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The point of departure of this paper is the claim by Heyvaert, Maekelberghe & Buyle (2019) that the suffix -ing has no aspectual meaning in English gerunds. Rather, the interpretation of nominal and verbal gerunds depends, so they argue, on situation or viewpoint aspect, a claim that contradicts the wide-spread view that the aspectual meaning of English gerunds is brought about by the nominalizing suffix. The present paper addresses the issue from a comparative perspective, focusing on German ung-nominals: while they share aspectual features with their English counterparts, empirical evidence from productivity, distribution, and argument linking shows (i) that the derivational suffix -ung imposes aspectual restrictions on possible verb bases, and (ii) that with respect to argument linking, the deverbal nominal favors the state component of a complex event predicate over its process component. From the historical record of German, we learn that these aspectual restrictions do not hold for ung-nominals in earlier periods of German. With the rise of aspectual restrictions, the nominalization pattern turns more nominal resulting in a position further towards the nominal end of the deverbalization continuum. It appears, then, that it is only in the historical pariods of German that ung-nominals pattern with English nominals as regards their aspectual features. Currently, German ung-nominals are more noun-like than nominal (and verbal) gerunds in English. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The major aim of this volume is to investigate infinitival structures from a diachronic point of view and, simultaneously, to embed the diachronic findings into the ongoing theoretical discussion on non-finite clauses in general. All contributions subscribe to a dynamic approach to infinitival clauses by investigating their origin, development and loss in miscellaneous patterns and across different languages.
Portal Wissen = Borders
(2013)
The new edition of the Potsdam Research Magazine “Portal Wissen” approaches the subject “Borders” from different perspectives.
As a linguist, this headline makes me think of linguistic borders and the effects that might result from the contact of two languages at a particular border. There is, for instance, ample evidence of code-switching, i.e. the use of material from at least two languages in a single utterance. The reasons for code-switching can be manifold. On the one hand, code-switching may result from a limited language competence, for example if a speaker lacks a particular word in a nonnative language. On the other hand, code-switching may be a matter of prestige if the speaker wants to demonstrate his or her affiliation to a certain social group by switching languages. If code-switching does not only occur sporadically but involves whole language communities over a longer period of time, it can result in significant changes of the involved languages. Which language “gives” and which one “takes” is determined by sociolinguistic factors. It is, hence, quite easy to predict that German varieties spoken in language islands in South and Eastern Europe as well as in North and Latin America will absorb more and more language material from their neighbouring languages until they disappear unless political will strives to preserve these language varieties. Increasing mobility of modern societies has multiplied the extent and the intensity of language contact and certainly comprises a large number of different contact situations besides the one most commonly known, i.e. the contact between German and English.
From a historic point of view, German witnesses a strong influence of various Romance languages such as Latin, French and Italian. In Potsdam, one cannot help being reminded of the French influence during the 18th century.
Overcoming language borders becomes also apparent in the everyday life of an international research university. In March this year, the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society took place in Potsdam, with more than 500 participants. Lingua franca of this conference was English. Compared to previous conferences, this further increased the number of international participants.
The articles in this edition illustrate various approaches to the topic “Borders”: On the trail of “Boundary Surveys”, we follow the Australian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. “Travellers Across Borders” is focussed on articles dealing with the literature of the colonial Caribbean or with the work of an Italian geologist deep beneath the earth’s surface, for example. Looking for the “Boundless”, our authors follow scientists who discuss questions like “Why love hurts?”. The present issue of “Portal Wissen” also takes into account “Drawing Up Borders” in an article that is concerned with the limits of workrelated stress. Instances of successful “Border Crossing” are provided by the “Handkerchief Lab” as well as by new biotechnological applications.
I would like to wish you inspiring border experiences, hoping that you will get many impulses for crossing professional borders in your field of expertise.
Prof. Ulrike Demske
Professor of the History and the Varieties of the German Language
Vice President International Affairs, Alumni and Fundraising
A key problem in automatic annotation of historical corpora is inconsistent spelling. Because the spelling of some word forms can differ between texts, a language model trained on already annotated treebanks may fail to recognize known word forms due to differences in spelling. In the present work, we explore the feasibility of an unsupervised method for spelling-adjustment for the purpose of improved part of speech (POS) tagging. To this end, we present a method for spelling normalization based on weighted edit distances, which exploits within-text spelling variation. We then evaluate the improvement in taging accuracy resulting from between-texts spelling normalization in two tagging experiments on several Early New High German (ENHG) texts.
The rising standard language in Early New High German (1350–1650) provides particularly interesting cases for the question of missing heads on all levels of language structure. A well-known example are subordinate clauses lacking a finite auxiliary verb, traditionally called Afinite Constructions. Based on new data, drawn from two treebanks of Early New High German, the present paper will briefly sketch the distribution of ACs, before establishing that they are in fact a type of ellipsis and do not cluster with other non-finite clauses in German. The remainder of the paper addresses the question what kind of information is missing in ACs and how this information is retrieved. Obviously, auxiliary drop in ENHG represents a type of ellipsis rarely attested in present-day German.
Sprachwandel
(2015)
Unsere Sprache wandelt sich unablässig. Beispiele dafür lassen sich in der Alltagssprache täglich aufs Neue entdecken. Meistens handelt es sich um Fälle lexikalischen Wandels, wie die Entlehnung von Wörtern aus einer anderen Sprache in das Deutsche. Eine besondere Rolle spielt hier in den letzten Jahren das Englische. Bekannte Beispiele solcher Entlehnungen sind Wörter aus der Computersprache wie scannen, e-mailen, chatten, aber auch Punk oder Hooligan sind aus dem Englischen entlehnt. Aus anderen Sprachen sind Lexeme wie Plateau (aus dem Französischen), Cello (aus dem Italienischen) oder Fatzke (aus dem Polnischen) übernommen worden. Informationen über die Geschichte einzelner Wörter lassen sich aus etymologischen Wörterbüchern beziehen. - Diese Einführung informiert über die linguistischen Kerngebiete Lexikon und Morphologie, Phonologie, Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik . Sie erläutert Grundbegriffe, illustriert sie an Beispielen aus dem Deutschen und gibt einen Einblick in die linguistische Theoriebildung. Kindlicher Spracherwerb und Sprachwandel - zwei Gebiete, die von großer Bedeutung für ein tieferes Verständnis der menschlichen Sprache sind - werden in weiteren Kapiteln vorgestellt. Mit Übungen, einem Glossar der wichtigsten Fachtermini, einer weiterführenden Schlussbibliographie und einem Sachregister. Für die 3. Auflage wurde der Band umfassend überarbeitet und aktualisiert.
The present paper looks into the grammaticalization of the definite article in the history of German. Starting with the well-known emergence of the definite article from a demonstrative pronoun over the course of Old High German (750–1050), I will consider the rise of so-called weak definites in Early New High German (1350–1650) as a new piece of evidence for the grammaticalization process. Here, the subclass of possessive weak definites is of particular interest for the grammaticalization of the definite article in German, because of a word order change affecting the position of possessor phrases. As soon as the possessor systematically follows the head noun (except for proper names), we observe three alternatives for the prenominal determiner slot: it may remain empty, or it may be filled either by the indefinite or the definite article in Early New High German. In Present-Day German, the definite article is used in the unmarked case, thus pointing to a second stage in the grammaticalization process of the definite article in German, which has so far not been acknowledged in the literature.