Volume 44, Issue 2

Using elicited experimental data from 35 kindergartners, this article investigates the ability of children aged 3–6 to deal with German ambisyllabic consonants. In this age group – yet without structured tuition in reading and writing, the development of the phonologic system still in progress – both intra- and inter-subject variation appears to be greater than previous studies conducted on school children revealed. It is argued that this variability supports the view of an exemplar-based theory on language acquisition; stable analytic knowledge on this specific syllable structure emerges as a function of age and frequency. Simultaneously, the data suggest a second kind of underlying variation, stemming from the contact of two conflicting typological syllable systems.

This paper is concerned with syntactic and semantic properties of ditransitive constructions in standard and dialectal German. A higher or lower extent of ‘ditransitivity’ can be observed by means of these properties. Canonical ditransitives, for instance, vary by allowing ( geben ‘to give’) or prohibiting ( gönnen ‘to grant’) a contextual ellipsis of the dative object. In addition, whether the proto-patient is either a concrete or an abstract noun can change the ditransitivity of the same construction. Non-canonical ditransitives (which contain e. g. complex predicates, certain APs or PPs that expand the valency of transitive verbs, a so-called ‘free dative’, or a ditransitive adjective) often remain unattended by studies on ditransitives. But none of these patterns differ from canonical geben with respect to their syntactic and semantic properties. Finally, only light verb constructions whose objects are categorically restricted represent the divide between (non-)canonical and idiomatic ditransitives.

The starting point of this paper is the question how the graphematic sentence, i. e. the written sentence, can be defined. The answer seems to be clear: a graphematic sentence begins with a sentence-initial capital letter and is concluded by a sentence-final punctuation mark such as the full stop or the question mark. However, this definition is problematic since it requires an underlying (syntactic) definition of the sentence in general. Yet within linguistics there is no commonly accepted definition of the sentence (cf. section 1). Language users (linguists among them), however, seem to have a clear idea of what a sentence is. In the paper I argue that this seemingly contradictory situation could be explained on the following two assumptions. (a) The widespread clear intuition about the existence of a linguistic category called ‘sentence’ mainly derives from the influence of the written language on concepts of language in general. (b) Yet this influence has never really been taken into consideration for sentence definitions within modern linguistics due to the fact that written language has for long time been neglected as an object of linguistic research (cf. section 2). The main part of the paper (section 3) is concerned with a definition of the graphematic sentence without recourse to syntactic structures. It reveals that in German the graphematic sentence is a clearly recognizable unit within the writing system and therefore seems to be predestined for being the conceptional model for the idea of what a sentence is. Based on the punctuation theory of Bredel (2008, 2011) I argue that punctuation marks do not indicate sentences but rather constitute them. Finally I discuss how the graphematic analysis presented here can constitute the basis for empirical approaches towards a linguistic reconstruction of the widespread idea of what a sentence is (cf. section 4).

The aim of this paper is to analyze the communicative function of idioms and their constituents in the information structure of an utterance. Usually idioms tend to occupy the final position in a sentence, which correlates with their inherent rhematic properties. However, structural transformations such as fronting, passivization and conversion can lead to changes in their communicative status. Among such changes, we single out (a) topicalization or thematization of the fronted sentence constituent, (b) its focusing or emphatic rhematization, (c) focusing of the postponed constituent, or (d) rhematization of the sentence as a whole, etc. In spite of their lexical stability, idioms make use of the possibilities provided by German syntax. This allows them to contribute to the communicative structuring of utterances.