Volume 39, Issue 1

There is much disagreement with respect to the adequate description of the primary local demonstratives in German. This is partly due to the fact that functions of da have been considered which are not properly locative deictic. However, the problem appears to derive first and foremost from regional differences on the one hand and the influence of written language on the other. In day-to-day language there is considerable variation in the use of local demonstratives. Two-level systems predominate: the most widespread is hier – da , but regionally hier – dort or da – dort are also usual, although a complete parallelism between these oppositions is not always present. For the (intended) standard language use, this is the point of departure (real deixis is normally connected to the proximity situation); but through the orientation of spoken language towards written language, in which the local demonstrative dort is preferred to da for reasons of clarity, dort generally comes into play additionally as a variant which is given a higher value.

Case is one of the grammatical categories that pose great challenges to children acquiring German, both in first and second language acquisition. The paper examines the special case of the second language acquisition of case within prepositional phrases (PPs). A prototypical German PP consists of a preposition selecting a determiner phrase (DP) whose case is governed by the prepositional head. One problem is that the case assigned by a preposition and its semantics are not related to each other, while in the case of socalled two-way prepositions, the semantics of the PP and the case within the DP are closely connected. This conflict between arbitrariness and semantically driven case assignment could pose an additional obstacle for learners of German. I have conducted an experiment in which I examined how case within PPs is acquired by 56 primary school children whose first language is not German. My study shows that the children have great difficulties regarding the dative and that the accusative is used instead very often. This overgeneralization decreases with an increase in age.

Both German monolingual children and Turkish bilingual children use pleonastic locatives for a certain period of time but they do so for different reasons, as will be shown in this paper. Constructions like Das Buch ist auf dem Tisch drauf , where the spatial relation is signaled twice – in the preposition auf and in the adverb drauf – are grammatically acceptable but are considered somewhat colloquial. It is therefore not surprising that adults in the picture-description task being reported here make no use of the spatial repetition. With the children things are different: Those Turkish L2 learners who start to acquire German at the age of 3 begin by using a semantically unspecified prepositional head for all topological relations (e.g. * Der Apfel ist in/bei Baum/Schale/Tisch instead of Der Apfel ist am Baum/in der Schale/auf dem Tisch ). Owing to their mother tongue, it takes them quite long to detect the semantic specification in the input. In particular, stressed and post-final elements attract their attention, and not surprisingly they start using the postpositional spatial adverbs and particles to break through the German prepositional system (e.g. * Das Buch ist in/bei Tisch drauf ). Unlike Turkish children, young German native speakers combine these adverbial elements with a full prepositional phrase, but with no functional value. As the data indicate, the pleonastic locative construction appears to be a residue of an earlier developmental stage which involves the splitting of a complex pronominal adverb (e.g. da(d)rauf ) and stranding the prepositional part (e.g. Da ist ein Buch drauf ). The high frequency of sentence final verb particles in the input (often with identical form and transparent spatial meaning) might produce the preserving effect even though meanwhile the full prepositional phrase is used to express a spatial relation. Already at preschool age German children come to recognize the redundancy and finally drop the adverbial element. Turkish children, however, have to rely on the prepositional adverb – as a supportive and stabilizing „function-carrier“ – until they notice that in German it is the preposition that must carry the specific spatial information. This is subsequently transmitted from the postpositional spatial element to the head of the full prepositional phrase.

This paper investigates the distribution of the genitive singular allomorphs - es and - s in modern standard German, in the light of current theories of the mental lexicon. It will be shown, using current electronic corpora, that the preference that native speakers demonstrate for one genitive allomorph over the other is determined by a number of interacting factors: phonological, morphological, semantic and frequency-based, and that this preference should not be seen in terms of a simple two-way opposition but is a more subtle matter of degree. Primarily, the paper will argue that: i) the choice of genitive allomorph in non-derived nouns is determined by the token frequency of that noun; ii) the choice of genitive allomorph on the head of compound words is determined by semantic transparency, so that compound heads showing a clear semantic association with the corresponding free-standing noun mirror the behaviour of that noun with respect to their genitive form (e.g. Hundes ‘dog’ – Blindenhundes ‘guide dog’). By contrast, compounds with more opaque meanings tend to act as independent items with respect to genitive allomorph allocation. It will be argued that such data provide evidence for the wholesale lexical listing of genitive forms in the lexicon, which are related to other members of their (inflectional and derivational) paradigm by lexical connections of varying strength.