Volume 36, Issue 1

The system of gender represents one of the greatest problems for learners of German as a foreign language, because it seems to be arbitrary as far as suffixless simple words are concerned. Leiss (1997) showed that the system of gender once was semantically motivated and was available in a complete Indoeuropean paradigm. In Old High German this system is still available in numerous lemmata with double- and triple-gender, but first tendencies of dissolving are recognizable. Following this idea it can be shown that predictability for a certain gender increases, if phonological markers are considered in addition to the semantic ones. The amount of coda consonants and their quality seem to be particularly relevant for fixing the masculine, feminine or neuter gender. In New High German too a huge amount of semantical characteristics exists which allows to predict the gender; but it can be shown that in a lot of cases the rate of predictability increases in a significant way when semantical charactaristics are combined with those phonological marks which are relevant already in Old High German. Nevertheless a small amount of words (especially feminines) remains which is arbitrary. The final didactical proposal for teaching German as a foreign language are based on these results.

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared idiomatic sentences and literal sentences that comprised the same verb. The German perfect tense is of particular interest here, since the verb (i.e. the past participle) is always cast in sentence-final position. This allowed us to examine associations with the verb immediately after its presentation. We compared response times for associations with the literal meaning of the verb, with the figurative meaning of the phrase, or for unassociated nouns. Even though the idiomatic sentences were highly predictable, our results showed that not only associations with the figurative meaning but also associations with the literal verb meaning were activated. This contrasts with the configuration hypothesis (Cacciari/Tabossi 1988) assuming that literal associations should not be activated in idiomatically biased sentences. We argue that the literal verb meaning is essential in both figurative and non-figurative language and present a model that integrates our findings.

This article gives an overview of some general, but also controversal gender features generally accepted by the typological literature in describing gender languages. I pursue a contrastive typological strategy as my methodological principle by applying the typological connections to “unshakable” categorisations of the individual language (based on grammatical traditions) in order to test their stability. During the work I discuss these controversal gender parameters and their application to the German nominal gender system. I do not claim to supply proof for a radically new gender theory for German on the basis of this analysis, but rather I would like to show how these typological classifications and definitions show traditional grammatical categorisations of German in a different light.

How many inflectional classes displays the German substantive? As basic as this question may be, a satisfactory answer is still lacking. In this paper, the question will be tackled again, taking into consideration the contribution provided by several recent theoretical approaches to an adequate description and comprehension of the German inflectional system. On the other hand, the intricacies of the German plural constitute an optimal test bed to verify the empirical adequacy of recent theoretical thinking on language.

German Kluft ‘dress, uniform, working clothes’ looks Germanic but is supposed to derive (via Yiddish) from a Hebrew word meaning ‘peel’. Ten pertinent hypotheses are discussed and rejected – mainly on phonological grounds. On the basis of Kluft and the older occurrences klabot and claffot , it is concluded that we should look for a Hebrew “word”{q/k}-ǝ-l-ā-{v/w}-{o/ō}-{ṭ/ð} and that two dialects of medieval Judeo-German must be kept apart: Rhinelandic ( klabot, Claffot, Klaft } and “Danubelandic” ( Kluft, Kloft ). This word is interpreted as a Hebrew syntactic compound kǝlī + ʕāvōð ‘working clothes’, with kǝlī ‘instrument, clothes’.