Volume 48, Issue 2

In June 2017, a new letter was officially introduced into the German language: the capital eszett <ẞ>. Following a suggestion of the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung (Council for German Orthography), the letter was included in the revised version of the official spelling rules, and also the new 2017 edition of the Duden mentions the capital eszett. The present article investigates the reasons underlying this orthographic change.

Despite their high frequency in present-day language, German proper name compounds have received little attention in the linguistic literature. It has been assumed that this pattern is rather recent, and possibly a loan from English. Focusing on the period between 1600 and 1900, the paper provides evidence against this claim. More specifically, I argue that the development of proper name compounds can only be properly described if proper name compounds that are names themselves (e. g., Martin-Luther-Universität ‘Martin Luther University’) are strictly distinguished from those that are common nouns (e. g., Nilfahrt ‘Nile ride’). It is shown that both types develop differently, and in particular that common noun compounds undergo a functional extension in this period. In this connection the paper also discusses the idea of proper name compounds as competitors of the genitive and it compares proper name compounds and alternative constructions with respect to the concept of the “Nominalklammer” (nominal frame).

This article examines the acquisition of German as the weaker language in the cases of German-Polish bilingual children. Focusing on negation and verb position, phenomena that have frequently been taken as diagnostic when distinguishing between the course of language development characteristic for first (L1) and second language acquisition (L2), we analyse experimental and productive data from six simultaneously bilingual children. Due to the constrained input, German is their weaker language. The results in Forced Choice and Grammaticality Judgements tasks are compared with the results of monolingual children. We show that in the area of negation the acquisition of German as the weaker language resembles L1, and in the area of inversion and verb final position the development of the weaker language is delayed. The striking difference between bilinguals’ results in the experimental vs. productive tasks points to specific processing mechanisms in bilingual language use. In narrative contexts of the production tasks the language of the performance is activated, while the other is inhibited, which leads to a target-like performance. Structural properties of the stronger language tend to be activated, however, in the experimental tasks involving the weaker language, resulting in non-target-like responses.

This paper focusses on case marking in informal Namibian German (so called Namdeutsch ). Whilst the use of nominative and accusative case is stable and similar to Standard German, there is a considerable amount of variation with regard to the dative case. This phenomenon is analysed in detail using corpus and questionnaire data. Multifactorial analyses reveal that several sociolinguistic and grammatical factors have a significant impact on the language use in this particular domain. Subsequently, the results are compared with other extraterritorial varieties of German and various similarities are found. This supports the idea that there are variety/language overarching principles at work.

In this essay I understand school grammar as academic grammar for future teachers. It aims at linguistic awareness, not linguistic knowledge, which is an essential common ground with grammar lessons at school. It is about exciting insights into the structure of language. In the first section, the discourse on school grammar is examined. I will put a focus on the cultivated negative image of school grammar in history and then contrast it with practical expectations of use. Thereafter the essential linguistic foundations are outlined, which have been neglected in school grammar for far too long, being afraid of linguistic theory: valency and constituency. Afterwards, the area of tension between first and second language in terms of school grammar will be explored. Finally, I sketch school grammar as a basis for error correction and evaluation.

Starting out from a critical questioning of Construction Grammar’s basic tenets I am advocating a version of Construction Grammar that should be primarily understood as based on the patterns evinced by grammatical operations. This approach aims for a theory of rule-governed operations over constructions and not for a theory of idiomaticity and non-(or restricted) compositionality.