Volume 49, Issue 2

This article investigates the inflection of the German indefinite pronouns jemand and niemand in the accusative and dative. The pronouns are used both with inflectional suffix ( jemanden/jemandem, niemanden/niemandem ) and without ( jemand, niemand ) and are thus an example of current variation in contemporary German. The grammars take an unusually liberal stance and describe both forms as correct, partially even with preference to the uninflected form. A corpus study which examines conceptually written data of the DeReKo (German reference corpus) and conceptually oral data of the DECOW16B (German web corpus), shows that over 90 % of occurrences are inflected. But almost 10 % of uninflected forms show that these formations are no arbitrary errors either. To find out what influences the presence or absence of the inflectional ending, a binary logistic regression model was calculated. The following factors proved to be significant influencing factors for inflection: the degree of formality (DeReKo vs. DECOW16B), the lexeme ( jemand vs. niemand ), the case (acc vs. dat), government by preposition vs. government by verb and the following nominalized adjective ( jemand anderen ). With regard to the different inflectional suffixes, the frequent use of -en in the dative stood out in particular. Although this form is classified as erroneous in all grammars, almost 30 % of the dative occurrences in informal DECOW16B data are formed in this way.

Using the example of newspaper headlines, this paper develops a speech-act theoretic approach to aspects of meaning that can be communicated through the use of typographic means. After considering, more generally, the relationship between speech act theory and writing, analogies between prosody and typography are discussed and the claim is developed that typographic means, just as prosodic means, may function as illocutionary force indicating devices. Using Gallmann’s (1985) system of graphic means, newspaper headlines are defined, more specifically, as typographic objects indicating the (meta-textual) illocution type of an announcement of the text topic. Finally, the relationship between the grammatically determined illocution of a (sentential) headline and its typographically determined meta-textual illocution is modeled, on the basis of Searle’s (1982b) account of fictional speech acts, as an interplay of „vertical“ and „horizontal“ rules. The paper closes with a discussion of the more general question whether typographic acts are speech acts.

This empirically oriented article focuses on uses of the pronoun “wir” (‘we’) in medical interaction – more precisely, in oncological consultations. After a brief presentation of major research on the 1st person plural pronoun in German, I will – based on methods of Interactional Linguistics – analyze interactional uses of this deictic pronoun in institutional doctor-patient conversations. This article aims at contributing to research of how grammar is used in response to local interactional needs within social interaction (Auer/Pfänder 2011). As the data show, participants in these institutional settings make use of various types of “wir” – beyond the prototypical forms of usage (a) “self and person addressed”; (b) “self and person or persons spoken of” and (c) “self, person or persons addressed, and person or persons spoken of” (Boas 1911: 39). These “alternative”, non-prototypical uses of “wir”, which partly override the “residual semanticity” (Silverstein 1976: 47), are found to be related to the way in which they are embedded within the particular “social field” (Hanks 2005: 18). Thus, the indexical anchoring of “wir” proves to be rather flexible and responsive to interactional contingencies.

First linguistic studies have paid attention to the influence of the current corona pandemic on language use in the German media coverage. They have revealed, amongst other things, that compounds beginning with corona are very productive and frequent. Against this background, the questions arise how frequent these compounds de facto are, what their morphological and graphematic characteristics look like, which second constituents can be observed, which semantic relations between the constituents exist and what their referents are. However, not only people being able to read texts in standard language need information concerning the pandemic; individuals lacking this capacity also need to know which rules apply to public life and social interaction. Therefore, information on the corona pandemic is also available in German Easy Language. But translators are faced with several dilemmas regarding the translation of compounds into Easy Language. It is thus an open question whether compounds beginning with corona , recently observed in the media coverage in standard language, also occur in the media coverage in Easy Language and, if present, what their characteristics are in comparison to the relevant compounds in standard language. An additional question is how the referents of compounds beginning with corona in standard language are designated in Easy Language in those cases where no comparable compound beginning with corona is used for this purpose. The present study uses a corpus linguistic approach to address these questions.

Empirical and theoretical arguments are presented against a framesemantic grounding of construction grammar and thus against a holistic unification of meaning and world knowledge. A modular conception is the basis of the interplay between construction and projection in Goldberg (1995). Goldberg’s attempt to include frame semantics is at odds with this foundation and must be considered a failure. The same is true for the continuation by Boas (2003). The argumentation is supplemented, among other things, by the reference to the contrast of a perceptual system and a linguistic system of cognition in cognitive psychology and by the necessity to take a modular concept as a basis in the area of syntactic-semantic ambiguity of sentences.

The global outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 changed the world in many ways. Language reflects these changes at various levels. The article considers the linguistic effects of the pandemic with humorous potential: various types of puns, the jocular exploitation of the polysemy of corona , and playful components of contemporary trending words. As a result, not only do portmanteaus and compounds prove to be particularly prone to entertain, but it is also shown that the various forms of word play generally depend on ludic remotivation, a kind of remotivation which is finally situated and defined between the scholarly and the folk etymological type.