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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.
In this study, we investigated the impact of two constraints on the linear order of constituents in German preschool children’s and adults’ speech production: a rhythmic (*LAPSE, militating against sequences of unstressed syllables) and a semantic one (ANIM, requiring animate referents to be named before inanimate ones). Participants were asked to produce coordinated bare noun phrases in response to picture stimuli (e.g., Delfin und Planet, ‘dolphin and planet’) without any predefined word order. Overall, children and adults preferably produced animate items before inanimate ones, confirming findings of Prat-Sala, Shillcock, and Sorace (2000). In the group of preschoolers, the strength of the animacy effect correlated positively with age. Furthermore, the order of the conjuncts was affected by the rhythmic constraint, such that disrhythmic sequences, i.e., stress lapses, were avoided. In both groups, the latter result was significant when the two stimulus pictures did not vary with respect to animacy. In sum, our findings suggest a stronger influence of animacy compared to rhythmic well-formedness on conjunct ordering for German speaking children and adults, in line with findings by McDonald, Bock, and Kelly (1993) who investigated English speaking adults.
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.
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.
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.
This study explores four German nominalization patterns (-ung; -erei; Ge- -X-e; nominalized infinitives) using corpus and web data. We conclude that they can be considered a word formation paradigm, as some functions depend on paradigmatic oppositions. Our case study supports gradual differences between inflectional and word formation paradigmaticity.
Morphology Days is a (nearly) biennial international meeting which deals with morphology within different frameworks and in various perspectives Previous editions of this conference have taken place in Leuven (2015), Leeuwarden (2013), Leiden (2012), Nijmegen (2011), Luik (2009) and Amsterdam (2007) While the first editions of the conference were mainly addressed to researchers working on morphology in the Netherlands and in Belgium, the last editions – including this one – included international contributions The programme and the book of abstract is available at the conference’s homepage at https://morphologydays2017.wordpress.com/program/. Organized by Philippe Hiligsmann, Kristel Van Goethem, Nikos Koutsoukos and Isa Hendrikx from the Université Catholique de Louvain, and Laurent Raiser from the Université de Liège, this edition of Morphology Days hosted more than 30 researchers, among which 3 plenary speakers, coming not only from Belgium but also from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Although both inflection and derivation (affixation) where dealt with in the talks, this conference report will only address the studies on derivation.
This paper studies the morphological productivity of German N+N compounding patterns from a diachronic perspective. It argues that the productivity of compounds increases due to syntactic influence from genitive constructions ("improper compounds") in Early New High German. Both quantitative and qualitative productivity measures are adapted from derivational morphology and tested on compound data from the Mainz Corpus of (Early) New High German (1500–1710).
Attributive participle constructions in German behave like adjectives in terms of inflection and position, but keep their verbal arguments. They can be extended by adjuncts or arguments and these extended attributive present participles mainly occur in written language (Weber, 1994). As the same content can also be expressed in a relative clause (RC), I compare both constructions in order to find out under which conditions a participle construction could lead to processing difficulties and how this relates to RC processing.
Based on previous assumptions for production (e.g. Weber, 1971; Fabricius-Hansen, 2016), three potential factors on the comprehension of prenominal modifiers and RCs are investigated: modifier length, the internal structure and multiple levels of embedding. The hypotheses for an effect on modifier length are mainly based on two processing accounts that make opposite predictions under specific circumstances: memory-based accounts such as the dependency locality theory (DLT) (e.g. Gibson, 2000) and expectation-based accounts such as surprisal (e.g. Levy, 2008). An increase in modifier length results in more intervening material between determiner and noun for the participle construction, contrary to RCs where these elements are adjacent. This separation of the DP could increase memory load. Therefore, longer participles would slow down processing of the noun, while there should be no difference for RCs. Two acceptability judgment experiments showed a tendency for longer participle phrases to receive lower ratings. The modifier length was further investigated in online processing. Contrary to the predicted locality effect, self-paced reading data reveals an anti-locality effect for participle phrases, with lower RTs on the noun when additional material was present inside the modifier. This experiment was followed up by an eye-tracking experiment which replicated the anti-locality effect, but at the participle instead at the noun.
The second factor that was investigated is the argument structure of the participle (or RC verb). My hypothesis is that more “prototypical” adjectives in terms of syntactic structure and semantics are more acceptable and easier to process. Attributive participles are considered hybrids between verbs and adjectives (e.g. Fuhrhop & Teuber, 2000; L¨ubbe & Rapp, 2011) due to their modifier internal verbal function, but adjectival position and agreement with the noun. This double role could lead to difficulties, in particular with a more complex verbal structure. Therefore, the prediction was that the presence of an accusative object inside a participle phrase would lead to lower acceptability ratings and higher reading times in online processing. In the first two acceptability experiments, this prediction was borne out. In addition, an SPR experiment was conducted which manipulated the presence of either an accusative object or adjunct for participles (of verbs that could be used intransitively and transitively) and the corresponding RCs. The experiment showed an effect of the presence of an accusative object on the participle, with higher reading times if an object was present, compared to an adjunct. No such difference was found for the RC verb, which indicates that only participles are processed more slowly when there is an accusative object. An alternative explanation for this finding is the inherent imperfective aspect of the present participle: a direct object could change the event structure in such a way that the aspect no longer matches.
The third factor I investigate is an effect of double embedding on the acceptability of participle phrases and RCs. While double embedded participles are rated lower than double embedded RCs, there is a smaller decrease from single to double embedding for participles than for RCs, contrary to the predictions calculated by the metric of the DLT.
Overall, the results provide evidence for experience-based processing, but they cannot be explained by either memory- or experience-based accounts alone. The effect concerning the presence of an accusative object suggest that properties of the participle distinguish the construction from RCs and affect its processing. The thesis suggests that the latter effect needs to be investigated further in future research. Furthermore, the findings have implications for the role of attributive present participles in German and for hypotheses about similar constructions in other languages.
History films personalize, dramatize and emotionalize historical events and characters. They revive the past by exemplifying it in the present, engage ongoing discourses of history and as a result have proven to be the most influential medium in conveying history to large audiences. History films are regarded as an attractive, motivating and efficient (supplementary) teaching and learning medium in history as well as in foreign language classes. As part of the course "Historical Survey of Germany" (BA German-programme at University Putra Malaysia) history film projects on important periods and events in German history were conducted. The article introduces a film project on World War II and describes the pedagogical approach which aims to develop three core competencies of historical understanding – Content Knowledge, Historical Empathy/Perspective Recognition and Narrative Analysis. It discusses selected general findings provided as qualitative data in group and individual assignments. While the responses to questions related to Content Knowledge and Narrative Analysis show that students achieved higher competency levels, the participants showed shortcomings in the rational examination of historical characters, their perspectives and motivations for their actions. Time, practice and guidance can be identified as key factors in developing historical literacy competencies further.
The relations between Turkey and Germany have a long history that involves collaboration and partnership in many areas. After 1960s, this relationship gained a new dimension as hundreds of thousands of Turkish workers immigrated to Germany. This paper presents a brief history of the relations between the two countries, and the cultural and language-related problems experienced by Turkish people in Germany. More specifically, it focuses on the background and current state of the Turkish Language and Culture course taught to the Turkish youth in German schools. Problems regarding the implementation of this course are discussed with reference to official statistics. Finally, suggestions are offered to address the challenges faced to improve the Turkish Language and Culture course so that Turkish children can successfully learn their origin-language, and eventually achieve competence in both Turkish and German in their academic studies.
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.
This thesis reports three experiments on structural choices during grammatical encoding in monolingual adult speakers of German. Conceptual accessibility, one of the most central notions in language production research, as well as the phenomena of structural and perceptual priming are investigated.
In the first two experiments, a manipulation in terms of inherent conceptual accessibility which has shown universal influences on language production - the factor animacy - is combined with a manipulation making the non-canonical passive structure itself more accessible via structural priming.
Results show that, in addition to a preference for animate entities preceding inanimate entities, speakers can be structurally primed. Structural priming of passive structures led to significantly more passive responses compared to (intransitive) baseline structures.
This holds for monologue settings (Experiment 1) as well as dialogue settings (Experiment 2).
The structural priming effect was stronger in the dialogue setting compared to the monologue setting.
The third experiment combines contexts manipulating the derived conceptual accessibility of one of two entities to be described with a visual cueing manipulation increasing the perceptual accessibility of one of the referents.
Whereas a comprehensive literature review as well as the experimental work conducted within this thesis suggest that animacy and topicalization may exert universal influences on structural choices during language production, perceptual accessibility does not seem to have this potential.
In line with previous cross-linguistic work, perceptual priming in form of an implicit visual cueing manipulation did not show significant effects on speakers' structural choices in German.
These findings contrast with findings obtained for English, suggesting that language-specific characteristics in terms of word order flexibility may influence effcts on grammatical encoding during language production.
Increasing the derived accessibility of one of two referents, however, once again showed significant influences on speakers' structural choices with the topicalization of a patient referent leading to an enhanced production of passive responses.
The collaborative context of language learning in Teletandem (TELLES; VASSALLO 2006) involves the principles of autonomy, reciprocity and separation of languages, as well as the mediation of the partnerships (in Vygotskian terms). This article aims to discuss the formats of teletandem mediation, by focusing on the strategies used to reconcile the management of interactions (SALOMÃO 2008) through reflective journals in our specific educational context This qualitative investigation is based on the analysis of a corpus of reflective journals produced after teletandem sessions by Brazilian students and the feedback offered by the mediators. The Brazilian participants wrote journal entries after practicing teletandem with speakers of the following foreign languages: English, German, Italian, and Spanish. They address a wide range of topics, covering aspects of technology, foreign language learning, methodological issues, as well as comments on the relationship with their partners. The data suggest great potential of the journals and the feedback for participants, mediators and coordinators to evaluate specific issues of collaborative language learning in the teletandem, as well as other relevant aspects for the pedagogical supervision of the project.
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.
Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.
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.
Pluralization strategies of monolingual German children aged 3-6, median 4;2 (N = 810), and adults aged 18-96, median 24;0 (N = 582), were compared on the basis of eight nonce nouns from the language test SETK 3-5. Differences between younger and older Germans resembled previously described differences between German and immigrant pre-schoolers for most aspects, e.g., use of fewer plural allomorphs (types), more errors in umlauting, and more avoidance strategies in the linguistically weaker groups. However, both German children and adults demonstrated the same universal frequency- and phonology-based pluralization patterns. Surprisingly, ungrammatical plural forms were equally frequent in both children’s and adults' answers.
In this article we present experimental findings on the acceptability of different argument orders in the German middle field. Our study pursues two goals: First, to evaluate a number of surface constraints on German argument order that have been proposed in the literature, and second, to shed new light on how gradient constraints jointly determine sentence acceptability. In four experiments, we investigated the impact of surface constraints relating to animacy, thematic roles, definiteness and case. While we are able to confirm an influence of most constraints under investigation, the resulting constraint hierarchy does not coincide with any hierarchy put forward so far in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. With regard to gradience, our results can be accounted for either by an OT variant incorporating a notion of markedness, or by a fully quantified model using constraint weights. For the latter, however, we provide evidence against uniform penalties associated with constraint violations.