Hypothesis: "Personal pronouns prefer subject antecedents and demonstratives prefer non-subject antecedents") shows that, although this generalisation correctly describes a tendency in the data, it is quite wrong in claiming that the grammatical role of antecedents is the relevant parameter. In the current paper we argue that the generalisation should be formulated in terms of in-formation-structural properties of referents rather than in terms of the grammatical role of antecedent expressions.
Two main types of sentences are traditionally distinguished in the context of semantic theories of questions and answers: declarative sentences, corresponding to statements, and interrogative sentences, corresponding to questions. The interrogative forms can be further subdivided into dialectical ones (yes-no-questions) and non-dialectical ones (constituent questions). These distinctions are made for both root and embedded sentences. The predicates that select sentential complements fall into three classes: predicates that license only declaratives, those that allow only for interrogatives, and those that embed both types of sentences. In this connection, verbs of doubt are interesting in that they allow for declaratives as well as dialectical interrogatives, while non-dialectical interrogatives do not seem to be appropriate complements.
In what follows, our main concern will be with the German verb of doubt zweifeln and its possible sentential complements. Speaker intuitions as to which constructions are grammatical or acceptable vary, particularily with respect to rare expressions like zweifeln. Therefore, interviews and corpus analysis were applied as a means to acquire reliable linguistic data. These as well as data from historical sources and from some languages other than German (esp. English and Italian) are presented and analysed. In the last section, based on the notion of ‘subjective probability’, an attempt is made at explaining the observations.
The focus of the present paper is on the difference between English and German learners‘ use of perfectivity and imperfectivity. The latter is expressed by means of suffixation (suffix -va-). In contrast, perfectivity is encoded either by suffixation (-nou-) or by prefixation (twenty different prefixes that mostly modify not only aspectual but also lexical properties of the verb).
In the native Czech data set, there is no significant difference between the number of imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms. In the English data, imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms are equally represented as well. However, German learners use significantly more perfective forms than English learners and Czech natives. When encoding perfectivity in Czech, German learners prefer to use prefixes to suffixes. Overall, English learners in comparison to German learners encode more perfectives by means of suffixation than prefixation.
These results suggest that German learners of Czech focus on prefixes expressing aspectual and lexical modification of the verb, while English learners rather pay attention to the aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective. In a more abstract way, the German learner group focuses on the operations carried out on the left side from the verb stem while the English learner group concentrates on the operations performed on the right side qfrom the verb stem.
This sensitivity can be to certain degree motivated by the linguistic devices of the corresponding source languages: English learners of Czech use imperfectives mainly because English has marked fully grammatical form for the expression of imperfective aspect – the progressive -ing form. German learners, on the other hand, pay in Czech more attention to the prefixes, which like in German modify the lexical meaning of the verb. In this manner, Czech prefixes used for perfectivization function similar to the German verbal prefixes (such as ab-, ver-) modifying Aktionsart.
The present study examines a particular kind of rule blockage – referred to below as an 'antistructure-preservation effect'. An anti-structure-preservation effect occurs if some language has a process which is preempted from going into effect if some sequence of sounds [XY] would occur on the surface, even though other words in the language have [XY] sequences (which are underlyingly /XY/). It will be argued below that anti-structure-preservation effects can be captured in Optimality Theory in terms of a general ranking involving FAITH and MARKEDNESS constraints and that individual languages invoke a specific instantiation of this ranking. A significant point made below is that while anti-structure-preservation effects can be handled straightforwardly in terms of constraint rankings they typically require ad hoc rule-specific conditions in rule-based approaches.
Glide formation, a process whereby an underlying high front vowel is realized as a palatal glide, is shown to occur only in unstressed prevocalic position in German, and to be blocked by specific surface restrictions such as *ji and *ʁj. Traditional descriptions of glide formation (including derivational as well as Optimality theoretic approaches) refer to the syllable in order to capture its conditions. The present study illustrates that glide formation (plus the distribution of long and short tense /i/) in German can better be captured in a Functional Phonology account (Boersma 1998) which makes reference to stress instead of the syllable and thus overcomes problems of former approaches.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
How the left-periphery of a wh-relative clause determines its syntactic and semantic relationships
(2004)
This paper discusses a certain class of German relative clauses which are characterized by a wh-expression overtly realized at the left periphery of the clause. While investigating empirical and theoretical issues regarding this class of relatives, it argues that a wh-relative clause relates syntactically to a functionally complete sentential projection and semantically to entities of various kinds that are abstracted from the matrix clause. What is shown is that this grammatical behaviour clearly can be attributed to the properties of the elements positioned at the left of a wh-relative clause. Finally, a lexically-based analysis couched in the framework of HPSG is given that accounts for the data presented.
This study examines articulatory and acoustic inter-speaker variability in the production of the German vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/. Our subjects are 3 monozygotic twin pairs (2 female and 1 male pair) and 2 dizygotic female twin pairs. All of them were born, raised and are still living in Berlin and see their twin brother or sister regularly. We assume that monozygotic twins that are genetically identical and share the same physiology should be more similar in their articulation than dizygotic twins but that the shared time and social environment of twins, regardless of their genetic similarity, also plays a crucial role in the acoustic similarity of twins. Articulatory measurements were made with EMA (Electromagnetic Articulography) and the target positions of the produced vowels were analyzed. Additionally, the formants F1-F4 of each vowel were measured and compared within the twin pairs. Our data seems to point out the importance of a shared environment and the strong influence of learning over the anatomical identity of the monozygotic twins regarding the production of vowels. But, additional results suggest (1) the impact of physiology on the production of a vowel following a velar consonant and (2) the interaction of physiology and stress in inter-speaker variability.
Das Partizip 1 im Deutschen
(2000)
It is controversial in the literature whether the First Participle in German ('Present Participle'; henceforth: Part I) is an adjective or a verbal form. Syntactically, it occurs exclusively in adjectival positions but it does not behave like an adjective in other respects. This paper provides an analysis of Part I starting from a diachronic perspective and arriving at a synchronic interpretation of its position in the field of 'finite verb + nonfinite verb constructions' in New High German. Against such positions as Paul's (1920), which regard Part I as an adjective only, it will be argued that, for an adequate description of its structural properties, its verbal character must be taken into account both diachronically and synchronically. It will be shown that Part I fits into and completes a paradigmatic structure together with other nonfinite verbal forms.
"Werden" plays an important role in German, especially as a copula and as an auxiliary verb. It constitutes the analytic (periphrastic) part of the verbal paradigm being used as an auxiliary by encoding the categories of Tense (Future), Mood (Conditional), and Diathesis (Passive).
The original meaning of PIE *uuerth- includes two basic readings – a terminative and an aterminative. Both of them have been used in the process of grammaticalisation of werden in constructions with participles and the infinitive. The terminative reading based on the feature "Change of a State" was originally the categorical marker of "werden" within the opposition "sein" vs. "werden", where "sein" indicated the meaning of "State". As a result of the further development which started in the later OHG period, the aterminative reading of "werden" in constructions with the Participle II mixed with the terminative one by establishing the Passive-Paradigm. This evolution forced "sein"+ Part. II into the periphery of the Diathesis where in NHG it is marked as a resultative (terminative) construction. On the other hand, werden + Participle I (later with Infinitive) did not establish aterminative readings due to the peculiarities of the semantics of the Participle I – form. In connection with the Infinitive the terminativity of werden developed in the process of its auxiliarisation to the prospective I prognostic reading in the future-tense perspective and to the epistemic reading in the perspective of the present tense. In the perspective of the past tense (cf. MHG "ward varen" {became ride}, "was ridden") it disappeared because in this perspective prospective or prognostic readings are impossible.
The ultimate goal of the study is to examine the acquisition of intensifiers in English and German. In this paper an overview of the first results regarding four L1 English-speaking children will be given. Contrary to previous claims in the literature (e.g. Thomas 1990), it will be argued that intensifiers are used by children in early phases of language acquisition. Intensifiers play an important role in early phases of language acquisition since they can be used to express the wish either to be included or excluded in a certain action and thus contribute to structuring a central aspect of the child's discourse.
The study presents a first investigation of two different processes in the L1-acquisition of German: The acquisition of definite pronominal forms and the occurence of finite verbs. The aim of the study is to find out if there are inherent relations between both processes. Inherent relations are understood as developmental relations based on the structural properties which demand a correlated emergence of the finite verb and definite pronominal forms.
Wenn man die syntaktischen Eigenschaften des Hildebrandliedes betrachtet, so zeigen sich einerseits Eigenschaften, die auch für die Syntax des Nhd. charakteristisch sind: von Komplementierern eingeleitete Nebensätze, Deklarativsätze im Verb-Zweit-Format, Argumentstrukturen von Verben und Adjektiven, Attributions- bzw. Modifikationsverfahren. Andererseits werden Eigenschaften sichtbar, die im Nhd. verlorengegangen oder ausgedünnt worden sind: Deklarativsätze im Verb-End-Format, Pro-drop-Phänomene (in finiten Sätzen), nicht präpositional regierte Adverbiale (in Gestalt von NP mit reinen Kasus), artikellose Nominalphrasen (insbesondere solche mit definiter Interpretation). Die Betrachtung lehrt, dass auch über einen zeitlichen Abstand von mindestens zwölfhundert Jahren und trotz verschiedener Wandlungen, die zu syntaktischer Diskontinuität führen, syntaktische Kontinuität erkennbar bleibt, und zwar in einem Maße, das man angesichts der ungeheuer verfremdenden phonologischen, morphologischen und lexikalischen Veränderungen, die einem heutigen, sprachhistorisch nicht geschulten Muttersprachler das Hildebrandlied als einen Text von einem anderen Stern erscheinen lassen, nicht erwarten mag, in einem Maße, das allerdings denjenigen Linguisten nicht so sehr überraschen wird, dessen Blick durch universalgrammatische Einsichten der letzten Jahrzehnte geschärft worden ist für Invarianzen und Kontinuitäten.
Seit mehr als 60 Jahren dominiert in der historisch-phonologischen Umlaut-Landschaft EIN Aufsatz, eine vierseitige Skizze des althochdeutschen Umlauts von W. Freeman Twaddell. Keller (1978: 160) nennt diese Theorie 'one of the finest achievements of American linguists'. Ähnliche Lobsprüche findet man mehrmals in der Literatur und der Artikel bleibt bis heute noch DER Eckpfeiler der Umlaut-Debatte (s. Krygier 1997, Schulte 1998).
In den letzten paar Jahren haben wir mit einigen Kollegen – Anthony Buccini, Garry Davis, David Fertig, Dave Holsinger, Robert Howell, Regina Smith – einen neuen Ansatz entwickelt, die wir "ingenerate Umlaut" nennen. "Ingenerate" heißt hier ungefähr 'vorprogrammiert, inhärent, angeboren' und deutet darauf hin, daß wir die Wurzeln vom Umlaut in der Phonetik – noch genauer: in der Koartikulation – suchen. Auch meinen wir, die allmähliche Entfaltung des Prozesses in den "Ausnahmen" zum Umlaut sehen zu können, mit anderen Worten genau in den umlautlosen Formen, die in der Twaddellschen Tradition als willkürliche Ergebnisse der Analogie gesehen werden müssen.
This paper draws a link between the typological phenomenon of the paradigmatically supported evidentiality evoked by perfect and/or perfectivity and the equally epistemic system of modal verbs in German. The assumption is that, if perfect(ivity) is at the bottom of evidentiality in a wide number of unrelated languages, then it will not be an arbitrary fact that systematic epistemic readings occur also for the modal verbs in German, which were preterite presents originally. It will be demonstrated, for one, how exactly modal verbs in Modem German still betray sensitivity to perfect and perfective contexts, and, second, how perfect(ivity) is prone to evincing epistemic meaning. Although the expectation cannot be satisfied due to a lack of respective data from the older stages of German, a research path is sketched narrowing down the linguistic questions to be asked and dating results to be reached.
In contradistinction to main verbs copula verbs like 'sein', 'werden' or 'bleiben' ('be', 'become' or 'remain') can, though with some restrictions, take projections of all lexical categories as complements. Semantically 'werden' and 'bleiben' are considered to be dual operators, related to each other by inner and outer (= dual) negation. But there are contexts where 'bleiben' seems to assume the meaning of its dual 'werden'. What at first glance appears to be an idiosyncracy of German turns out to hold for Swedish, Brazil-Portuguese and other unrelated languages as well.
'Werden' is more restricted than 'sein' and 'bleiben', it cannot have a locative complement. 'Bleiben' has the widest distribution, it can also take infinitives of verbs of position as complement. But in this case 'stehen bleiben' is ambiguous between a "remain" -reading and a "become" -reading.
In 15th century the Swedish verb 'bliva' - a borrowing from German - has undergone a change from the "remain"-reading to the "become"-reading. The "become"-reading of 'bliva' (later form 'bli') is only blocked (as is the German verb 'werden') in the case of a locative complement, where the "remain"-reading has survived. The two readings of 'bli' do not produce any ambiguity, except when taking a verb of position as complement - much the same as in German.
The paper attempts to pinpoint the conditions that lead to this surprising shift of meaning between duals.
Koreferenzielle Pro-Formen im Deutschen und Italienischen : Analyse von Korpora gesprochener Sprache
(2011)
Gegenstand dieses Beitrags ist die vergleichende Untersuchung von deutschen und italienischen verweisenden Pronomen. Für das Deutsche wird die Alternanz zwischen der/die/ das (im Folgenden d-Pronomen; vgl. Ahrenholz 2007 und Wiltschko 1998) und Personalpronomen betrachtet. Für das Italienische werden Demonstrativ- und Personalpronomen (freie und klitische) untersucht. In vorherigen Forschungsarbeiten wurde auf semantische, syntaktische und pragmatische Bedingungen hingewiesen, die das Vorkommen von d-Pronomen anstatt anderer Pronominalformen wie z.B. den Personalpronomen im Deutschen stark begünstigen (vgl. dazu Ravetto 2009). Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, zu überprüfen, ob in den zwei Vergleichssprachen ähnliche Tendenzen bzw. Bedingungen zu beobachten sind, die mit der Wahl der jeweiligen verweisenden Form verknüpft sind.
In vielen Metaphern ist das Leben als Zielbereich enthalten. In einer idiombezogenen kognitivlinguistischen Untersuchung wurden diejenigen Ausgangsbereiche gesucht, auf die bei der Konzeptualisierung des Lebens zurückgegriffen wird, wenn deutsche metaphorische Idiome verwendet werden. Die metaphorischen Lebens-Idiome wurden dabei aus zwei verschiedenen Datenquellen, aus Wörterbüchern und aus dem Mannheimer IDS-Korpus gesammelt, mit Rücksicht auf die Problematik der introspektiven bzw. korpuslinguistischen Methoden (Kispál 2010). Als Ergebnis dieser Untersuchung ist eine Liste von 152 metaphorischen Lebens-Idiomen sowie eine Liste von 20 konzeptuellen Metaphern aufgestellt worden. Die metaphorischen Lebens-Idiome sind durch eine mehrfache Motiviertheit geprägt. Die Motiviertheit mehrerer Idiome kann dabei u. a. durch konzeptuelle Metaphern aufgezeigt werden, die die Konzeptualisierung des Lebens als Zyklus darstellen.
Neue Vorschläge in der Valenzlexikographie am Beispiel des spanisch-deutschen Verbvalenzwörterbuchs
(2011)
Sprechen über Emotionen und Gefühle: neurobiologisch und alltagssprachlich - Das Beispiel "Angst"
(2012)
In der deutschen Gegenwartssprache sind die Funktionsverbgefüge (FVG) die über lange Zeit vor allem nur unter stilistischen Gesichtpunkten betrachtet und meist als schlechter Stil abgewertet wurden, mit dem Aufsatz Peter von Polenz (1963) in zunehmendem Maße in das Blickfeld der linguistischen Untersuchungen getreten. In den folgenden Jahren erschienen mehrere Arbeiten zu den FVG, in denen vor allem ihre semantischen, syntaktischen und kommunikativen Leistungen untersucht worden. Die als FVG in der Fachliteratur erfassten Konstruktionen bestehen bekanntlich aus einem Funktionsverb(FV) und einem deverbativen Substantiv, auch manchmal nomen actionis genannt. Funktionsverb und Verbalsubstantiv bilden zusammen sowohl strukturell als auch semantisch eine lexikalische Einheit, z. B. Kritik üben; in Verbindung treten. Kennzeichnend für diese Einheiten ist, dass die eigentliche Bedeutung der FVG im Substantiv liegt, während das Verb der ganzen Einheit nur eine grammatisch-syntaktische Funktion ausübt. Auch im Türkischen sind derartige aus Verben und Verbalsubstantiven bestehende Fügungen vorhanden. Sie stimmen im Hinblick auf ihre Konstruktionen mit den FVG im Deutschen überein […]. Die vorliegende Arbeit verfolgt das Ziel, die Fragen zu erörtern, wie die FVG und VF gebildet werden und welche syntaktischen Konstruktionen dieser FVG und VF ermöglicht werden. Das Hauptaugenmerk gilt den semantischen und syntaktischen Funktionen dieser sprachlichen Phänomene. Dabei geht es weniger darum, die Formen und Funktionen der FVG und VF bis ins kleinste Detail darzustellen. Hier werden vielmehr ihre Formen und Funktionen behandelt, die für eine kontrastive Betrachtung interessant. Die Arbeit hat vor allem theoretischen Charakter und sie ist nicht an einem Korpus orientiert. Die Beschreibung basiert auf der eigene Sprachkompetenz.
Der Schluss vom Bekannten auf das weniger Bekannte ist ein zentrales Grundprinzip der Didaxe. Ein mittelalterlicher Texttyp, der dieses Prinzip nicht nur beherzigt, sondern es durch seine Bauform regelrecht ausstellt, ist das spätestens seit 1230 literaturfähig gewordene Reimpaarbîspel, das zwei unterschiedliche Bereiche oder Sphären so aufeinander bezieht, dass der erste Teil des Textes, die eigentliche Beispielerzählung, ein allgemein akzeptiertes Modell einführt, das dann im zweiten Teil, in der Auslegung, auf eine andere Lebenssphäre übertragen wird, um mit diesem Akt der Analogisierung das zu Erklärende im Rückgriff auf bereits Etabliertes zu verdeutlichen. […] Hinzu kommt, dass gerade Texte dieser Art interessante Rückschlüsse auf die Etablierung, Durchsetzung und Veränderung von Diskursen ermöglichen, zeigt doch schon die Zweiteiligkeit der Bauform, die eine Redeordnung A mit einer Redeordnung B vergleicht, auf das deutlichste an, dass diese Texte gewissermaßen auf der Schwelle zwischen zwei argumentativen Kontexten angesiedelt sind, wobei das im ersten Teil Präsentierte stets als das bereits Eingeführte, Abgesicherte, Evidente erscheint, während das im zweiten Teil Vorgeführte immer als das relativ gesehen Neue wahrgenommen wird, das in seiner Geltung und in seiner Evidenz vom vorher Entwickelten abhängt.
This paper aims to determine and classify by syntactic criteria, the functions of reflexivity (reflexive pronoun kendi) in Turkish, in contrast to German.
Reflexivity in Turkish can be expressed by synthetic elements such as affixes, but also by an analytical element – the reflexive pronoun kendi. And in German it is formed by the reflexive pronoun sich. The reflexive pronoun sich in German used both in anaphorical and lexical functions, which can be distinguished from each other by certain criteria.
„Football“, „soccer“ in British terms, is the most famous sport of the world. The history of the football goes back to the ancient times. In this article, the football terms used in Germany and Turkey are handled together with the historical development of football. Various differences and similarities between these terms and their features are also demonstrated.
In this paper I will present some empirical studies concerning a linguistic construction called binomials, e.g. auf und ab (‚up and down‘). Binomials consist of two coordinated elements in a fixed order ‚A and B‘, whereas empirically the reversed order ‚B and A‘ is rarely found and, asked for acceptability judgements, native speakers tend to reject it. In two corpus studies hypotheses on phonological principles responsible for the ordering of the constituents are tested. Furthermore I present a pseudoword experiment with German native speakers and Russian and Turkish learners of German as a second language. Results are discussed in the framework of optimality theory.
Recent critical discussions of German migrant and post-migrant literature has repeatedly focussed on the phenomenon of the exotic: where some writers seem consciously to exoticise their writing, exaggerating myths about Oriental culture and thus highlighting differences between East and West, perhaps with the aim of making foreigners exciting, likeable or deserving of sympathy, others react against this, rejecting clichés and highlighting continuities, apparently with the aim of making cultural boundaries traversable. Both are understandable strategies tor dealing with displacement. ln this context l should like to adopt a term from quite a different discipline. Bultmanns concept of demythologising. ln theology, demythologising means dissectting the "myth" - the sacred but implausible narrative - to distil from it a kerygmatic truth. If we regard the exotic as being, in this technical sense, the "myth", then it is not entirely devoid of a relationship to reality, but it cannot simply be read as "teal". Thus demythologising is the opposite process to exoticising. Drawing on satirical texts by four Turkish-German writers and cabaretts, this paper looks at ways in which this ethnic minority can use ironic self-depiction to capture and defuse the stereotypes with which it is confronted. Under the rubric "cold turkey", that is, Turkishness without the psychedelics, it shows how the satirists transpose clichés into everyday situations, where they become absurd. The paper’s conclusion is likely to be that hybrid communities are inevitably torn between a desire to highlight demarcation lines (exoticism) and a need to accentuate the potential for assimilation (demythologising). Humour, which in any case has a tendency either to underline or to debunk stereotypes, serves as a highly effective tool for working out this dichotomy, and as all four satirists have successfully reached main-stream German audiences, it would also appear to be a key mechanism in achieving intet-cultural understanding.
"What characterizes the literature of the transition? ln the late medieval period the forms and aspirations of literary endeavor stood in clear continuity with those of the High Middle Ages; but they were also rapidly expanding in scope, with many innovations that would become important for the Renaissance and the Rcformation. [...] Bringing all these elements under a common denominator we may say that the intellectual life of the centuries of transition showed a great openness to new ideas - an openness that stands in contrast both to the more rigid cognitive hierarchies of the High Middle Ages and to the entrenched positions of the Reformation. The resulting diversification of German literature reveals itself in the new forms of writing pioneered by new classes of writers for ever-widening circles of readers. We shall observe this increased diversity in the traditional centers of literary production, the court and the cloister, but even more so in the new literary world of the cities. And we shall see the parallel rise of Iewish literary awareness as belonging in die same broad context."