Volume 27, Issue 2

This paper presents an analysis of a sample of intentional deviations from the typical stress pattern of German words. These deviations are described as stress shifts in which the main stress is in a different position to the norm. This process is optional, mainly found in media speech and used for emphatic purposes. All stress shifts involve an interchange of primary and secondary stress, thereby demonstrating their sensitivity to a prosodic-similarity constraint. Stress retractions by far outnumber stress advancements, which can be jointly explained by a probabilistic association of the main stress and the word-initial position in language structure and an anticipatory bias in the language production system. Stress shifts show a strong overrepresentation of adjectives because this word class codes evaluative aspects most naturally and it is evaluations that speakers prefer to emphasize. From a social-psychological perspective, stress shifts are claimed to be a means by which speakers may boast their knowledge and, from a rhetorical perspective, a strategy of making the event being talked about more spectacular. Stress shifts are minority patterns in the sense that the constraints on them are so strong that only relatively few lexical items are eligible. This raises the issue of what speakers do with those items which they wish to emphasize but which do not lend themselves readily to stress shifting. Whether they turn to alternative means of expression or whether they leave their intentions unexpressed remains to be determined.

In the field of phonology, the concept of ‘word’ has been well-defined in contemporary linguistics. In morphology and syntax, the different existing theories provide a basis for establishing a ‘word’ as well. In graphematics, too, establishing a concept for ‘word’ might appear simple: A graphematic word is the segment sequence between two spaces. But what does this segment-sequence look like? The essay addresses this question in three steps. It begins by discussing the graphematic syllable. It then explains the principle of writing complex words. In German, this may be the prototypical part of graphematic words. For the non-prototypical part, acronyms, abbreviations, punctuation (hyphen, apostrophe, word-level period) and numbers are discussed. The final section is devoted to the interaction between the different concepts of words (phonological, morphological, syntactic and graphematical), and shows that the graphematic word in German is especially determined by morphological and syntactic features.

The article considers four scenarios along the way human language developed, the neolithic transition from nomadic to agricultural societies, the upper paleolithic revolution when a sudden proliferation of art, tools and complex social organization took place, the emergence of homo sapiens possibly supported by the rise of the vocalization ability, and the emergence of homo ergaster/erectus accompanied with a rapid growth of the brain, and discusses in what respect these different scenarios contribute to the linguistic capacity of modern man. In particular, the thesis offered within the Minimalist Program that the language faculty in the narrow sense is a product of the upper paleolithic revolution is questioned. It is argued, instead, for a different view, namely that early morphology evolved as a reinterpretation of phonological alternations just in time when phonological features were developed, whereas a considerable amount of syntax proper evolved only when the neolithic transition had changed the circumstances of communication. However, the faculty of combining meaningful elements, as well as the faculty of recursion, may well have developed quite earlier at the time of homo erectus .