Volume 38, Issue 1

Two main functions are attested for the apostrophe in German: the substitution of omitted letters (‘phonographic apostrophe’) as opposed to the indication of morpheme boundaries (‘morphographic apostrophe’). While the first type of use is in accordance with the orthographical norm, the second one is not. Based on a corpus study of a total of more than 350 million word forms, the distribution of the apostrophe in a specific graphemic environment, namely before <s>, will be investigated. It will be shown that 10–20% of all apostrophes are used in case of genitive or plural formation. Furthermore, a detailed context analysis will reveal an interdependency between the different types of apostrophe and text type.

The adverb jetzt is used extremely frequently in everyday spoken language. Usually, jetzt is described as a deictic adverb which activates a concept of temporal proximity (“now”), which is contrasted to some past or future temporal distance (“not now”). Indeed, one can find many instances of such a basic temporal use of jetzt in data of spoken German. Often, however, the functions of jetzt are somewhat more complicated: Sometimes, jetzt is used to refer back in time, in other cases it refers forward, in yet other instances, it refers to some virtual temporal and discourse-structural space within narratives, sometimes, it is a semantically empty discourse marker which is used to structure and partition talk, and finally, there are cases where jetzt can only be described in terms of a conglomerate of several of these meanings and functions. On the basis of a corpus of spoken German (including audio material from the second series of the TV show Big Brother, radio phone-in shows and informal interaction between friends or families) this article aims to give a qualitative and detailed description of the syntactic, prosodic, semantic, functional and sequential features of the different uses of jetzt within this corpus. In a next step, the question is asked which of these features are necessary and sufficient for a full description and finally, an attempt is made to integrate these findings into the descriptive framework of Construction Grammar .

The paper deals with the question what kind of vocabulary writers use, when they are asked to report about their activities during the writing process. The main task was to examine which of their different activities are denoted by single expressions (words) and which of them are not denoted at all. On the basis of interviews with researchers and university students it could be shown that there are a lot of activities which could be denoted by single words (e.g. the activity ‘revising’ can be denoted by the German word ändern ), while there are a lot of other activities which were never denoted (e.g. the activity ‘producing the idea of a sentence to be written’). The former ones differ from the latter ones in that they can be perceived physically, and that the objects involved in these activities have solid contours, i.e. that they are organized as a gestalt, while, on the other hand, features of this kind are absent in the activities which could not be denoted. All the expressions that occurred in my corpus are listed in the appendix of this paper.

The paper presents a new analysis of a certain type of use of proper names that appears particularly widespread in German (as well as in French or Spanish, but only marginally in English). While proper names are generally regarded as being inherently definite, in German one frequently finds proper names preceded by the in definite article. Indefinite proper names differ in their semantic and syntactic properties from ordinary proper names (= PN). I distinguish two main types: (i) the appellative type introduces sets of objects that stand in a relation to the bearer of the PN and are described by predicates of the type called ‘PN’, is related to PN or has typical properties of PN; (ii) the subindividual type introduces entities that are not individuals by themselves, but depend on the bearer of the PN. I distinguish two subtypes: stages and manifestations. The relation between stages or manifestations and the bearer of the proper name is reconstructed by Carlson's (Reference to Kinds in English, Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1977) instantiation relation. Both main types differ in their semantics as well as in their syntax and therefore raise interesting questions for the pragmatics-semantics-syntax interface.