Volume 32, Issue 1

The paper studies how the German connectives also and dann are used as displays of understanding in talk-in-interaction. It is shown that the use of also at turn-beginnings in pre-front-field position is a routine practice to explicate implicit meanings of the prior turn of the partner, which is presented for confirmation. Also thus indexes that explicated meanings are taken to be intersubjective, i.e. part of the interlocutors’ common ground. Turn-initial dann (in front-field position), in contrast, is routinely used to (a) index the formulation of a unilateral inference from the partner’s prior turn which is not claimed to have already been communicated by the partner, and is (b) used to preface different kinds of next actions which are framed as being a consequence from the preceding action of the partner. Drawing on data from four genres of talkin- interaction (conversation, psychotherapy, doctor-patient interaction, broadcasted talk shows), the paper discusses how functions of also and dann are related to their positions concerning turn-construction and topological fields, prosodic design, collocations, sequential structures and participation frameworks of the interaction.

The paper claims that a marriage of the Dependency Grammar (DG) understanding of word and sentence structure with the axioms of Construction Grammar is possible and desirable. The catena unit – the validity of which has been established in syntax – is extended to morphosyntax. In syntax, a word catena is defined as a word or a combination of words that is continuous with respect to dominance. This definition is extended to morphosyntax, where a morph catena is defined analogously as a morph or a combination of morphs that is continuous with respect to dominance. The validity and utility of the catena concept for construction grammars is demonstrated in a particular area, namely regarding the functional meanings expressed by periphrastic verb chains (e.g. modality, aspect, and voice). The morph combinations (= the constructs) that express these functional meanings form morph catenae.

This paper analyzes the non-standard use of the apostrophe in modern German texts. Traditionally, it is assumed that the apostrophe has a purely phonographic function in German, even though the first examples of non-phonographic apostrophes date back to the 17 th century. Still today, spellings with non-phonographic apostrophes, such as die Pizza’s , are considered as mistakes or misspellings. However, the in-depth analysis of these spellings reveals that the vast majority of non-phonographic apostrophes are not used at haphazard. They rather indicate information about the morphological structure of words: they either mark the right border of their left context, the left border of their right context or the morphological border as such. Interestingly, the number of morphologically motivated spellings has increased considerably during the last decades. This can be explained by an extension of possible contexts. In this paper, I argue that the morphographic apostrophe spreads from a prototypical construction, namely the s -genitive of person names, to other contexts, such as nominal plural or denominal adverbs. I furthermore illustrate that both the left and the right context of the apostrophe may serve as a starting point for the propagation of the morphographic apostrophe.