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As kindergartens and schools closed down during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, two hashtags emerged on Twitter: #CoronaEltern (#CoronaParents) and #CoronaElternRechnenAb (#CoronaParentsDocumentTheCosts). In this paper, we examine the positioning practices around both hashtags as expressions of “digital activism” (Joyce 2010: VIII). One characteristic of the hashtag campaign is that political demands are hardly ever made directly. Rather, the participants resort to five main linguistic patterns: (1) they address different target groups; (2) they refer to different protagonists; (3) in the subcorpus #CoronaEltern specifically, they constitute themselves as a collective through (4) the recurring use of first-person narratives; (5) and generalization and typification. Our findings show that #CoronaParents are not just parents in times of a pandemic: #CoronaParents are only those who see themselves as such, participating in an evolving, at times misunderstood community.
Social media, asthe fifth estate, increasingly influence public dis-courses and play a major role in shaping public opinion.Undoubt-edly, they have the potential to promote participation and democra-cy. On the other side, they also constitute a risk for democratic soci-eties, as the spread of hate speech and fake news has shown. As aresponse,forms of counterspeech organisedby civil society have emerged in social media to counter the normalisation of hate speech and democracy-threateningdiscourses. In order to influence dis-course in social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech campaigns must be visible alsoquantitatively. In this ethnographic contrastive study, I analysed the activitiesof the German and Finn-ish Facebook groups of the network #iamhere international. The in-tensity and continuity of their activities is obviously influenced by their strategic organisation: conventionalised rules support them whereas lacking or inconsequent rules seemed to be counterpro-ductive.
Funktionsverbgefüge stehen seit jeher in der Sprachkritik, die sich nun auch auf digitale Räume ausbreitet. Vertreten wird dort die These, Funktionsverbgefüge und ihre entsprechenden Basisverben seien äquivalent und könnten in allen Kontexten durch die verbalen Entsprechungen ersetzt werden. Dies kann durch die vorliegende korpusbasierte und textlinguistische Studie am Beispiel des Gefüges Frage stellen widerlegt werden. Anhand eines extensiven Datenmaterials aus den Wikipedia-Artikel-Korpora des IDS zeige ich die semantischen, grammatischen und textlinguistischen Unterschiede zwischen dem Basisverb und dem Funktionsverbgefüge im Gebrauch auf, die sich in der Anreicherung, Verdichtung, Perspektivierung, Gewichtung und Wiederaufnahme von Informationen im Text manifestieren.
This article addresses the controversial question how non-derived denominal verbs (e.g. wingsuit, kennel, trombone) build their argument structures. Based on selected subsets of conceptually related verbs it will be shown that the argument structures of these verbs are flexible though not arbitrary. Without context, these verbs evoke frame-like default situations which are determined by speakers' shared encyclopaedic knowledge and sensorimotor experience and which are mapped onto a small set of abstract event schemata that 'predesign' thematic configurations. The discourse context, which also provides the syntactic context, either meets or models our expectations as to the context-free readings. In the latter case, new (metaphorical) readings are contextually created. These configurations are not arbitrary either because the meanings of verbalized nouns should always be (a) in a relation of contiguity to the base-noun concepts and (b) compatible with the semantics of the syntactic constructions.
Based on the privative derivational suffix -los, we test statements found in the literature on word formation using a – at least in this field – novel empirical basis: a list of affective-emotional ratings of base nouns and associated -los derivations. In addition to a frequency analysis based on the German Reference Corpus, we show that, in general, emotional polarity (so-called valence, positive vs. negative emotions) is reversed by suffixation with -los. This change is stronger for more polarized base nouns. The perceived intensity of emotion (so-called arousal) is generally lower for -los derivations than for base nouns. Finally, to capture the results theoretically, we propose a prototypical -los construction in the framework of Construction Morphology.
This study proposes a cross-linguistic, corpus-based, and constructionist analysis of denominal verbs (DNVs) in English, Dutch and German. DNV constructions include various morphological construction types, such as conversion (e.g. English bottle > to bottle), prefixation (e.g. Dutch arm 'arm' > omarmen 'to embrace') and suffixation (e.g. German Katapult 'catapult' > katapultieren 'to catapult'). We investigate the correlation between the distribution of DNV constructions and the typological properties of the languages, focusing on boundary permeability, inflectional complexity, syntactic configurationality and word-class assignment. The study shows that, although the three languages have the same repertoire of DNV constructions at their disposal, a Germanic cline can be detected in their preferences for non-overt vs overt marking of the word-class change. As such, the study highlights the impact of typological factors on the shape of language-specific constructional networks.
"Ausgangssperre light" und "digitales Semester" – Wortgruppenlexeme zwischen Lexikon und Syntax
(2022)
In recent years, the relation between lexicon and syntax as distinct domains has been questioned repeatedly. For all languages under discussion word-like examples that do not fit the category word have been found, so that the boundary between lexical unit and syntactic unit becomes leaky. Furthermore, relative borderlines vary from language to language. One of the problematic domains are phrasemes (phraseological units). This article concentrates on German multi-word lexemes which are very similar to compounds in respect to structure, semantics, and cognitive aspects (rechter Winkel 'right angle'). Though mostly neglected or treated peripherally, this group is not exactly small, and patterns are productive – in contrast to the rest of phrasemes. We argue in favor of a transition between words and phrases and gradient distinctions between categories and a position of the problematic examples close to compounds and rather not among phrasemes. Finally, we look at how theoretical approaches deal with the problem.
Am 2. und 3. Dezember 2021 fand im Haus der Universität in Düsseldorf die von Katrin Hein (IDS Mannheim) und Sascha Michel (RWTH Aachen) organisierte Tagung "Wortbildung und Konstruktionsgrammatik" statt, welche von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) sowie der Gesellschaft von Freunden und Förderern der HHU (GFFU) finanziert wurde. Aufgrund der aktuellen Corona-Lage wurde die Tagung in einem hybriden Veranstaltungsformat durchgeführt, sodass neben den Veranstaltern und fünf ReferentInnen vor Ort weitere fünf ReferentInnen aus Deutschland, den Niederlanden, Italien und Frankreich zugeschaltet wurden. Daneben fand sich mit 46 digital Teilnehmenden aus dem In- und Ausland ein großer und disziplinär breit aufgestellter Rezipientenkreis aus LinguistInnen, GermanistInnen, RomanistInnen, AnglistInnen sowie Literatur- und ÜbersetzungswissenschaftlerInnen ein, die nicht nur die Vortragsdiskussionen bereicherten, sondern insgesamt die bestehende Relevanz des Tagungsthemas unterstrichen.
So-called gender-neutral nouns like Freund*innen, Redakteur_in or AutorInnen are suspected to not fit into the linguistic system. This paper argues that if these forms are pronounced with a glottal stop (e.g. Freund[ʔ]innen), only small changes in the grammar are needed to integrate them. It is shown that the suffix [ʔ ɪn] in these derivatives can be analysed as a phonological word and therefore could be a new suffix that is added to the grammar. The phonological structure of its derivatives is shown to be just like the phonological structure of many native German derived nouns as many suffixes form a phonological word of their own. Also, the insertion of [ʔ] in these derived wordforms can be explained by the status of the suffix as a phonological word. Hence, it is argued that speakers do not ignore the regularities of the grammar when they use gender-neutral nouns with [ʔ ɪn], but rather work with these rules to create new words with new meanings.
Am 5. und 6. Mai 2022 fand am Institut für Germanistik der Universität Leipzig der von Adele Baltuttis, Anna Bliß, Barbara Schlücker und dem Autor dieses Berichts organisierte internationale Workshop "Word Formation and Discourse Structure" statt. Gegenstand des Workshops war ein bisher in der Forschung weitgehend unbeachtetes Thema, nämlich die Rolle der Wortbildung für die Struktur und Verständlichkeit von Texten: Inwieweit tragen komplexe Wörter zum Strukturaufbau und zur inhaltlichen Verknüpfung über Satzgrenzen hinweg bei? Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Desiderats sollte der Workshop ein Forum bieten, in dem zu diesem Thema Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Forschung erarbeitet werden. Zwar sind bereits in den 1970er bis 1990er Jahren erste Arbeiten zur Interaktion von Wortbildung und Text- bzw. Diskurslinguistik entstanden, im Anschluss ist das Thema jedoch kaum noch verfolgt worden. Dabei fanden in der Text-/Diskurslinguistik enorme Entwicklungen statt, etwa bei der Einbeziehung neuer Methoden, insbesondere aus der Psycho- und Computerlinguistik oder hinsichtlich elaborierter theoretischer Modellierungen. Der Aspekt der Wortbildung blieb hierbei aber weitgehend außen vor. Der Workshops sollte deshalb neue und bekannte Fragen und Probleme (wieder) aufgreifen und vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Erkenntnisse und Methoden neu diskutieren. Das Thema Wortbildung und Diskursstruktur ist insofern ein neues und interdisziplinäres Thema, das das Zusammenspiel unterschiedlicher linguistischer Bereiche und Traditionen erfordert. Dies zeigt sich auch im Programm des Workshops, das internationale Wissenschaftler:innen aus verschiedenen linguistischen Teilbereichen (Wortbildung, historische Sprachwissenschaft, Diskurs-/Textlinguistik, Fachsprachen, Korpus- und Computerlinguistik) zusammengebracht hat.
This article provides a comparative overview of phonological and phonetic differences of Mukrī Kurdish varieties and their geographical distribution. Based on the examined data, four distinct varieties can be distinguished. In each variety area, different phonological patterns are analyzed according to age, gender, and social groups in order to establish cross-regional and cross-generational developments in relation to specific phonological distributions and shifts. The variety regions which are examined in the present article include West Mukrī (representing an archaic form of Mukrī), Central Mukrī (representing a linguistically peripheral dialect), East Mukrī (representing mixed archaic and peripheral dialect features), and South Mukrī (sharing features of both Mukrī and Ardałānī). The study concludes that variation in the Mukrīyān region depends on phonological developments, which in turn are due to geographical and sociological factors. Moreover, contact-induced change and internal language development are also established as triggering factors distinguishing regional variants.
This paper investigates self-initiated uses of mobile phones (such as texting or making a call) in everyday video-recorded conversations among Czech speakers. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis, it illustrates how participants publicly frame their own device use (for example, by announcements), and how co-present interlocutors respond to it. Previous studies have described how participants manage two concurrent communicative involvements, but have not provided detailed sequential descriptions of how device use can be negotiated and accounted for. This study shows that mobile device use in co-presence is not a priori problematic (or vice versa). Instead, participants frame their technology use in different ways according to various features of the social situation they treat as momentarily relevant. These features include the course of the conversation and how the device use relates to it, the overall participation framework and the opacity of the device use for co-present others.
The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima's Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima's drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters' utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.
There are two main approaches to change of state verbs. One adopts an approach in terms of a total change (becomeP, for base predicate P), i.e., a change from not being in the extension of the base predicate to being in it. The other adopts an approach in terms of a relative change (becomemore P, for base predicate P), i.e., a change for a theme in which it increases in the extent to which it holds the property denoted by the base predicate. Different languages have been analyzed using one or the other approach. I argue that both proposals are actually appropriate for analyzing related but not (completely) overlapping phenomena in the domain of derived change of state verbs in the very same language. This proposal is based on the discussion of change of state verbs in Southern Aymara that are derived with the suffixes -pta and -ra. I show that verbs with -pta convey the meaning of total change and that verbs with -ra convey the meaning of relative change. I further discuss how expressions with -pta and -ra interact: expressions with -ra implicate that the theme does not change from not being in the extension of the base to being in it. I propose an account in terms of scalar implicatures in which -pta and -ra are lexical alternatives, thus extending the domain of linguistic phenomena for which the computation of scalar implicatures is relevant.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the contribution of linguistic research on Portuguese as a heritage language in Germany to the general understanding of heritage language development. From 1955 to 1973, nearly 166,000 Portuguese migrants found work in Germany as so-called ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter). Because the aim of many Portuguese migrant families was to return to Portugal, their children met relatively good conditions for the acquisition of their heritage language. Nonetheless, second-generation heritage speakers (HSs) show some linguistic particularities in comparison to monolingual Portuguese speakers in Portugal. Based on the results of previous research, we show that the following factors shape the linguistic knowledge of this group of bilinguals: (1) Restricted exposure to the heritage language may cause a delay in the development of certain linguistic structures, (2) deviations from the standard norm may be related to the lack of formal education and the primacy of the colloquial register and (3) heritage bilinguals may accelerate ongoing diachronic development. We argue that apparent effects of influence from the environmental language can often have alternative explanations.
In German, the subject usually precedes the object (SO order), but, under certain discourse conditions, the object is allowed to precede the subject (OS order). This paper focuses on main clauses in which either the subject or a discourse-given object occurs in clause-initial position. Two acceptability experiments show that OS sentences with a given object are generally acceptable, but the precise degree of acceptability varies both with the object‘s referential form (demonstrative objects leading to higher acceptability than other types of objects) and with formal properties of the subject (pronominal subjects leading to higher acceptability than non-pronominal subjects). For SO sentences, acceptability was reduced when the object was a d-pronoun, which contrasts with the high acceptability of OS sentences with a d-pronoun object. This finding was explored in a third acceptability experiment comparing d-pronouns in subject and object function. This experiment provides evidence that a reduction in acceptability due to a prescriptive bias against d-pronouns is suspended when the d-pronoun occurs as object in the prefield. We discuss the experimental results with respect to theories of German clause structure that claim that OS sentences with different information-structural properties are derived by different types of movement.
The aim of this article is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from the joint analysis of linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouletic meanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a grammatically given semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixing patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs, resulting in a complex interpretation of the text.
This paper deals with German kinship terms ending with the form "n" (Muttern, Vatern). Firstly, data from newspapers are presented that show that especially Muttern denotes very special meanings that can only be derived to a limited extent from the lexical base: a) Muttern referring to a home where mother cares for you, b) Muttern standing for overprotection, and c) Muttern representing a special food style (often embedded in prepositional phrases and/or comparative constructions like wie bei or wie von Muttern). Secondly, it is argued that the addition of n to kinship terms is not a word-formation pattern, but that these word forms are instead lexicalized and idiomatized in contemporary German. Hence, a diachronic scenario is applied to account for the data. It is argued in the present paper that the n-forms have been borrowed from Low German dialects, especially from constructional idioms of the type ‘X-wie bei Muttern’ and that forms were enriched by semantic concepts associated with the dialect.
The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.
The present study investigates word formation processes and strategies in monolingual and bilingual children by age 7 to 8. Using an elicitation task in form of naming of low frequent complex objects, it is analyzed whether bilingual children use other word formation strategies than monolinguals do. Therefore, N=9 monolinguals and N=9 bilinguals were tested. N=268 elicited reactions were analyzed. Results show bilinguals to use the same word formation strategies to the same extent as monolinguals do. Compounding overweighs derivation in each child. However, a more in-depth qualitative analysis shows that the complex compounds formed by bilingual children disregard the German composition rule of right-hand heads to a significantly higher extent than the monolingual children do. Since this acquisition process has been reported for German monolingual 2-year old children, this result is interpreted as a delayed acquisition process rather than a transfer from the respective first language.
This paper describes the interplay of lexical and grammatical aspect with other grammatical phenomena in the interpretation of the aspectual suffix ‑ile (which we analyse as Perfective) in isiNdebele, a Nguni Bantu language spoken in South Africa. Crucial other phenomena include constituency-related factors such as the conjoint-disjoint distinction and (related) penultimate lengthening, along with morphophonological conditions that trigger different forms of ‑ile. These factors appear to interact differently in isiNdebele than they do in closely related Zulu, suggesting two different paths of grammaticalization, which we argue can change the interpretation of markers of grammatical aspect as they interact with lexical aspectual classes.
Theoretical accounts agree that German restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are integrated at the level of syntax as well as at the level of prosody (; , ; ; ; ) in both the default verb-final and the marked verb-second variant (referred to as iV2). Both variants are assumed to show the same prosodic pattern, i. e., prosodic integration into the main clause, and not unintegrated prosody, which would signal a sequence of two main clauses. To date strong empirical evidence for this close correspondence between prosody and syntax in RCs is missing. Findings regarding prosodic integration of verb-final RCs are not consistent, and research regarding the prosody of iV2 structures is very scarce. Using a delayed sentence-repetition task, our study investigated whether subordination is signaled by prosody in RCs in both the verb-final and the V2 variant in adults (n = 21). In addition, we asked whether young language learners (n = 23), who at the age of 3 have just started to produce embedded clauses, are already sensitive to this mapping. The adult responses showed significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in the V-final and the iV2 structures, with no difference between the two conditions. Notably, the child responses mirrored this adult behavior, showing significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in both V-final and iV2 structures. The findings regarding adults’ prosodic realizations provide novel empirical evidence for the claim that iV2 structures, just like verb-final RCs, show prosodic integration. Moreover, our study strongly suggests that subordination is signaled by prosody already by age 3 in both verb-final and V2 variants of RCs.
We aim to understand whether Greek and Italian, two null subject languages, differ in the use and interpretation of null subjects, based on evidence from both a production and a comprehension experiment. The results of the two experiments show that the two languages differ in the extent to which they comply with the Position of Antecedent Strategy as formulated by Carminati (2002). In order to account for this difference, we introduce a principle which defines prominence of sentence constituents in terms of hierarchical height, elaborating on a recent proposal by Rizzi (2018). Then we show that the prominence of subject and object constituents in Greek and Italian reflects word-order differences between the two languages (Roussou & Tsimpli 2006). In more general terms, this paper argues in favour of a multi-factorial approach to reference interpretation, in that syntactic factors interact with discourse factors, leading to a gradient variety of reference possibilities.
Four main informational elements have been suggested and studied as central aspects of narrative discourse: causality, character, location, time. The research that scholars have previously undertaken on these aspects has been primarily on Indo-European languages, and more specifically on the European side of that language family. The linguistic limitations have indicated that character is the aspect of narrative that readers/listeners attend to most closely. However, in examining narrative discourses from non-Indo-European languages, challenges to the presumed primacy of character emerge. In a partial report on field work conducted in Borneo in 2012-2015, I compare and contrast patterns in the rankings of the four main aspects of narrative in three languages, English, Hobongan and Daqan. I also note the strategies by which the languages make their respective rankings clear, including focus particles (Hobongan), specificity of description (each), and amount of information provided about the aspects (each). I suggest that analyses of the patterns and rankings of information in narrative be included in typological categorizations and linguistic descriptions of languages.
Combining the methods of linguistics and literary criticism, this article takes a fresh look at two texts that have been analysed ad nauseam: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I use James’s late style as a touchstone to compare and contrast the two texts. Analysing syntax by means of close textual analysis of the novels’ opening paragraphs as well as their metaphorical language, and employing the corpus analysis programme AntConc to survey the entire texts, I aim to show that James’s 1880 text anticipates his late style and Wharton’s 1920 text appropriates it to suit her own agenda. However, in respectively anticipating and appropriating this style, James and Wharton create different effects. James intensifies his female protagonist’s ‘world of thought and feeling’ (Eliot 1963: 56), creating a fictional world with literary equality for both genders, while Wharton subverts gender roles in a scathing critique of Gilded Age society, which did not allow for this other ‘world of thought and feeling’. In addition to positioning both novels as feminist, this article compares Wharton’s writing to James’s, but without presupposing the latter’s influence on the former. Instead, acknowledging the fluidity of style, I aim to put forward a convincing case that there are subtle differences that make these authors’ styles Jamesian and Whartonian, respectively.
The shared communicative act of theatrical texts in performance: a relevance theoretic approach
(2020)
This article adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Theatrical texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience – the playgoer or spectator – through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of the vital contributions of the audience in constructing the interpretation of performance, treating it as a communicative act.
This paper explores how refugee families in Germany draw on me-diational repertoires to accomplish a range of digital literacy prac-tices on their smartphones. We introduce the concept of ‘mediation-al repertoire’, i.e. a socially and individually structured configuration of semiotic and technological resources for communication, and use it in an ethnographic case study with participants from Syria and Af-ghanistan in a refugee residence in Hamburg in 2017/18. The collect-ed data includes nine semi-directed interviews, video demonstra-tions of smartphone usage, and ethnographic fieldnotes. Qualitative analysis draws on mediagrams, i.e. visualizations of mediational re-pertoires in two families. Findings suggest that individual mediation-al repertoires in these families differ especially by generation and other factors, such as literacy competence, type of social relation-ship and purpose of online use, including smartphone-based lang-uage-learning.
Simple Event nominals with Argument Structure? – Evidence from Irish deverbal nominalizations
(2020)
Deverbal nominals in Irish support Grimshaw's (1990) tripartite division into complex event (CE-), simple event (SE-) and result nominals (R-nominals). Irish nominals are ambiguous only between the SE- and R-status. There are no CE-nominals containing the AspP layer in their structure. SE-nominals (also found in Light Verb Constructions) are number-neutral and incapable of pluralizing and are represented as [nP[vP[Root]]]. R-nominals are devoid of the vP layer and behave like ordinary nouns. The Irish data point to v as the layer introducing event implications and the vP or PPs as the functional heads introducing the internal argument (Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011). Event denoting nominals in Irish can license the internal argument but aspectual modification and external argument licensing are not possible (cf. synthetic compounds in Greek (Alexiadou 2017)), which means that, counter to Borer (2013), the licensing of Argument Structure need not follow from the presence of the AspP layer.
DeriMo is an international meeting dealing with derivational morphology from the perspective of data analysis. Its second edition DeriMo 2019 was held at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. The local organizers are researchers of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL = Ústav Formální a Aplikované Linguistiky) at the Computer Science School of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Chairs of the program committee were Magda Ševčíková (ÚFAL), Zdeněk Žabokrtský (ÚFAL), Eleonora Litta Modignani Picozzi (CIRCSE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan), and Marco Passarotti (CIRCSE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan).
French suffixations in -age, -ion and -ment are considered roughly equivalent, yet some differences have been pointed out regarding the semantics of the resulting nominalizations. In this study, we confirm the existence of a semantic distinction between them on the basis of a large scale distributional analysis. We show that the distinction is partially determined by the degree of technicality of the denoted action: -age nominals tend to be more technical than -ion ones. We examine this hypothesis through the statistical modeling of technicality. To this end, we propose a linguistic definition of technicality, which we implement using empirical, quantitative criteria estimated in corpora and lexical resources. We show to what extent the differences with respect to these criteria adequately approximate technicality. Our study indicates that this definition of technicality, while amendable, provides new perspectives for the characterization of action nouns.
Linguistic research and linguistic activism have resulted in key changes to official language use. However, revisions remain contested and many English and German speakers continue to employ male generic terms. In this article I explore whether the encounter with sex-/gender-neutral terminology in June Arnold's novel 'The Cook and the Carpenter' can prompt readers to review their language use and consider alternatives. Based on narrative research, my premise is that fiction can create familiarity with new terms, which is the first step toward wider linguistic change. I frame my investigation with Wittgenstein's notion that "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life", and put it to the test with a discourse analysis of English and German reader responses. The results of my study show that Arnold's novel stimulates fruitful debate around the issue of linguistic representation. Based on my findings, I propose to integrate literary texts which engage with the issue of sex/gender and language into educational settings to further promote neutral/inclusive language use.
In this article, we build on research arguing that linguistic self-representation on social media can be viewed as a form of face-work and that the strategies employed by users are influenced by both a desire to connect with others and a need to preserve privacy. Drawing on our own analyses of usernames as well as that of others which were conducted as part of a large-scale project investigating usernames in 14 languages (Schlobinski/T. Siever 2018a), we argue that these conflicting goals of wanting to be recognised as an authentic member of an in-group while retaining a degree of anonymity are also observable in the choice of username. Online self-naming can thus be viewed as a key practice in the debate of face-work on social media platforms, because names and naming strategies can be studied more readily than broader and more complex aspects, such as stylistic variation or text-image interdependence, while at the same time forming part of these.
"You don’t mind my calling you Harry?" : Terms of address in John Updike’s "Rabbit" tetralogy
(2020)
This paper examines the use of address terms in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy (Updike 1995). The first part of the analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the great variety of terms used to address the protagonist, Harry Angstrom, in the decades covered by the novels. The second part focuses on two important side characters, Reverend Eccles and Harry’s mother-in-law. It demonstrates how address term usage with these two characters reflects ongoing changes in their relationship with Harry. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate the potential of fictional data for the study of address terms and, in return, to capture the manifold functions of address terms as a literary device in fiction.
This article examines French Verb-Noun compounds with Means value (couvre-pied 'blanket', lit. cover-feet), derived from stative bases. It shows that they are generally ambiguous between Means and Instrument reading. The regularity of this double value discards an analysis relying on verbal homonymy, in favor of Rothmayr's (2009) hypothesis of bi-eventive verbs. We assume that the presence of an agentive as well as a stative component in the verbal bases accounts for the double Means/Instrument value of the VNs studied here. We also examine "pure" Instrument VNs, available with similar verbal bases. We show that the distribution of the Instrument vs. Means/Instrument values relies on the state of the referent of the noun involved in the compound after the event described by the verbal base occurred. A permanent state entails a "pure" Instrument reading, whereas Means/Instrument reading obtains if the state of N is reversible (Fábregas & Marín 2012).
We investigate deverbal zero-derived nominals in English (e.g., to walk > a walk) from the perspective of the lexical semantics of their base verbs and the interpretations they may receive (e.g., event, result state, product, agent). By acknowledging that, in the absence of an overt affix, the meaning of zero-nominals is highly dependent on that of the base, the ultimate goal of this study is to identify possible meaning regularities that these nominals may display in relation to the different semantic verb classes. We report on a newly created database of 1,000 zero-derived nominals, which have been collected for various semantic verb classes. We test previous generalizations made in the literature in comparison with suffix-based nominals and in relation to the ontological type of the base verb. While these generalizations may intuitively hold, we find intriguing challenges that bring zero-derived nominals closer to suffix-based nominals than previously claimed.
This paper adds to the growing field of conversation analytical re-search on smartphone-use in face-to-face interactions. Whenever smartphones are used in mobile-supported sharing activities - e. g. to show a picture to co-present others - the smartphone user needs to search for and find the “searchable object” in the World Wide Web, an App or on the device’s local memory. Analyzing audio-recordings of naturally-occurring conversations, this paper iden-tifies two types of practices of speech that explicitly orient to on-going smartphone-supported searches: Collaborative search (cf. Brown/McGregor/McMillan 2015) and search-accompanying com-mentary by the smartphone-user. Both practices verbally provide for the accountability of the otherwise opaque device use. They differ in the way they produce opportunities for co-present others to substantively contribute to the progression of the search as well as the degree to which they produce the search as an interactionally public event.
This article deals with the development of -igen verbs in German since the Old High German period, demonstrating that this can be regarded as a process in which the adjective formation morpheme -ig gradually develops into a component of a word formation pattern that derives transitive verbs from nouns. An -igen-verb can be descended not only from an -ig-adjective (würdig – würdigen) but also from a noun without an intermediary -ig-adjective (Pein – *peinig – peinigen). In this article, it is claimed that a word formation pattern with -ig develops over time. The emergence of this word formation pattern can be described as a "reanalysis" of the verb structure accompanied by a "resegmentation" of the original word structure and a semantic "remotivation" of the established unit. It is also pointed out that this development is particularly evident in the Middle High German period.
In the typology of West African languages, tone has been noted to play crucial grammatical and lexical roles, but its function in word formation has been less systematically explored and remains to be fully understood. Against this backdrop, the present study seeks to examine the form and function of tonal morphology in the formation of action nominals in four Kwa languages spoken in Ghana, namely Akan, Gã, Lεtε, and Esahie, a relatively unexplored language of the Central Tano subgroup. Relying on data from both secondary and primary sources, we argue that tone raising is an important component of Kwa action nominalization, as it is found across different languages and derivational strategies. Specifically, while across the Kwa languages considered, tone raising tends to be an epiphenomenon of phonological conditioning, sometimes tone is the sole component of the nominalization operation or, as in Esahie, it concurs with the affix to the derivation, hence playing a morphological function.
In Japanese, direct combination of verbs or adjectives by coordination (with to 'and') or juxtaposition (with its empty counterpart) can form a NP, if the conjuncts are antonymous to each other; the coordinator to 'and' can combine only NPs elsewhere. We claim that this is because there is a phonetically empty nominalizer that can nominalize each conjunct, and that the new nominal construction has been gradually developing in the history of Japanese. An acceptability-rating experiment targeting 400 participants shows that the younger speakers were likely to judge this construction more acceptable than the older ones, that this tendency is slightly weaker in the Nominative condition than in the Genitive condition, and that the coordination condition was significantly worse than the juxtaposition condition.