Volume 41, Issue 3

This study compares the productivity of word formation patterns involving the affixes - ung, - keit /- igkeit /- heit , - bar and ver -. The comparison is between non-native and native German writers, using the Chamisso corpus and a comparable corpus. The creative use of the German language in non-native literature , a literature of migrant authors who write in German as a foreign language, is widely considered the most prominent feature of this writing. According to critics, this creative use of language is related to the fact that authors switch from the native language to German. Such an assumption is plausible from a linguistic standpoint: empirical studies in language acquisition and in sociolinguistics support the hypothesis that linguistic creativity could consist of an over-use of productive morphological categories. My results reject the hypothesis that the non-native authors differ from German authors in the productivity of the observed morphological categories. This negative result points out that the non-native authors have achieved near-native competence in the use of word formation patterns.

While there is common agreement that “orality” has to be considered a crucial factor in analyzing historical data, it is still an open question how this should be done in a theoretically as well as empirically satisfying manner. In this respect, the paper aims at a comparison of different empirical and theoretical approaches to “ancient orality” in order to determine the factors which have so far prevented an alignment of different perspectives: Taking particular “oral” phenomena as a point of reference, the main thesis of the paper claims that the traditional binary distinction “oral” vs. “written” is neither an absolute concept nor does it adequately account for the complex historical (and present-day) conditions. Instead, it is shown by means of a detailed empirical analysis of different “oral” phenomena that (at least) three different dimensions on two different levels of “orality” have to be taken into account. This leads to a three-dimensional model of “orality” which is discussed concerning its implications with regard to a theory of “ancient orality” and present spoken language.

The paper deals with selected problems of the so-called if-so -clauses from the synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. The syntactic constructions in question encode conditional relations of various types and demonstrate numerous cross-categorial features, primarily in the fields of modality, temporality and verbal aspect. The article presents the interaction of these categorical features in selected old and contemporary Germanic and Slavonic languages (Gothic, Old High German, Middle High German, New High German, Modern English, Russian and Polish), as well as in Latin and Classical Greek, chosen on the basis of typologically or/and genetically relevant criteria. In the sphere of modality-temporality interfaces, languages with and without a formally indicated indirect modality in the protasis are confronted; while in the sphere of aspect-modality convergence, languages with and without overt aspect markers are the main subject of the analysis. Another discussed problem is an analysis of various types of the connection between the protasis and the apodosis and a diachronic explanation of their – as a rule temporal – origins reanalyzed as conditional markers.

In present-day German, the present subjunctive (Konjunktiv I) and the modal verb sollen ‘shall’ are used to mark reported discourse. In this paper, we aim at clarifying the semantic relationship between these two markers. We suggest that they basically pertain to two separate semantic-functional domains, viz. origo-shifting versus evidentiality. While Konjunktiv I is an origo-shifting quotative marker, sollen is a reportive evidential marker. We argue that the proposed basic difference in semantics accounts for the different behavior of these elements in present-day German: e. g. with respect to their distribution over different contexts of use, to complementation patters, to combinatorial potential with certain prepositional phrases, etc. These theoretical observations are corroborated by the results of two small corpus studies: the one analyzing sollen that is embedded under a communicative matrix predicate, and the other focusing on combinatorial regularities with prepositional phrases with nach ‘after’, laut ‘as per’, and zufolge ‘according to’.