Volume 8, Issue 1 -

The present paper is about types of seeming subordination (i.e. subordination by form), which in fact bears all distributional assets of insubordination. Yet, such insubordinate subordination is characterized by sentential autonomy in terms of illocutive force (i.e., it is not only presupposed as subordinates usually are). It will be shown that a reliable diagnostic is provided by the selection of modal particles in the narrow sense, which German and Dutch excel in. It will be illustrated that even the property of matrix V2 as opposed to subordinate Vfinal, otherwise a reliable diagnostic in German and Dutch, are not sufficient conditions for subordination vs. matrix status, sentential presupposition vs. assertive status, and independent (autonomous) illocutive force vs. dependent (inherited) illocutive force. Modal particles play a major diagnostic role in this categorial dichotomy. It will be argued that since formal subordination is an insufficient condition for the separation of formal and notional independence of sentential autonomy the theory of sentence types will have fundamentally to be modified with the main asset of a thorough notional rather than formal definition of sentential autonomy.

The present work is an attempt to develop a database of hedges to study the usage and effects of hedges in women writings. ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ , a work of eighteenth century British-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is compared with a 1970 book ‘The Female Eunuch’ by Germaine Greer . To exploit the functions of linguistic devices of hedges, frequently used hedges in most cited articles are categorized on the basis of the paradigms proposed by Hyland and Yu. Frequencies of various hedges are counted through a computer program written in ‘C’ language. Every hedge category is given a weight and the highest weight category is identified through the program in the selected corpus. The research further points out the validation of the usage of hedges in the works of non-fictional literature.

In recent years, both the availability of electronic resources (such as the BNC and the DWDS) and the possibility of compiling highly specialised large corpora (e.g. on the same topic, interaction type or communicative event) together with the development of ever more sophisticated corpus-linguistic tools, have opened new horizons in the study of language use and, consequently, in lexicography, translation and the teaching and learning of second/foreign languages. However, working with huge amounts of data and/or information remains a challenging issue, and search strategies are needed to cope more effectively with linguistic phenomena such as intralinguistic and interlinguistic variation in language use and polyfunctionality, which appear to be the rule rather than the exception in natural languages, not only in everyday language but in LSP communication, too. This paper will focus on different contextualization strategies. The examples offered, drawn from highly specialized subcorpora on the one hand and from very large general language corpora on the other, will illustrate once more the impact of variables such as domain, topic, text type etc., which can be observed even in the case of core vocabulary items. Furthermore it will discuss the potential offered by concgrams, which allow us to cope with many of the difficulties described above.

Email flooding, deleting emails without reading them – both common parts of our daily workflows. Emails need to motivate their recipients to read them and of course, the number of emails we receive every day play a crucial role. The present paper shall not only describe how the email communication between the members of a research project could be enhanced, but also show how helpful emails are for implementing strategic communication optimisation. By involving the project members as probands in a study based on AMASA (Research project “Accessing Medicines in Africa and South Asia”) emails for developing a restructuring of the internal communication, the process of communication optimisation was accepted by the project members and the strategic superiour aims could be met.