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Background
German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus be context-dependent, that is, dependent on other cues. Precisely this context dependency is investigated in the current study: Is there an effect of capitalisation on reading and is this affected by the presence of other cues such as a determiner (specifically, an article)?
Methods
We ran an eye-tracking study with 30 German-speaking adults, measuring fixations during sentence reading. Critical NPs either contained correctly capitalised nouns or not and were presented either with or without a determiner.
Results
The results show that both the presence of capitalisation on the noun and the presence of a determiner led to faster reading. When no determiner was present to signal the NP, the presence of noun capitalisation aided reading most.
Conclusions
From these results, we conclude that the influence of capitalisation is indeed context dependent: Capitalisation aids processing most when no other cue is present. Thus, different cues play a role in NP recognition. Based on these findings, we argue that noun capitalisation should not be studied in isolation. We argue that a better understanding of capitalisation as a reading aid is relevant for teaching reading strategies.
Flexion
(2023)
Quotation marks are substantially used for direct speech and citations. For the ‘modalizing’ use, the Official Rules state that a “different understanding than usual” is indicated; they give very little information on the use of quotation marks beyond literal reference. It therefore seems all the more interesting to investigate the usage of modalizing quotation marks. In the present analysis, we studied the school-leaving examinations of an entire year. School-leaving examinations are texts by persons whose institutional acquisition of written language can be regarded as complete; they are texts written by skilled writers. The investigation takes into account both formal and functional observations. We recognized differences between school subjects that can be interpreted with regard to the concept of educational language. The writers described here showed a high sensitivity (conscious or unconscious) to the use of quotation marks, which we call the “struggle for educational language”. This may be related to the corpus investigated here. However, our study constitutes a solid basis for further corpus studies on quotation marks.
Flexion als Lerngegenstand
(2023)
Das Schriftsystem ist ein System und es zeigen sich Folgen, wenn Schreibungen gegen den Schreibusus geandert werden. Exemplarisch wird dies erstens an der Veranderung des Verbsuffixes -iren zu -ieren im Nachgang der Rechtschreibreform von 1876 und zweitens der Veranderung von Gruppen wie im Allgemeinen in der Reform von 1996 gezeigt. Beide verursachen unbeabsichtigte Folgefehler. Wie systematisch manche Variation und damit auch mancher Fehler ist, wird sowohl am Komma vor Vergleichssatzen als auch an Fehlern in der Getrennt- und Zusammenschreibung gezeigt. Das Statut des Rechtschreibrates besagt, dass bei der Weiterentwickung des Amtlichen Regelwerks die ständige Beobachtung der Schreibentwicklung, die Klärung von Zweifelsfällen, die Erarbeitung und die wissenschaftliche Begründung von Vorschlägen zur Anpassung des Regelwerks an den allgemeinen Wandel der Sprache im Vordergrund stehen. Das ist zu begrusen, weil viele Zweifel bei den Zweifelsfallen grammatische und nicht orthographische Ursachen haben.
Phonologie, die Lehre von der lautlichen Organisation der Sprache, ist einer der zentralen Bereiche der Sprachwissenschaft. Auch das Schriftsystem, das Gegenstand der Graphematik ist, gewinnt zunehmend an Bedeutung für Forschung und Lehre. Dieser Band informiert über Form und Funktion der wichtigsten Einheiten des gesprochenen und geschriebenen Deutschen, von den Lauten und Buchstaben über Sprech- und Schreibsilben bis hin zu phonologischen und graphematischen Wörtern, phonologischen Äußerungen und graphematischen Sätzen. In zweifarbiger Gestaltung mit Definitionen, Beispielen, Grafiken und Aufgaben. – Die 2. Auflage wurde durchgängig aktualisiert und erweitert.
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.
