Volume 9, Issue 1 -

Teaching materials in German lessons at primary level, which are intended to guide or support the acquisition of written language, have different concepts. As part of a nationwide survey, between 2013 and 2015, the question was asked about the textbooks used in German lessons, and especially about the use of an initial sound table. The evaluation focuses on the distribution of syllabic-oriented textbooks and the use of initial sound tables. It can be seen that the nationwide distribution shows regional tendencies. Follow-up surveys and a correlation with spelling and reading at later points in time of the cohorts collected can provide possible indications as to how learn-effective textbooks could be.

Adnominals of different types in the texts of 16 popular modern Russian authors were analyzed to examine gender based differences. The study was conducted with the help of discriminant analysis which revealed considerable differences in female and male authors’ adnominal styles and allowed to build a discriminant model of several types of adnominals.

The present paper discusses the occurrence, structure, and complexity of the postmodifier in the Nigerian English noun phrase (NP) showing tendencies for structural simplification. It also compares its findings with patterns in British, Ghanaian, Singaporean, Honk Kong varieties. The paper shows how variables representing syntactic function, register, and weight shed light on specific contexts where we might or might not find (1) NP with or without a postmodifier (2) a clausal or phrasal postmodifier, and (3) a simple or a complex postmodifier. In addition, the paper shows that the extent of variation among different varieties of English is dependent on variables crucial to the construction choices being investigated. For instance, in (1), a postmodifier is realised while no postmodifier is realised in (2). (1) My car which I just bought last week has been stolen, and (2) My car has been stolen.The NP in (1) is structurally complex because it realises the clausal type of post modifier, ‘which I just bought last week’. Meanwhile in (2), the NP (the car) lacks a postmodifier. In other words, the occurrence viz-a-viz non-occurrence of a postmodifier contributes to the overall structural and semantic complexity of the entire noun phrases, irrespective of the syntactic positions of the NP. Quantitative analyses of 8897 NPs indicate that in Nigerian NPs, a postmodifier is more unlikely to occur (61 %) than not (39 %). Further analyses show that prepositional phrase (57 %), rather than clause (32 %) or adjective (9 %) or adverbials (2 %), is the most preferred structural postmodifier type. It is also shown that realised postmodifiers are more likely to be structured in two-to-four words (51 %) than four-words above. As for the predictive strength of variables studied, syntactic function is found to edge register in asserting influence and explaining different scenarios and contexts where we might or might not find a postmodifier, together with its structural type and weight. In other words, register, which is reputed as a significant indicator of structural variation (Biber, 2007; De Haan, Pieter. 1993. Sentence Length in Running Text. In Souter, C. & E. Atwell (), Corpus-Based Computational Linguistics , 147–161. Amsterdam: Rodopi; Schilk and Schaub, 2016) is outweighed by syntactic function. The study further attests that significant structural simplification is largely present in the postmodifier structure of the Nigerian English noun phrase.

In physics, the spread of particles such as atoms is called diffusion. The same term is employed in linguistics to describe the spread of language features or languages as a whole. In this paper, we investigate how models for physical diffusion can be transferred to linguistics to study language spread. We review the different ways of describing physical diffusion and then look at two types of models to study language spread. By examining the differences and similarities between speakers, languages and atoms, we show that it is important to be clear about what is being modelled: languages or speakers, as these are quite different but cannot be completely separated—languages cannot exist without speakers and vice versa.

The article focuses on analysing activity in the selected sonnets of the Czech and Russian nineteenth-century literatures (100 poems per each). Busemann Coefficient (Q) is counted for the samples, and the individual authors are tested on statistical significance by means of the nonparametric Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon test. Another product of the research is a scatter plot, where the counts of the significant MWW test values for the poets and their average Q’s are compared; these figures are clustered according to the k-means method, and interpretations are formulated on the basis of the groupings. Both microanalyses penetrating into an author’s production, and literary-movement investigations are provided, so as to make the research of use for literary criticism, too. Finally, two ways of comparing the Czech and Russian data are sketched, with the outcomes being commented upon.