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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). ...
This article examines three novels by the popular Flemish youth author Gie Laenen, written between 1975 and 1982, in which the theories and practices associated with progressive education in the 1970s are key elements of the narrative. It argues that Laenen, who was convicted in 1973 and again in 2008 of serial sexual abuse of teenage boys, used progressive education as a narrative trope both to suggest to his young readers that close attachments between young boys and adult men were harmless and to provide an exculpatory defence for his own acts. Through narratological analysis and a contextualisation of the novels within the educational culture of the time, the article shows how Laenen – by drawing upon the ideas of progressive education, using these ideas to shape his narratives, and suggesting parallels between himself (as author) and several main characters – effectively appropriated the ideals of progressive education for ulterior purposes to justify his own abusive behaviour.
The rebellious spirit of 1968 was characterised, among other things, by a strong aversion to authority of any form. In Dutch children’s literature, this spirit is personified by the author Miep Diekmann. From the end of the 1950s until the end of the 1980s, Diekmann contested all kinds of social injustice, both in her children’s books and in her critical work. This article discusses how she challenged the status quo in Dutch children’s literature, firstly through her efforts to improve the cultural status of children’s literature, and secondly through writing books with a different view of the world than the one with which children were then familiar. In interviews, reviews, and discussions with politicians, she successfully appealed for more academic and critical attention for books for young readers. With her children’s books she wanted to make her readers think independently about all kinds of social injustice. Whereas in her first books a tension can be observed between her ambition to make children aware of forms of inequality and her intention to let her reading audience judge for themselves, in her later novels, in particular in De dagen van olim, [The Days of Yore] (1971), she presents social injustice in a way that leaves more to the imagination of her readers.
In der Theatergeschichte wurde von Aristoteles bis Brecht immer wieder angenommen, dass ein Bühnengeschehen das Publikum beeinflussen kann. Entsprechend nahe liegt der Gedanke, das Theater als Erziehungsinstrument einzusetzen, wie es z. B. im Jesuitentheater der Renaissance oder den didaktischen Dramen der Aufklärung der Fall war. Stand bei Ersteren die Vermittlung der christlichen Heilslehre im Mittelpunkt, können Letztere als »Einübung in gesellschaftliche Verhaltensnormen« (Schedler 1974, S. 23) verstanden werden. Auch das emanzipatorische Kindertheater der 1960er Jahre verfolgt erzieherische Ziele, obgleich diese sich signifikant von den oben genannten unterscheiden. Hier sollen Kinder nicht lernen, indem neue Ängste erzeugt, »sondern alte benannt [und] sprachlich faßbar« gemacht werden (Reisner 1983, S. 116). ...
Setzt man bei der Darstellung revolutionärer Prozesse im Kindertheater in den 1960/70er Jahren an, so liegt der Fokus auf einer Zeit gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche und politisch-sozialer Bewegungen, die für die Geschichte des Kinder- und Jugendtheaters von besonderer Bedeutung ist (vgl. Schneider 1984). Wie andere Intellektuelle und KünstlerInnen auch wurden Theaterschaffende von den Protesten und dem Klima der Veränderung und des Aufbruchs vielfältig angeregt. Auch im Theater wurden Autoritäten hinterfragt, traditionelle Repertoirestücke einer kritischen Revision unterzogen und neue Spielformen erprobt. Das Revolutionäre erscheint hier zunächst als eine Hinwendung zum Politischen, die auch bestehende und neu gegründete Kindertheater erfasste. Erkennbar wird eine gesellschaftlich engagierte Theaterarbeit, die Formen der Unterdrückung (z. B. von Kindern) dokumentierte und mit großem Engagement bekämpfte. Mit den Mitteln des Theaters sollten kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Veränderungen durchgesetzt werden und die Theaterbühne sollte ein Ort der Revolution gegen gesellschaftliche Missstände sein. Theaterarbeit war politische Arbeit und Kindertheater ein »Mittel, auf gesellschaftliche Zustände einzuwirken« (Ludwig 1994, S. 24). ...
Kaum eine Zeit steht so sehr für die sexuelle Befreiung und Sprengung familialer Strukturen wie die 1968er (vgl. Herzog 2005). Kaum ein Märchen steht in der psychoanalytischen Deutung so sehr für den sexuellen Reifungsprozess und das Unabhängigwerden eines Kindes wie Der Froschkönig. Der vorliegende Artikel greift diese Verbindung auf, da gerade während der 68er-Bewegung verschiedene Wasser- und Amphibienfiguren in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (KJL) vorkommen, die stark an die Motive des Märchens erinnern. Besonders prominente Beispiele hierfür sind: Christine Nöstlingers Wir pfeifen auf den Gurkenkönig von 1972 sowie Mirjam Presslers Erzählung Goethe in der Kiste, die zwar erst 1987 erschienen ist, jedoch deutliche Züge des anti-autoritären Gedankenguts der Protestkultur aufweist. Diesen Texten ist gemein, dass ihre Motive augenscheinlich von einem Märchen geprägt sind, das von der Psychoanalyse als Sinnbild für den Reifungsvorgang eines Kindes bewertet wird, welches sich aus seiner inzestuösen Verstricktheit mit dem Vater lösen muss. Während Presslers Buch den Froschkönig explizit anzitiert, kann Nöstlingers Gurkenkönig als eine Schwell- und Schwellenfigur gelesen werden, die ähnliche Prozesse in Gang setzt wie die Märchengestalt. ...
The years around May ’68 (c. 1965 – c. late-1970s) are widely understood to represent a watershed moment for children’s books in France. An important factor was the influence of a new fringe of avant-garde publishers that attracted attention across their trade in and beyond France. Using archives and interviews and accounts of some of the books produced and their reception, this article presents case studies of the most influential publishing houses as a series of three snapshots of the areas of movement in the field. At the same time, it evaluates the extent to which the social, cultural and political upheavals in France in the wake of May ’68 helped to alter the shape of book production for children and to bring about a ›radical revolution‹ in the children’s publishing trade.
This article, based on extensive source material from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, is about the changing norms for children’s media, childhood and art in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis demonstrates how changes within welfare state institutions converged with the youth rebellion’s wider criticism of children’s low status in traditional power hierarchies, and contributed to new definitions of the role of media in children’s lives. After establishing a wider historical contextualisation, the article moves on to show how the criticism of existing norms in the realm of children’s literature in the mid-1960s grew into a critique of the prevailing ideologies and existing narratives in all children’s media (including film, theatre and television) at the end of the decade. A key figure in the redefinition of norms for children’s media was the Swede, Gunilla Ambjörnsson. Her 1968 book, Trash Culture for Children, led to discussions about the role of media in children’s lives all over Scandinavia. Her core belief in the innate social and political interests of children had a great impact on the ways in which the possibilities for an explicit political agenda in children’s media were conceptualised in Scandinavia at large.
Fünfzig Jahre nach 1968. Fünfzig Jahre nach der Studentenrevolte.
Was hat sie in Deutschland bewirkt? Was ist geblieben? Wo haben sich die 68er geirrt? Fragen, mit denen man seit Beginn des Jahres konfrontiert wird. Namen und Fakten, die erinnert werden: Benno Ohnesorg, Rudi Dutschke, Alice Schwarzer, Rainer Langhans, Kommune 1. – Die Jugend, aber nicht nur die, ging auf die Straße, protestierte gegen Alt-Nazis in Führungspositionen oder juristischen und öffentlichen Institutionen, forderte Gleichberechtigung für die Frauen und vieles mehr. Der Protest richtete sich gegen verkrustete Strukturen und falsche Selbstverständlichkeiten. ...