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Although morphosyntax has been identified as a major source of difficulty for adult (nonnative) language learners, most previous studies have examined a limited set of largely affix-based phenomena. Little is known about word-based morphosyntax in late bilinguals and of how morphosyntax is represented and processed in a nonnative speaker's lexicon. To address these questions, we report results from two behavioral experiments investigating stem variants of strong verbs in German (which encode features such as tense, person, and number) in groups of advanced adult learners as well as native speakers of German. Although the late bilinguals were highly proficient in German, the results of a lexical priming experiment revealed clear native-nonnative differences. We argue that lexical representation and processing relies less on morphosyntactic information in a nonnative than in a native language.
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
Extract: Topics in psycholinguistics and the neurocognition of language rarely attract the attention of journalists or the general public. One topic that has done so, however, is the potential benefits of bilingualism for general cognitive functioning and development, and as a precaution against cognitive decline in old age. Sensational claims have been made in the public domain, mostly by journalists and politicians. Recently (September 4, 2014) The Guardian reported that “learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain”, and Michael Gove, the UK's previous Education Secretary, noted in an interview with The Guardian (September 30, 2011) that “learning languages makes you smarter”. The present issue of BLC addresses these topics by providing a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and experimental research on the role of bilingualism for cognition in children and adults.
This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax-phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdge constraint.
It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian–English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence–picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.
We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers’ interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first (the assistant) or the second (the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers’ and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners’ ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants’ disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers’. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders’ initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information.
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker's knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker's knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality - often context bound - by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.
This contribution is organized as follows: in section 1, I propose a formulation of the Mirror Principle (MP) based on syntactic features; the examples will be taken from Causatives and Anti-Causatives that are derived by affixes (in Russian, Czech, Polish, German, English as compared to Japanese and Chichewa) by head-to-head movement. In section 2, I review some basic facts in support of a syntactic approach to Merge of Causatives and Anti-Causatives, proposing that theta roles are also syntactic Features that merge functional affixes with their stems in a well-defined way. I first try to give some external evidence in showing that Causatives and Anti-Causatives obey a principle of thematic hierarchy early postulated in generative literature by Jackendoff (1972; 43), and later reformulated in terms of argument-structure-ordering principle by Grimshaw (1990:chapter 2). Crucial for my paper is the working hypothesis that every syntactic theory which tries to capture the data not only descriptively but also explanatively should descend from three levels of syntactic representation: a-structure where the relation between predicate and its arguments (and adjuncts) takes place, thematic structure where the theta-roles are assigned to their arguments, and event structure, which decides about the aspectual distribution and division of events.
Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Rheinischen Verlaufsform (RV) im rheinfränkischen Dialekt. Nach dem DUDEN handelt es sich bei der RV um eine Konstruktion, die aus dem Kopulaverb sein und einer PP mit am und nominalisiertem Infinitiv besteht und dem Ausdruck von progressivem Aspekt dient.
Die vorliegenden Arbeiten zur RV beschäftigen sich im Wesentlichen entweder mit der Ausprägung der Konstruktion im Standarddeutschen (z.B. Reimann (1999), Krause (2002), Rödel (2003), Rödel (2004a), Rödel (2004b), van Pottelberge (2004)) oder im Ripuarischen (z.B. Andersson (1989), Bhatt & Schmidt (1993)) und kommen zu unterschiedlichen Ergebnissen bezüglich der Verwendungsmöglichkeiten und des Aufbaus der Konstruktion, insbesondere des Status des Infinitivs in der Verlaufsform.
Hauptziel dieser Arbeit ist es, zu zeigen, dass sich die Grammatikalisierung der Verlaufsform von der im DUDEN beschriebenen Konstruktion zu einer analytischen Verbform entlang eines festen Grammatikalisierungspfades vollzieht und die entsprechenden Teilschritte bei der Entwicklung zu einer analytischen Verbform herauszuarbeiten. Auf dieser Grundlage wird in der Arbeit dargestellt, wie sich mittels eines geeigneten Sets an Indikatoren der Grammatikalisierungsgrad der Verlaufsform in einem Dialektraum oder einem diatopischen Register konkret feststellen lässt.
Dieser Band entstand auf der Basis von Beiträgen, die zum XXIV. Internationalen Kolloquium des Studienkreises ‘Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft’ vom 22. bis 24. August 2013 vorgetragen wurden. Ausschlaggebend für die Wahl des Themas war nicht ein Befolgen des Zeitgeistes, der immer wieder auf die Krise hinweist, die Europa durchlebt und die sich natürlich auch im metasprachlichen Bewusstsein niederschlägt, sondern die Absicht, eine von der Feststellung von Kontinuitäten in der Entwicklung der Sprachwissenschaft unterschiedene Forschungsperspektive einzunehmen.
Krisenzeiten und Umbrüche führen allerdings tatsächlich auch zu veränderten Diskursstrategien und Bezeichnungsmustern, die auch von linguistischen Laien wahrgenommen und diskutiert werden. Sprachwandeltheorien spiegeln zwar ein Bewusstsein von Phasen sehr dynamischer sprachlicher Entwicklungen wider, nicht jedoch ein Interesse an dem gesellschaftlich bedingten initialen Moment, an dem anfänglichen Auslöser von Sprachwandel. Eine Umbruchkonzeption, die Gesellschafts- und Sprachgeschichte in diesem Sinn aufeinander beziehen würde, wurde bisher nicht entwickelt. ...
Viel mehr als dieser lebensweltliche Bezug des Verhältnisses von Sprache und Krise bildete jedoch die Sichtung der historiographischen Literatur der letzten Jahre und Jahrzehnte den Ausgangspunkt für das Thema dieses Bandes. Immer wieder werden begriffliche Kontinuitäten, Einflüsse zurückliegender Autoren auf spätere und die Verpflichtung moderner Theorien gegenüber früheren Ansätzen konstatiert. Meistens geschieht dies zu Recht, doch das wissenschaftshistorische Interesse für die Innovation oder auch den theoretischen Verlust, mit einem Wort die Diskontinuität, sollte nicht vernachlässigt werden. Dabei gibt es durchaus immer wieder Behauptungen des völlig Neuen in sprachtheoretischen Publikationen, die eine Tradition und die jetzt neue, gültige Theorie, die sogenannte Vorgeschichte eines Theorems und den Beginn der eigentlichen Wissenschaft in Gegensatz zueinander stellen. Doch solche Behauptungen stammen von den Sprachwissenschaftlern selbst, sie dienen meist der Hervorhebung des eigenen Standpunkts und sind keine Ergebnisse professioneller Historiographie.