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In this paper, data from a current study on bilingual language acquisition and language promotion of children is presented. 96 narratives from 32 Turkish-German and Russian-German bilingual children were examined with regard to the acquisition of narrative ability in three rounds of tests. The macrostructure of each narrative was evaluated based on the theories of Westby (2005), Stein and Glenn (1977) and Gagarina et al. (2012). In the quantitative analysis, the factor age of onset (AoO) was considered and therefore, two hypotheses were introduced: 1) There is an influence of AoO on the narrative ability of L2 German bilingual children. And 2) The narrative ability will converge over time and after three years there will be no difference between the groups. Neither of those hypotheses could be confirmed by the examined narrative data. Hence, other influences on narrative ability were discussed in the last chapter and prospects for further research were given. In sum, the article shows that more narrative data of these children should be collected to make a comprehensive conclusion about the influence of AoO on narrative ability.
This study investigates macrostructure in elicited narratives of 69 monolingual German-, Russian- and Swedish-speaking adults. Using the LITMUS-MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives), and its Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories, story structure and story complexity, concerning episodic organization, were examined across the 3 languages. As theoretical underpinnings, a multidimensional model of macrostructure was used. This model includes analyses of story structure (SS), in which a narrative merits a maximum score of 17, based on the occurrence of five types of macrostructural components (Internal states as initiating event and as reaction, Goal, Attempt and Outcome), and of story complexity (SC), which measures combinations of Goals, Attempts and Outcomes within one episode. The highest attainable complexity is the GAO-sequence, when a Goal, Attempt and Outcome are produced within the same episode. The results for SS were similar for German, Russian and Swedish, where adults included 11-12 components per story. A more detailed analysis of the individual components revealed striking similarities across the 3 languages, both for frequently used and seldom occurring components. SC did not differ significantly across languages nor across stories, whilst for SS, a slight difference between the two stories was found. We interpret this finding as story complexity (a qualitative measure of macrostructure) being of a more universal nature. Furthermore, our results indicate that caution is warranted when conclusions about children’s narrative skills are to be drawn on the basis of the MAIN Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories.
With the demographic explosion of young people in major African cities, we are witnessing the emergence of youth languages and new speech forms. In search of well-being, these young people, plagued by poverty, social injustice, unemployment and idleness, invent linguistic codes that allow them to find themselves. The linguistic and sociolinguistic description of these youth languages is the object of this volume. The contributions inform on the statutes and functions of the youth languages of Africa, their forms and structures, their representations, and envisage perspectives and prospective didactics.
Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels by Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based.
In order to analyse the way the protagonist, Inspector Jack Frost, is characterised in either version, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. The rationale for this article is to apply established models in stylistics to investigate the differences between the original and the adaptation. A core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou 2007: 19); this article therefore offers a close linguistic explanation for an author’s dissatisfaction with the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics observed that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article contends that ‘softness’ is represented in language through politeness strategies adopted by speakers whilst impoliteness represents the ‘tougher’ speech of Wingfield’s original iteration of Jack Frost. In order to demonstrate this contention, this study will analyse pragmatic elements of the dialogue of both novel and television versions of Frost through the analytical framework for impoliteness developed by Culpeper (1996; 2010). This framework will be integrated into the model for analysing the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995), in turn suggesting an elaboration of this model. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield, free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television.
A growing body of evidence shows a positive relation between the language skills of a child and the socio-economic status (SES) of his/her parents. These studies have mainly been conducted in an American English monolingual context. The current paper addresses the question of whether SES has a comparable impact on the simultaneous bilingual language acquisition. In this study, noun and verb test scores of German simultaneous bilingual children with Turkish and Russian as heritage languages are related to the SES of their parents – to verify the existence and the nature of a common pattern. The results do not show common patterns across the two heritage language groups, suggesting the existence of other confounding factors.
Narratives 2.0 : a multi-dimensional approach to semi-public storytelling in WhatsApp voice messages
(2019)
Based on a corpus of voice message narratives in German WhatsApp group chats, the present study contributes to research on social media storytelling in that it focusses on stories of personal experience which are embedded in a communication platform which favours a continuous dialogic exchange, narrated to well-defined non-anonymous publics and multimodal (comprised of visual and audible posting types). To capture the characteristics of this type of social media storytelling, the paper argues that Ochs and Capps’ (2001) dimensional model originally developed for conversational narratives (including the dimensions of tellability, tellership, embeddedness, linearity, moral stance) should be expanded by the dimensions of publicness, multimodality and sequencing. The prototype of storytelling in WhatsApp group chats is based on recent personal experiences; it is related by a single teller as an initial, sequentially non-embedded and linearly organised “big package” story (in a single voice message sometimes introduced by a text message containing an abstract); other group members routinely document their evaluative stances in rather conventionalised text message responses in the semi-public group space.
Ziel dieses Beitrags ist der Vergleich von Formen und Diskursfunktionen der nominalen Anredeformen in verschiedenen Fernsehwahldebatten aus Brasilien, Portugal, Deutschland, Frankreich und Spanien.
Die sprachvergleichende Perspektive ist aus mehreren Gründen von besonderem Interesse. Zum einen liegt ein sprachstruktureller Unterschied zwischen dem Portugiesischen und den anderen Sprachen vor, der darin besteht, dass das Portugiesische eine große Zahl nominaler Anredeformen in sein Pronominalparadigma integrieren kann, wohingegen es diese Möglichkeit im Deutschen, Spanischen und Französischen nicht oder nur sehr begrenzt gibt.
Ein anderer Unterschied ist, dass es im Portugiesischen einen gewissen Spielraum dafür gibt, die interlokutive Distanz in der Interaktion durch Anredeformen auszuhandeln, was sich auch in den Wahldebatten zeigt. In den anderen drei Sprachen besteht diese Möglichkeit nur sehr eingeschränkt.
In allen fünf Debatten stehen die Anredeformen jedoch in engem Zusammenhang mit Fragen, wie z.B. der, wie Respekt oder Professionalität gezeigt wird, wodurch somit ein gewisser Zusammenhang zwischen der Wahl der Anredeformen und dem diskursiven Ethos manifest wird. Die Wahl der Anredeformen kann als strategisch betrachtet werden, wie auch der Wechsel von der Anrede zur delocutio in praesentia (Rede über den Gesprächspartner in seiner Gegenwart). Doch trotz dieser Parallelen zeigen sich deutliche Unterschiede in der Ausgestaltung, die die Frage nach interkulturellen Differenzen aufwerfen.
In ihrer neuesten Publikation befasst sich die ausgewiesene Wortbildungsexpertin Elke Donalies mit Fällen wie Wetterbeobachter, Dickhäuter, Vergissmeinnicht, zartfühlend und wieviel, deren linguistische Erfassung nach wie vor Probleme bereitet. Grund dafür dürfte zum einen sein, dass die Worthaftigkeit der untersuchten Einheiten vielfach fraglich ist (z. B. zart fühlend als syntaktische Fügung vs. zartfühlend als Wort bzw. Wortbildungsprodukt). Zum anderen ist die Analyse der Einheiten – bei Zuordnung zum Bereich Wortbildung – schwierig und im Resultat entsprechend vielfältig (z. B. Dickhäuter als Derivation, Zusammenbildung oder synthetic compound (vgl. S. 114)). Donalies hat sich also mit der Wahl derartiger "linguistischer Problemmacher" viel vorgenommen und insgesamt drei Jahre Projektzeit im Rahmen ihrer IDS-Tätigkeit dafür aufgewendet (Januar 2015–Januar 2018).
Multiple exponence in morphology has recently attracted a good deal of attention (see, among others, Harris 2017; Caballero & Inkelas 2018). In this paper, I examine Modern Greek verbs which take an extra verbalizer (implicit multiple exponence). The simple base (bare form) and the base with the verbalizer co-exist in the lexicon without any semantic or aspectual opposition and can be used in the same syntactic context. Thus, they raise important questions for morphological theory. I argue that the explanation of this pleonastic addition may be hidden in the relation between inflection and derivation and the polyfunctional character of verbalizers in synthetic languages. Since the two forms co-exist and one member of each pair features an idiomatic association of meaning and complex form, morphological theory is challenged. I argue that these formations find a natural account within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010; Jackendoff & Audring 2019).
This thesis investigates the acquisition of compositional and lexical semantic properties of adjectives in German-speaking children between the age of two and five years.
According to formal semantic approaches, there are intersective and non-intersective adjectives, subsective and non-subsective adjectives as well as gradable and non-gradable adjectives. These properties concern the compositional mechanisms involved in nominal modification, i.e., the combination of adjectives and nouns. In addition, adjectives differ regarding lexical semantic properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning. Differences in the adjectives' scale structure have led to the theoretical assumption that gradable adjectives should be distinguished into relative and absolute gradable adjectives. In addition, meaning components such as multidimensionality or subjectivity have led to the distinction between dimensional and evaluative gradable adjectives. These properties have been mostly investigated independently of each other in both theory and acquisition research. I suggest a classification system for adjectives that combines different semantic properties. This system results in six adjective classes constituting a Semantic Complexity Hierarchy. Assuming that these adjective classes differ in semantic complexity, I propose an operationalization of semantic complexity that takes into account the adjectives' length of description, their type complexity, and lexical properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning.
Regarding the question of how monolingual German-speaking children acquire the semantics of adjectives, I hypothesize that the order of acquisition of adjectives is determined by their semantic complexity. This hypothesis is tested in a spontaneous speech study and a comprehension experiment.
The spontaneous speech study is a longitudinal investigation of the production of adjectives from 2;00 to 2;11 years based on transcripts from a dense data corpus. The results provide evidence that the mean age of acquisition for the adjective classes in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy follows the order predicted by semantic complexity. The same order was observed for the age at which the number of types for each class increased most. A preliminary analysis of the input indicates that the frequency of parental adjective use is related to the order of acquisition, but it is unlikely that frequency determines the order completely.
The comprehension experiment focuses on two specific adjective classes. I examine children's and adults' interpretation of relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable dimensional adjectives with a picture-choice task. These two classes are of the same semantic complexity because they are both gradable, but they have different scale structures. As a result, they must be interpreted differently due to lexical semantic properties. I investigate whether children calculate different standards of comparison for relative and absolute gradable adjectives and whether they distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives regarding the relevance of the explicit comparison class. The results indicate that as of age 3, children distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives with regard to the standard of comparison. However, with respect to the relevance of the comparison class, for 3-year-old children, unlike for 4- and 5-year-olds, changes in the noun, i.e., in the explicit comparison class, led to non-adult-like responses regarding both relative and absolute gradable adjectives.
On the basis of the empirical findings, I propose an acquisition path stating that children enter the acquisition process with inherent linguistic knowledge, the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy, and cognitive abilities to categorize their environment. I suggest that initially, children apply the least complex interpretation available in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy to all adjectives: all adjectives are interpreted as properties of individuals that are not gradable. To access other levels of the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy and to establish more complex adjective classes, positive evidence from the input and conceptual properties of adjectives, e.g., COLOR, MENTAL STATE, PHYSICAL PROPERTY etc., can operate as triggers.
Deutsche Komposita haben einige forschungsrelevante Eigenarten, zum Beispiel die Fugenelemente. Kopf hatte deshalb befürchtet, das Thema Fugenelement sei längst "leergeforscht" (S. 1). Natürlich ist kein Thema wirklich leergeforscht. Weil wir verschiedene Ansichten und Einsichten haben. Weil niemand auf Forschungsfragen definitiv antworten kann. Weil sich unsere Sprache – wie alles in der Welt – ständig verändert.