Volume 2026, Issue 84

Previous work on the semiotic landscape of educational institutions (‘schoolscapes’ or ‘educationscapes’) has focused on spatially emplaced texts and semiotic inscriptions (‘signs’) in multilingual contexts, while the interplay between signs and oral communication is less well researched. This paper introduces the term ‘sign ensemble’ and draws on the concept of assemblage to examine the interplay between schoolscape signs and situated school communication, thereby focusing on signs and practices of behavioural regulation. The data originates in a project on the connection between schoolscape signs and the social conditions of secondary schools drawing on a mixed-methods approach. Sign ensembles are multi-part signs that are framed as belonging together and serve a common purpose. A sign ensemble typical of classrooms in this study is the so-called ‘behaviour traffic light’ (‘Verhaltensampel’), i. e. a conglomerate of color-coded symbols, strips, and magnets on a board that is used to evaluate students’ observed behaviour during class. While photographic data enables a social-semiotic analysis of the ‘behaviour traffic light’, interviews with teachers and students allow to reconstruct how the sign ensemble becomes part of a semiotic assemblage that involves people (teachers and students), their verbal and embodied actions, and space (i. e. the classroom). This assemblage determines subsequent actions by participants as well as third parties (such as parents) and contributes to the construction of institutional identities. The study reveals new possibilities for linguistic research into school communication and contributes to a holistic approach to schoolscapes.

The expansion of nominal structures is a linguistic phenomenon that has received increased attention in recent years. A number of corpus-linguistic studies have examined the occurrence of nominal structures in spoken and written academic texts (e. g., Obermayer 2013; Siekmeyer 2013; Schleppegrell 2001) and more recent studies have also analysed the complexity of such structures (e. g., Fischer 2017; Pohl 2017) and discussed differences in the structural complexity of nominal modifiers (e. g., Hennig 2016). The project NomiverSe 1 investigates how students in third, fourth, sixth, and ninth grade transform relative clauses into prenominal modifiers within (in)complete syntactic structures. For example, simple nominal structures in incomplete syntax such as ‘das Mädchen, das glücklich ist’ (‘the girl who is happy’) become ‘das glückliche Mädchen’ (‘the happy girl’), whereas highly-complex modifiers in sentences like ‘Das Buch, das häufig ausgeliehen wird, ist spannend’ (‘The book that is frequently borrowed is exciting’) become ‘Das häufig ausgeliehene Buch ist spannend’ (‘The frequently borrowed book is exciting’). A total of 196 students participated in the present study. The study provides new insights into linguistic development and the handling of complex nominal structures. Results show that younger students are less proficient at transforming relative clauses into prenominal modifiers. Simple structures are mastered early, but complex ones stay challenging, showing steady growth in syntactic and lexical skills.

This paper investigates the use of gender-inclusive language on 42 municipal websites from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and South Tyrol between 2022 and 2024. Based on a corpus of two key subpages of each city, namely those that provide information on how change one’s address and online job postings, the study shows that the choice of personal nouns is shaped by both regional and text-specific factors. Administrative texts tend to favor gender-neutral forms such as epicene nouns (e. g. Person, Mensch ). In contrast, job advertisements which are shaped by legal frameworks and have persuasive intent, show a strong preference for explicit gender-inclusive forms, in particular those using non-binary gender symbols such as the asterisk ( Krankenpfleger*innen ) or the colon ( Sachbearbeiter:in ). Regional variation is most evident on pages providing administrative information: Austrian and South Tyrolean cities are more likely to use gender symbols than German or Swiss cities. In Germany, generic masculine forms are the second most common choice after gender-neutral forms, whereas binary pair forms are most prevalent in Switzerland. Despite this variation, patterns of language use have remained relatively stable over the three years analysed. These findings indicate that the flexible, context- and genre-sensitive use of person references is already widespread in public communication within the pluricentric German-speaking area.

This article aims to shed light on the stereotypes of ‘gay’ nasalization by analysing metapragmatic utterances about (perceived) nasality. The data consists of two sub-corpora compiled from existing German corpus resources (SC I 444 records, 1605–1927 & SC II 3,266 records, 1949–2023), of which records are content-analytically categorized to identify associations with nasalization. This approach also allows for broader analyses of metapragmatic stereotypes of nasalization. The results shows that nasalization is primarily associated with (1) the characteristics of arrogance, distinguishedness and affectation, (2) the languages French and English and Austrian and Northern German varieties of German as well as (3) nobility, clergy, teachers and gays. Furthermore, these associations often occur in conjunction with each other. Why nasalization is associated with the stereotype of an affectatious flamboyant gay can at least in part be explained by the concept of indirect indexicality. In addition, the data show that this association represents a metapragmatic stereotype which can be discriminatory.

This paper investigates multiple language learners’ metalinguistic awareness at the lower secondary level in German schools in South Tyrol and its impact on decoding and transfer strategies when confronted with an unfamiliar linguistic system. Based on findings from trilingual test procedures used to assess participants’ metalinguistic competences, the study investigates the effects of different metalinguistic competence levels on such strategies. The results indicate that learners with higher metalinguistic mean scores demonstrated better decoding practices and transfer abilities, and were more frequently able to decode at a level that requires a high degree of awareness (that is, at the level of understanding) than peers with lower mean scores. High-scoring learners furthermore showed enhanced ability to analyze target structures, improved capacity for crosslinguistic consultations, and reduced reliance on avoidance strategies during the decoding process. Such findings emphasize the importance of fostering meta- and crosslinguistic competences to facilitate effective transfer strategies, which in turn have a catalytic effect on the development of the multilingual system as a whole. They also expose the need to move beyond the still prevailing notions of separate language learning processes for the learning of multiple languages and the monolingual habitus in multilingual instructional settings.