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Das Adverb jetzt zwischen Zeit- und Gesprächsdeixis

  • Wolfgang Imo
Published/Copyright: May 6, 2010
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Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik
From the journal Volume 38 Issue 1

Abstract

The adverb jetzt is used extremely frequently in everyday spoken language. Usually, jetzt is described as a deictic adverb which activates a concept of temporal proximity (“now”), which is contrasted to some past or future temporal distance (“not now”). Indeed, one can find many instances of such a basic temporal use of jetzt in data of spoken German. Often, however, the functions of jetzt are somewhat more complicated: Sometimes, jetzt is used to refer back in time, in other cases it refers forward, in yet other instances, it refers to some virtual temporal and discourse-structural space within narratives, sometimes, it is a semantically empty discourse marker which is used to structure and partition talk, and finally, there are cases where jetzt can only be described in terms of a conglomerate of several of these meanings and functions. On the basis of a corpus of spoken German (including audio material from the second series of the TV show Big Brother, radio phone-in shows and informal interaction between friends or families) this article aims to give a qualitative and detailed description of the syntactic, prosodic, semantic, functional and sequential features of the different uses of jetzt within this corpus. In a next step, the question is asked which of these features are necessary and sufficient for a full description and finally, an attempt is made to integrate these findings into the descriptive framework of Construction Grammar.


Adresse des Verfassers: Dr. Wolfgang Imo, Germanistisches Institut, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Hindenburgplatz 34, D-48143 Münster. E-Mail:

Online erschienen: 2010-05-06
Erschienen im Druck: 2010-May
Downloaded on 25.1.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/zgl.2010.003/pdf
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