Volume 47, Issue 3

This article investigates the use of überhaupt and sowieso in German and Dutch. These two words are frequently classified as particles, if only because of their pragmatic functions. The frequent use of particles is considered a specific trait common to German and Dutch, and the description of their semantics and pragmatics is notoriously difficult. It is unclear whether both particles have the same meaning in Dutch (where they are loanwords) and German, whether they can fulfil the same syntactic functions and to what extent the (semantic and pragmatic) functions of überhaupt und sowieso overlap. There has already been linguistic research on überhaupt and sowieso by Fisseni (2009) using the world-wide web and by Bruijnen and Sudhoff (2013) using the EUROPARL corpus. In the present study we critically evaluated the corpus study, integrating information on original utterance language and discussing the adequacy of this corpus. Moreover, we conducted an experimental survey collecting subjective-intuitive judgements in three dimensions, thus gathering more data on sparse and informal constructions. By using these complementary methods, we obtain a more nuanced picture of the use of überhaupt and sowieso in both languages: On the one hand, the data show where the use of both words is more similar and on the other hand, differences between the languages can also be discerned.

This paper deals with normative statements in interviews concerning the use of languages and varieties in university. A corpus of 123 interviews with teachers, students and administrative staff was used to investigate within an interactional approach the relation between the form of normative statements, the norms they refer to and the interactional situation in the interviews. This article shows by means of three exemplary analyses that the expression of normative expectations / evaluations is highly dependent not only on the validity, salience and effectiveness of the norms in question, but also on the interview situation itself. Seen as a social practice and not just as an instrument of elicitating attitudes and other metalinguistic data, the interview becomes a showcase of the interconnection of normative phenomena (norms, values, attitudes …), normative conflicts and their negotiation.

The present paper investigates small clause adjuncts displaying the phenomenon referred to as ‘event control’ in literature. Many languages, including German, employ non-finite clauses (besides finite clauses) as propositional adjuncts, for instance infinitival, participial and small clause adjuncts. The subject of these adjunct clauses is left unexpressed and must generally be interpreted co-referentially with the subject or object of the matrix clause (subject or object control), but the matrix event itself can also be interpreted as the controller. Adjuncts involving event control have, to my knowledge, never been examined jointly or particularly thoroughly. The aim of this paper is therefore to provide insight into German data involving event control in different kinds of non-finite propositional adjunct clauses, by examining common and diverging syntactic and semantic properties. The data comprises nominative DPs (Germ. Satzappositionen ), adverbial infinitives headed by um (Engl. in order to ), adverbial present and past participle constructions, and adverbial small clauses headed by the particle als . Furthermore, I discuss briefly how these data could be captured theoretically, by analyzing them as adjuncts in different syntactic-semantic domains and as obligatorily controlled (OC) adjuncts according to the OC-properties described by Landau (2013).

In contemporary German, nominal structures are often prefered to verbal sentences. Since it is rather common to convert main verbs into nouns by the means of derivation, verbal propositions can easily be integrated into new sentences. As the main verb‘s valency is maintained, verbal complements can be transfered into noun phrases as well – now functioning as modifiers. Thus, contemporary German offers a wide range of possibilities of transferring propositions from sentences into noun phrases. On the other hand, it seems to be easier to transfer certain types of sentence structures into nominal structures than others. The article explores the possibilities and limitations of this process on the basis of an empirical study, in which native speakers of German were asked to „translate“ sentences into noun phrases. According to the results of the study, the possibilities and limitations of the transformation of verbal sentences into nominal structures depend on the following factors: amount of complements, form of complements and modifiers, formal similarities and differences of verbal complements and nominal modifiers.