Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (105)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (18)
- Review (13)
- Postprint (12)
- Doctoral Thesis (7)
- Conference Proceeding (4)
- Other (4)
- Part of a Book (1)
- Part of Periodical (1)
- Preprint (1)
Language
- English (167) (remove)
Keywords
- bilingualism (4)
- Mehrsprachigkeit (3)
- Turkish (3)
- Türkisch (3)
- Balkan Turkic (2)
- Deutsch (2)
- ERP (2)
- German (2)
- Infinitival patterns (2)
- Kiezdeutsch (2)
Institute
- Institut für Germanistik (167) (remove)
The administrative language used in imperial and city chanceries illustrates formal language use in the Early Modern period, as most evident in its syntactic complexity. Since administrative language was considered prestigious by the literate people of the time, the syntactic features in question are increasingly found in other text types as well (Lötscher 1995, Schwitalla 2002). The present paper investigates early newspapers published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to evalute their degree of syntactic complexity and hence the extent of formal language used. Contrary to common belief (Admoni 1980, von Polenz 2013), it will be shown that early newspapers do not allow a uniform assessment in terms of their syntactic complexity, when they emerge as a new genre in the seventeenth century: some news segments display a fairly simple syntax, whereas others are of high syntactic complexity. By the end of the eighteenth century, the growing conventionalization of the new genre as well as the impact of standardization processes render newspapers much more balanced in terms of syntactic complexity. Unlike previous work on the syntactic complexity of newspaper language, the measurement of syntactic complexity takes into account not only sentence length and the relationship between independent and dependent clauses, but also the placement of adverbial clauses in relation to their associated clause.
Turkish is a language described as relying predominantly on non-finite subordination in the domain of clause combining. However, there are also strategies of finite subordination, as well as means of syndetic and asyndetic paratactic clause combining, especially in the informal settings.
Clause combining is and has been one of the focal points of research on heritage Turkish (h-Turkish).
One point is particularly clear: In comparison with the monolingual setting, finite means of clause combining are more frequent in h-Turkish in Germany, the U.S., and the Netherlands, while non-finite means of clause combining are less frequent.
Overall, our results confirm the findings of earlier studies: heritage speakers in Germany and the U.S. prefer paratactic means of clause combining using connectors, as opposed to monolingual speakers.
Our results also reveal that age (adolescents vs. adults) and register (informal vs. formal) significantly modulate the use of connectors.
Moreover, we find that the shift in preferences in means of clause combining triggers an expansion in the system of connectors and leads to the development of new narrative connectors, such as o zaman and derken.
The system of syndetic paratactic clause combining is expanding in heritage Turkish. This expansion calls for multifaceted modeling of change in heritage languages, which integrates language-internal factors (register), dynamics of convergence with the contact languages, and extra-linguistic factors (age and language use).
Allegory and the poetic self
(2022)
This book is the first collective examination of Late Medieval intimate first-person narratives that blurred the lines between author, narrator, and protagonist and usually feature personification allegory and courtly love tropes, creating an experimental new family of poetry. In this volume, contributors analyze why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries. The editors identify and discuss three predominant forms within this family: debate poetry, dream allegories, and autobiographies. Contributors offer textual analyses of key works from late medieval German, French, Italian, and Iberian literature, with discussion of developments in England, as well. Allegory and the Poetic Self offers a sophisticated, theoretically current discussion of relevant literature. This exploration of medieval “I” narratives offers insights not just into the premodern period but also into Western literature’s subsequent traditions of self-analysis and identity crafting through storytelling.
Im Hochmittelalter entstehen Erzählungen, die etablierte literarische Formen und Traditionen neu verbinden: Sie sind volkssprachig, allegorisch und verwenden als Erzählform die erste Person, um in dieser Kombination, die sich zu einem die Grenzen der Einzelsprachen überschreitenden Erzähl-Format verfestigt, unterschiedlichste Themen aufzugreifen. Dieses Format, erstmals realisiert im altfranzösischen Roman de la Rose, wird die europäische Literatur mit Texten wie Dantes Divina Comedia, Guillaumes de Deguileville Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, William Langlands Pierce Plowman und Christines de Pizan Le Livre de la mutation de Fortune bis weit in die Neuzeit hinein prägen. Der in den Band einleitende Beitrag geht der Frage nach, ob das narrative Format dabei universell verwendet wird oder, z.B. im Rahmen der Liebesdichtung, spezifische Besonderheiten aufweist.
In light of the growing emotionalization of public discourse, this article deals with the action of shame allocation in Israeli accountability interviews. A qualitative analysis of tokens of the Hebrew verb lehitbayesh ‘to be ashamed’ in political interviews was conducted using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis methods. The findings show that in this public context the verb lehitbayesh is mostly not used to convey an emotional state, nor can its meaning be explained by the classic theoretical conceptualization of shame. Instead, lehitbayesh is mobilized to allocate shame to another actor, and portrays the allocator as morally superior and as someone who sacrifices for what is right. Lehitbayesh is part of the negotiations between journalists and politicians over the question of who is accountable for a transgressive act, what the desired response is, and who the relevant audience for the moral lesson is.
Diglossic translanguaging
(2024)
This book examines how German-speaking Jews living in Berlin make sense and make use of their multilingual repertoire. With a focus on lexical variation, the book demonstrates how speakers integrate Yiddish and Hebrew elements into German for indexing belonging and for positioning themselves within the Jewish community. Linguistic choices are shaped by language ideologies (e.g., authenticity, prescriptivism, nostalgia). Speakers translanguage when using their multilingual repertoire, but do so in a diglossic way, using elements from different languages for specific domains
Converbs in heritage Turkish
(2021)
Turkish expresses adverbial subordination predominantly by means of converb clauses. These are headed by nonfinite verbs, i.e. converbs, which have a converb suffix attached to the stem. The different converbs express different aspectual relations between the subordinate and the superordinate clause, and they can be modifying or non-modifying. We analyse data from speakers of Turkish as a heritage language in Germany and the U.S. as well as monolingual speakers of Turkish in Turkey. The data come from two age groups: adults and adolescents. We show that unlike in canonical Turkish, converbs in heritage Turkish can be multifunctional, meaning that they can express both simultaneity and causality, for example. Furthermore, we show that converbs in heritage Turkish can be both modifying and non-modifying. As possible factors which might be responsible for such variation, we discuss language contact, sociolinguistic differences between the speaker communities (Germany vs. the U.S.) and age of the speakers.
Goethe had lifelong unhappy memories of his early riding lessons at the Frankfurt Marstall. Yet not only did he become a passionate rider later, but he also held riding in unusually high esteem as a veritable form of 'art'. In his literary works, riding serves as a complex symbol of, among other things, a prudent, measured style of government, an analogy that was also drawn in early modern equestrian theory. Above all, however, according to his understanding of art, riding can be located not only in the early modern system of the artes, but also in the contemporary aesthetics of autonomy.
Balkan varieties of Turkic, particularly those on the periphery of the Turkic spread area in the region, such as Gagauz and West Rumelian Turkish, are commonly observed to have head-initial verb phrases. Based on a wide survey, this paper attempts a more precise description of the pattern of VP directionality across Balkan Turkic and shows that there is considerable variation in how prevalent VX order is, a pattern that turns out to be more complex than the previous descriptions suggest: Two spectrums of directionality can be discerned between XV and VX orders, contingent upon type of the dependent of the verb and dialect locale. The paper also explores the grammatical causes underlying this shift in constituent order. First, VX order seems to be dependent upon whether a clause is nominal or not. Nonfinite clauses of the nominal type have XV order across Balkan Turkic, while finite clauses and nonfinite clauses of the converbial type show differing degrees of VX order depending on type of dependent and geographical location. Second, VX order appears to be an outcome of verb movement to the left of the dependent in finite clauses and nonfinite clauses of the converbial type, rather than head parameter shift.