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"Great technology, football and ..." : Malaysian language learners' stereotypes about Germany
(2014)
This study focuses on stereotypes about Germany, its culture and people, held by learners of German in a big public university in Malaysia. It examines not only the stereotypical representations of the target language country but also assesses its favourability and salience, which has not been done previously. The findings revealed that the students' stereotypes about Germany were varied and diverse. Also, they were overwhelmingly positive. The top three salient categories of images about Germany were related to technology, famous personalities – for the most part football players and scientists – and cars. The findings also indicated that very few references had been made to German culture and to its great cultural figures. The results of the present study suggest that students could benefit from a wider and deeper exposure to German culture in the language classroom.
In a similar way to dramatic performances and plays, song lyrics establish a complex discourse structure whereby listeners are placed in a position to overhear ‘the pretence of a conversation constructed to convey the performer’s meaning’ (Nahajec 2019: 25; see also Short 1996: 169). In Taylor Swift’s songwriting, listeners are positioned not only to eavesdrop on the narratives presented but are also invited to conceptualise and enact particular roles and scenarios in the discourse. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of songwriting and narrative structure across Swift’s oeuvre to identify how disnarration strategies are used to build stories in her two sister albums written and produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). Specifically, this study examines how disnarration characterises the albums’ narrators, establishes narrator-narratee relationships and invites listeners to adopt a participatory role in the meaning-making process. Through close analysis of four songs across the two albums, this paper builds on developing studies of the stylistics of songwriting (see West 2019) and argues that disnarration strategies foreground particular themes within the discourse, such as nostalgia, wistfulness and regret, and contribute to the fictionalisation and self-aware storytelling characteristic of these albums’ storyworlds.
Unquestionably (or: undoubtedly), every competent speaker has already come to doubt with respect to the question of which form is correct or appropriate and should be used (in the standard language) when faced with two or more almost identical competing variants of words, word forms or sentence and phrase structure (e.g. German "Pizzas/Pizzen/Pizze" 'pizzas', Dutch "de drie mooiste/mooiste drie stranden" 'the three most beautiful/most beautiful three beaches', Swedish "större än jag/mig" 'taller than I/me'). Such linguistic uncertainties or "cases of doubt" (cf. i.a. Klein 2003, 2009, 2018; Müller & Szczepaniak 2017; Schmitt, Szczepaniak & Vieregge 2019; Stark 2019 as well as the useful collections of data of Duden vol. 9, Taaladvies.net, Språkriktighetsboken etc.) systematically occur also in native speakers and they do not necessarily coincide with the difficulties of second language learners. In present-day German, most grammatical uncertainties occur in the domains of inflection (nominal plural formation, genitive singular allomorphy of strong masc./neut. nouns, inflectional variation of weak masc. nouns, strong/weak adjectival inflection and comparison forms, strong/weak verb forms, perfect auxiliary selection) and word-formation (linking elements in compounds, separability of complex verbs). As for syntax, there are often doubts in connection with case choice (pseudo-partitive constructions, prepositional case government) and agreement (especially due to coordination or appositional structures). This contribution aims to present a contrastive approach to morphological and syntactic uncertainties in contemporary Germanic languages (mostly German, Dutch, and Swedish) in order to obtain a broader and more fine-grained typology of grammatical instabilities and their causes. As will be discussed, most doubts of competent speakers - a problem also for general linguistic theory - can be attributed to processes of language change in progress, to language or variety contact, to gaps and rule conflicts in the grammar of every language or to psycholinguistic conditions of language processing. Our main concerns will be the issues of which (kinds of) common or different critical areas there are within Germanic (and, on the other hand, in which areas there are no doubts), which of the established (cross-linguistically valid) explanatory approaches apply to which phenomena and, ultimately, the question whether the new data reveals further lines of explanation for the empirically observable (standard) variation.
The aim of this paper is to give a unified account of the way that German demonstrative pronouns (henceforth: D-pronouns) like der, die and das behave (a) in sentences where they receive a coreferential interpretation, and (b) in sentences where they receive a covarying interpretation because they are in some way dependent on a quantificational expression – either via direct binding or indirectly, because the value they receive varies with the value that is assigned to the variable bound by an indefinite determiner.
The paper characterizes three different domains in the German middle field which are relevant for the interpretation of an indefinite. It is argued that the so-called 'strong' reading of an indefinite is the basic one and that the 'weak' reading needs special licensing which is mirrored by certain syntactic requirements. Some popular claims about the relation between the position and the interpretation of indefinites as well as some claims about scrambling are discussed and rejected. From the findings also follows that the strong reading of an indefinite is independent of its information status.
The present article is a follow-up study of the investigation of labiodentals in German and Dutch by Hamann & Sennema (2005), where we looked at the perception of the Dutch labiodental three-way contrast by German listeners without any knowledge of Dutch and German learners of Dutch. The results of this previous study suggested that the German voiced labiodental fricative /v/ is perceptually closer to the Dutch approximant /ʋ/ than to the corresponding Dutch voiced labiodental fricative /v/. These perceptual indications are attested by the acoustic findings in the present study. German /v/ has a similar harmonicity median and a similar centre of gravity to Dutch /ʋ/, but differs from Dutch /v/ in these parameters. With respect to the acoustic parameter of duration, German /v/ lies closer to the Dutch /v/ than to the Dutch /ʋ/.
This thesis investigates the acquisition pace and the typical developmental path in eL2 acquisition of selected phenomena of German morphosyntax and semantics and compared them to monolingual acquisition. In addition, the influence of ‘Age of Onset’ and of external factors on eL2 acquisition is examined.
To date, the most studies on eL2 acquisition focused on language production. Based on mostly longitudinal spontaneous speech data of only small number of children, they indicate that eL2 learners acquire sentence structure and subject-verb-agreement faster than monolingual children, whereas the acquisition of case marking causes them more difficulties. Moreover, similar developmental paths to those of monolingual children are claimed. Only several studies examined comprehension abilities in eL2 learners, however overwhelmingly in cross-sectional design. The findings from comprehension studies on telic and atelic verbs, and on wh-questions indicate that eL2 children acquire their target-like interpretation faster than monolingual children. The same acquisition stages towards target-like interpretation like in monolingual acquisition are assumed as well. Taking together, to date, no study exists, that examines comprehension and production abilities in a large group of eL2 learners of German in a longitudinal design.
This thesis extends the previous results by investigating pace of acquisition, impact of factors, and individual developmental paths in a longitudinal design with large groups of participants. Language data of 29 eL2 learners of German (age at T1: 3;7 years, LoE: 10 months) and 45 monolingual German-speaking children (age at T1: 3;7) are examined. The eL2 learners were tested in six test rounds (age at T6: 6;9 years). The monolingual children were tested in five test rounds (are at T5: 5;7). The standardized test LiSe-DaZ (Schulz & Tracy, 2011) was employed to examine children’s language skills.
eL2 learners show a significantly greater rate of change, thus faster acquisition pace, than monolingual children in the following scales: comprehension of telicity, comprehension of wh-questions, production of prepositions, and production of conjunctions. These phenomena are acquired early in monolingual children. No differences regarding acquisition pace between eL2 children and monolingual children are found for comprehension of negation, production of case marking, and production of focus particles. These phenomena are acquired late in monolingual development and involve semantic and pragmatic knowledge. The findings of faster acquisition pace of several phenomena are in line with several studies that reported that eL2 children develop faster than monolingual children.
Independent on whether a phenomenon is acquired early or late, no effects of external factors on eL2 children’s performance are found. These findings indicate that acquisition of core, rule-based phenomena is not sensitive to external factors if the first exposure to L2 takes place around the age of three.
Moreover, eL2 children show the same developmental stages and error types in comprehension of telicity, comprehension of negation, production of matrix and subordinate clauses. This is also independent on how fast they acquire a structure under consideration. Thus, these findings provide a further support for similar developmental paths of eL2 and monolingual children towards target-like comprehension and production.
This study reports on the results of an airflow experiment that measured the duration of airflow and the amount of air from release of a stop to the beginning of a following vowel in stop vowel-sequences of German. The sequences involved coronal, labial and velar voiced and voiceless stops followed by the vocoids /j, i:, ı, ɛ, ʊ, a/. The experiment tested the influence of the three factors voicing of stop, place of stop articulation, and the following vocoid context on the duration and amount of air as possible explanation for assibilation processes. The results show that the voiceless stops are related to a longer duration and more air in the release phase than voiced ones. For the influence of the vocoids, a significant difference could be established between /j/ and all other vocoids for the duration of the release phase. This difference could not be found for the amount of air over this duration. The place of articulation had only restricted influence. Velars resulted in significantly longer duration of the release phase compared to non-velars. A significant difference in amount of air between the places of articulation could not be found.
The research reported in this thesis examines two main questions: firstly, which dictionary type, bilingual or monolingual, is most effective for intermediate learners of German for reading comprehension, and secondly, which features make monolingual dictionary definitions effective for these learners. These questions divide the thesis into two parts. The first part compares the effectiveness of the bilingual versus the monolingual dictionary, and the second part compares two different monolingual definition styles.
The research was originally motivated by the observation that Hong Kong Chinese intermediate learners of German prefer to use a German-English bilingual dictionary. Since the translations are presented in the learners' second language, the effectiveness of this bilingual dictionary is doubtful. On the other hand, the learners are reluctant to use the monolingual dictionary, recommended to them by their language teachers. Three investigations were conducted in order to gain more detailed knowledge about the learners' dictionary preference, and the effectiveness of the two dictionary types. The learners' dictionary preference was investigated by means of a survey of ninety-eight foreign language students. The effectiveness of the bilingual and monolingual dictionary for reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning was first measured experimentally. The think-aloud method was then used in order to discover factors which determine the effectiveness of the two dictionary types.
The results of the experiment revealed that the German-English bilingual dictionary was not significantly more effective for the learners than the monolingual dictionary. The only monolingual dictionary available for German at that time, however, is linguistically too difficult for this proficiency level. Because of these findings, the research turned to monolingual dictionary definitions with the aim of identifying features that make them accessible to intermediate learners. Based on findings from the first think-aloud study, and principles promoted as user-friendly in the lexicographic literature, new definitions were developed for the target words in the research. These new definitions were compared with those in the existing dictionary. A second think-aloud study was conducted in order to generate hypotheses about individual definition features. These hypotheses were then tested in the second experiment, which was conducted with eighty-six learners of German in Shanghai.
The investigations reveal several features that determine the effectiveness of monolingual definitions for intermediate learners. The findings have theoretical and pedagogical implications. In the theoretical field, some lexicographic principles were recommended that are, unlike previous principles, based on empirical insights into user needs. In the pedagogical field, the research findings provide an empirical basis for the evaluation and recommendation of suitable dictionaries to intermediate learners.
A model of dictionary effectiveness is proposed. This model could help to assess the effectiveness of different information categories in dictionaries for different proficiency levels and different activity contexts. It could also provide lexicographic principles for the design of dictionaries. This research contributes one component to the proposed model: criteria for the effectiveness of definition features for intermediate learners in the activity context of reading.