Volume 31, Issue 2

This study focuses on the forms and functions of the German particle mit in everyday talk-in-interaction. In the first section it is shown that two types of mit can be distinguished for syntactic and semantic reasons. Type one has characteristics of an additive focus particle which is part of the verbal phrase and occurs in the central part of the middle field. Type two forms a syntactic unit with superlatives and indicates that the referent of the superlative phrase does not exclusively have the respective quality to the highest degree. Hence, it can be classified as an inclusive particle. Even though some instances allow for a reading of mit both as an additive particle and an including particle (in these instances, the including reading is usually dominant since the additive reading would affect a part of the informational background), the additive and the including meaning compete if they affect the same constituent. The second section of this article shows how prosodic features, communicative practices and the topical organization of conversation interact in order to disambiguate local uses of mit or to emphasize either an additive or an including reading of mit.

The paper presents a survey of the consequences of persecution and emigration of language scholars during fascism in Germany. As the professionalisation of linguistics was not very advanced at the time, the broader concept of language scholars is used. Thus, the destiny of 275 persecuted persons can be documented, 210 of them victims of racist persecution. Most of those who survived escaped in emigration (the biography of 220 emigrants is documented). Consequences for scholarly development must be differentiated for various disciplines (differing for smaller disciplines, e.g. Oriental philologies, as compared to the larger philologies: Germanic, English, Romance). Although most of those who escaped could continue their scholarly development, some of them even as prominent protagonists – what was specific to the contemporary scientific debates in Germany, that is, the critical reflexion on the state of the art, was not developed further. Thus the investigation of personal fates is embedded in the larger perspective of the development of linguistics from the late 19th to early 20th century.

Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, “Grammatiktheorie”, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Müller’s inspiring exposition of modern grammatical reasoning, which takes into account frameworks as diverse as Categorial Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Minimalism and Construction Grammar (among others!), leads us to an exploration of the validity of the popular claim that grammar theory provides explanations for the human ability to acquire and use linguistic skills. To what extent this claim is justified seems unclear in light of the recent wealth of developments in neighboring fields such as computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, and statistical language modeling. In the first section of the paper, we discuss what we perceive to be a widening gap between the claims to all-embracing explanation in theoretical linguistics and the increasingly disturbing neglect of a vast field of new data and analyses in the above-mentioned related disciplines. Section 2 gives a condensed survey of the contents of Müller’s book and discusses the relationships between the various frameworks. We conclude with sceptical remarks on the book’s preference of breadth over depth, the legacy of traditional grammar theory, and the future perspective of linguistics.