Open Access

The study focuses on the basic dimensions of the teaching of mother tongue (L1) in relation to new challenges and prospects in the European context. The introductory part of the paper highlights some stimuli and inspirations from Polish professional provenance in the second half of the 20th century. The core of the paper focuses on four basic dimensions in L1 teaching set against the background of a variety of relevant educational documents and decrees, current scientific knowledge, the author's research and authentic pedagogical practice. The dimensions are: 1. A reference framework for education in the EU focusing on the competences a person requires to function in the 21st century. 2. The training and life-long education of an L1 teachers, including the evaluation of the results of their work. 3. Educational programmes and standards for the teaching of L1, including the output measurement tools. 4. Comprehensive cognition, diagnostics and pupil's personality development which respects the pupil's learning abilities and utilises the influence of the educational system and the overall circumstances of the pupil's life.

Many orthographies include syntactic markers not represented in phonology. In general, to correctly use these syntactic markers, learners have to analyze and understand the syntactic context of the word to be written. Capitalization of nouns, a syntactic marker in German, involves marking heads of noun phrases and is challenging for learners. The aim of this intervention study was to evaluate the effects of syntactic and lexical based trainings on capitalization of nouns. 114 Luxembourgish fifth-graders were assigned to two syntactic groups, a lexical group and a passive control group. The syntactic groups focused on two variants of training syntactic structures within the noun phrase. The lexical group focused on lexical characteristics of nouns and the control group received reading input. The posttest results show that the students in the intervention groups profited from the syntactic-based training. The follow-up test shows that the intervention was sustainable, as the improvement remains stable. The study indicates that a greater focus on syntactic structures can effectively enhance the use of syntactic markers of capitalizations. Although this approach is initially harder to acquire, it covers all cases of capitalization.

Formal linguistics generally assumes that form-meaning relations in spoken language are arbitrary and not iconic. Ideophones, such as the English splish-splash have been considered exceptions to this rule of arbitrariness. Recently, however, researchers have begun to examine iconicity in spoken language more closely. Following work which established the default not- at-issue status of iconic co-speech gestures, here we discuss the crosslinguistic evidence for the (not-)at-issueness of ideophones and the factors that may have an influence upon this. We also present what we believe to be the first experimental work on the at-issue status of ideophones, conducted with German speakers. Although German may not be a prototypical ideophonic language, we argue that German ideophones follow crosslinguistic patterns in terms of at-issueness and provide initial evidence for the not-at-issue status of sentence- medial adverbial ideophones in German. This evidence comes from sentence-context matching tasks, where the mismatch effect was significantly larger for sentences containing standard adverbials than those containing sentence-medial adverbial ideophones. We presume that speaker judgements concerning how well target sentences match discourse contexts should be more impaired by mismatches induced by material relevant to the Question Under Discussion (QUD), i.e. at-issue material, than those induced by material irrelevant to the QUD, i.e. not-at- issue material. We thus argue that speakers’ ratings indicate that sentence-medial adverbial ideophones in German are not at-issue. This paper suggests a starting point for investigating the pragmatic status of ideophones crosslinguistically and also allows for comparison to previous research on other iconic enrichments, in particular gestures. This then has implications for our understanding of the at-issue status of iconic enrichments and how these enrichments interact with each other.

Phraseologisms are meaningful in everyday language use and reflect the culture and world view of a people. This work has the following objectives: On the one hand, Romanian somatisms are pointed out and their German equivalents are presented; on the other hand, the focus is on a comparison of Romanian and German phraseologisms under semantic and structural-lexical aspects. This present article is focused on analysing equivalences and false friends between Romanian and German phraseologisms with the lexeme head. The head is the most important part of the human body, as it houses the brain - the organ known for its cognitive functions. The phrasemes of the two languages are analysed according to the three types of equivalence: full equivalence, partial equivalence and semantic equivalence. Among the analysed equivalence types, false friends also appear as a transversal phenomenon. In the analysis section, which is based on idiomatic dictionaries and an internet corpus, these phenomena are analysed in German and Romanian native speakers and verified by examples on the internet.

The article deals with the role of the German language in the transfer of loanwords from French into Slovene. The process of borrowing is illustrated with examples from German and Slovene. An overview of the history of German-French and German-Slovenian language contacts and the resulting borrowings is presented, with numerous examples showing German as a mediating language for French borrowings. Finally, the criteria for internationalisms are discussed, and many French loanwords in Slovenian can be classified as international words.