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Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure has rarely been investigated. One reason for this might be, that measuring effects of syntactic structure involves the use of complex stimuli, for which the emotional impact of grammar is difficult to isolate. In the present experiment we examined the emotional impact of structural parallelisms, that is, repetitions of syntactic features, on the emotion-sensitive "late positive potential" (LPP) with a cross-modal priming paradigm. Primes were auditory presented nonsense sentences which included grammatical-syntactic parallelisms. Visual targets were positive, neutral, and negative faces, to be classified as emotional or non-emotional by the participants. Electrophysiology revealed diminished LPP amplitudes for positive faces following parallel primes. Thus, our findings suggest that grammatical structure creates an emotional context that facilitates processing of positive emotional information.
We discuss an intervention programme for kindergarten and school teachers' continuing education in Germany that targets biases against language outside a perceived monolingual ‘standard’ and its speakers. The programme combines anti-bias methods relating to linguistic diversity with objectives of raising critical language awareness. Evaluation through teachers' workshops in Berlin and Brandenburg points to positive and enduring attitudinal changes in participants, but not in control groups that did not attend workshops, and effects were independent of personal variables gender and teaching subject and only weakly associated with age. We relate these effects to such programme features as indirect and inclusive methods that foster active engagement, and the combination of ‘safer’ topics targeting attitudes towards linguistic structures with more challenging ones dealing with the discrimination of speakers.
Grammatical innovation in multiethnic urban Europe : new linguistic practices among adolescents
(2009)
This paper discusses a phenomenon that has recently been observed in areas with a large migrant population in European cities: the rise of new linguistic practices among adolescents in multiethnic contexts. The main grammatical characteristics that have been described for them are (1) phonological/phonctic and lexical influences from migrant languages and (2) morpho-syntactic reductions and simplifications. In this paper, I show that from a grammatical point of view, morpho-syntactic reductions are only part of the story. Using 'Kiezdeutsch' as an example. the German instance of such a youth language (which may be the one with most speakers), I discuss several phenomena that provide evidence for linguistic productivity and show that they evolve from a specific interplay of grammatical and pragmatic features that is typical for contact languages: grammatical reductions go hand-in-hand with productive elaborations that display a systematicity that can lead to the emergence of new constructions, indicating the innovative grammatical power of these muitiethnolects.
Der Vortrag behandelt den Einfluss sprachlicher Strukturen auf unsere Sicht der Welt. Am Beispiel des Englischen und Deutschen diskutiert die Referentin zusammengesetzte Wörter, wie das deutsche Wort "Schildkröte" oder das englische Wort "hedgehog" (Igel, wörtlich: "Heckeneber"), bei denen die lexikalische Bedeutung von unserem Weltwissen abweicht. Eine Schildkröte ist keine Kröte, ein Igel kein Eber, auch wenn ihre Bezeichnungen im Deutschen beziehungsweise im Englischen dies suggerieren. Führen sprachliche Unterschiede in diesem Bereich zu messbaren Unterschieden in der Art, wie wir die Welt wahrnehmen, derart dass Deutsche beispielsweise Schildkröten und Kröten als ähnlicher und Igel und Eber als unähnlicher ansehen, als englische Sprecher dies tun? Heike Wiese geht in ihrer Vorlesung der Frage nach, was solche Zusammenhänge über die Architektur des Sprachsystems und über die Schnittstelle zwischen Grammatik und Weltrepräsentation aussagen.