Volume 13, Issue 2

The Berber languages of Morocco – regionally distributed differently: Tarifit, Tamazight and Tashelhit – were subjected to a standardization process only at the beginning of the 21st century. The so-called Amazigh emerged as a standard language. The Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe , founded in 2001 specifically for the preservation and promotion of Berber, was given the task of initiating and controlling the standardization process. In 2008, a reference grammar of standard Amazigh was published, which will be examined more closely in the following article with regard to the orthographic specifications for the spelling of nominal units. In doing so, the critical examination of orthography will be conducted in a relatively unconventional manner. The written form of Tarifit used within a Facebook group will be analyzed in order to compare the word spellings with the spelling rules of the standard Amazigh grammar. Tarifit is used extensively in social networks in certain contexts and the preferred writing system is Latin. The French-language grammar description of the standard Amazigh uses for the object language level the so-called Tifinagh. However, this writing system is hardly used in Moroccan society not only due to a lack of acceptance. Likewise, the use of standard Amazigh in society is almost non-existent. Lay transcriptions in social networks can be very informative with regard to word spellings. The grammar description for the standard Amazigh can be criticized from different perspectives and is in urgent need of a linguistically based revision.

Decoding the implicitness of evaluative judgment in compliments (based on the cross-cultural analysis of conversations in male gender-homogeneneous groups). In this paper, the implicit (anti)compliments within male gender-homogeneneous groups are examined in a contrastive way. After reviewing some findings to the implicit compliments, the paper deals with a case study referring to decoding of implicit positive evaluative judgment, which constitutes a primary illocution of the compliment. The following study examines whether there are certain differences and similarities in the frequency, subject matter and phonological design of implicit (anti)compliments in [the] groups of males with different cultural backgrounds. The study also shows which contextualization cues can contribute to the decoding of the negative evaluative statement in implicit anticompliments.

Inspired by Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation, previous research was mostly directed at the interaction of word length and token frequency. Much less is known about the relationship of word length and type frequency, let alone about the differential impact of type and token frequency on word length. These issues are examined on the basis of a non-representative sample of 10 languages. The token frequency analysis reveals that 8 of the 10 languages show a monotonic decrease in frequency with increasing length while 2 languages reveal a unimodal distribution. By contrast, all 10 languages exhibit a rise followed by a monotonic drop of the frequency curve in the type frequency analysis. There appears to be a notable effect of type frequency on the nature of the token frequency distribution: the greater the average length of the words in the lexicon, the higher the probability of a unimodal distribution. Two principles are required to account for these results—a general dispreference for using long words and a language-particular dispreference for short words in the lexicon.