430 Germanische Sprachen; Deutsch
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This thesis investigates how students with Cantonese (L1) and English (L2) backgrounds acquire German as a third language (L3), with a focus on the acquisition of the Vorfeld (fronting) constructions of German. In L3 studies, the roles played by mother tongue, L2 and developmental grammar may be distinguished. Previous L3 studies have suggested that the role of L2 seems to be prominent in L3 strategy building, including interlanguage transfer from L2 to L3. Pursuing a cognitive approach, we argue that incremental production and language processing strategies are significant factors in accounting for third language acquisition and production.
A total of 45 university students of German completed a questionnaire and submitted copies of their compositions, followed by picture elicitation tasks. Three typical fronting types were found to be common amongst the learners:
1. Für mich, jede Familie hat eigene Situation und Probleme.
2. Obwohl gibt es viele Probleme mit alten Leuten zusammen lebt, finde ich gut dafür.
3. Jetzt die meisterns haben schon nach Hong Kong zurückgekommen.
Type 1 is argued to reflect indirect transfer of native language function-form characteristics. Type two is argued to be an intralingual error in which the learners have overgeneralized the verb second (V2) rule, without acquiring the correct function of the Vorfeld construction. The third type shows that apart from the influence of English in adverb fronting constructions, adverbs of stance or perspective adverbs like ‘jetzt’ semantically do not form part of the proposition and they are therefore treated as “extra-sentential” constituents which do not affect the basic V2 construction.
The findings suggest that learners may have primarily acquired the topic function of German fronting, while failing to fully acquire the focus function. For the focus function, learners seem to prefer alternative constructions such as existential sentences using ‘es gibt’. Both of these findings implicate L1 Chinese influence.
As an overall perspective on the incipient field of third language acquisition research I propose a holistic and coherent view which encompasses syntax, semantics and pragmatics at all levels of language development. By probing an independent paradigm of L3 studies, we aim to contribute to a new dynamic research space as well to ongoing debates in the SLA field by attributing greater autonomy and consciousness to the learner, even on the level of grammatical interaction.
In this paper, we deal with the semantic interaction between ung-nominalizations of different event types and temporal prepositions like wiihrend 'during', vor 'before', nach 'after', bis 'until' and seit 'since'. According to the two-level-approach to selnantics (Bierwisch 1983, Bierwisch / Lang 1989), we will argue that the meaning of ten~poral prepositions is determined on the level of semantic form (SF). When combined with an event nominal, the period in time required by the preposition has to be inferred on the level of conceptual structure (CS). Very often, the exact nature of the period in time is determined by pragmatic factors. There are, however, some important restrictions to this inference procedure which rely on the event noun's Aktionsart. In Ehrich/Rapp (2000), it was claimed that eventive ungnominals inherit the Aktionsart of their base verb. This assumption receives strong support by the data presented in this paper.
Recent work on argument selection couched in a lexical decomposition approach (Ehrich & Rapp 2000) postulates different linking properties for verbs and nouns, challenging current views on argument inheritance. In this paper, I show that the different behavior with respect to verbal and nominal linking observed for Present-Day German does not carry over to ung-nominals in Early New High German. Deverbal nouns and corresponding verbs rather behave alike with respect to argument linking. I shall argue that this change is motivated by the growing rift between ung-nominals and their verbal bases both focussing on different parts oftheir lexicosemantic structure in Present-Day German. Evidence for the verb-like behavior of ung-nominals in Early New High German comes from the regular meaning relation between verbs and corresponding derived nouns, the actional properties of event-denoting nouns, and the patterning of ung-nominals with nominalized infinitives. Even their syntactic behavior reflects the verbal character of ung-nominals during that period of the German language. The diachronic facts can be accounted for in a straightforward way once we adopt a lexical decomposition approach to argument selection.
This article examines the expression of natural gender in Icelandic nouns denoting human beings. Particular attention will be paid to the system's symmetry with regards to nouns denoting women and men. Our society consists more or less exactly of half women and half men. One would therefore assume that systems for terms denoting persons would also be symmetrically organised. Yet this assumption could not be further from the truth, and not just in single isolated cases, but in many languages: I will attempt to show that Icelandic has numerous methods for referring to women, but also many barriers and idiosyncrasies.
In the German-speaking regions of Switzerland, dialect is spoken by all social groups in most communicative situations, Standard German being used only when prescribed. Swiss dialects rarely appeared in written form before the 1980s, apart from the genre of dialect literature. Due to the growing acceptance of informal writing styles in many European languages, dialect is increasingly employed for written personal communication, in particular in computer-mediated communication (CMC). In Swiss Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms, varieties of German are used side by side as all chatters have a command of both standard and dialectal varieties. Depending on the channel, the proportion of dialectal contributions can be as high as 90 percent. The choice of a particular variety depends on both individual preference and on the predominant variety used within a specific thread. In this paper I take a quantitative approach to language variation in IRC and demonstrate how such an approach can help embed qualitative research on code-switching in CMC.
Dutch nominalised infinitives have been notoriously difficult to analyse, partly because they seem to show mixed verbal and nominal properties interspersed across the structure. In this paper, it is argued that at least two types of such infinitives should be distinguished, one which contains a high level of verbal functional structure, and one that differs at least in not projecting TP. On the basis of this distinction it is possible to show that Dutch nominalised infinitives have much more predictable properties than could previously be identified. They show evidence of conforming to a model of analysing mixed categories in terms of category switch within the constituent. In order to account for the seemingly interspersed nature of nominal and verbal properties in Dutch nominalised infinitives I propose that Dutch of-phrases (van-phrases) may merge inside the VP, provided they have access to nominal functional structure for feature checking. I will show that if D° is filled by a special type of non-deictic demonstratives van-phrases may even occur in SpecDP.