Konvergenz und Divergenz

This study examines the structural argument properties of media communication verbs. These are verbs that relate to situations in which communication takes place by means of a technological medium. The focus is on the question of whether / to which extent new media communication verbs adopted from English have adapted to the argument structures of semantically related verbs in German and Spanish respectively.

Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions.

How are words written in German and English? What features do they share in common, and what are their differences? The book approaches these questions from a morphologic-graphemic perspective. Accordingly, it addresses the graphemic structure of morphemes, and the issues of uniformity (how uniformly is a morpheme represented in writing?) and uniqueness (how distinctly does a spelling refer to one morpheme?).

Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other.

The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar.

The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.

This book provides empirical experimental evidence (including tracking of eye movements) for the contingency of human cognition on the grammar of one’s native language. Using the example of Czech and German, it also demonstrates how prolonged language contact results in grammatical changes and how, in turn, such changes have a profound impact on cognitive, perceptual, and memory abilities.

The concept of frozenness has helped to shape recent lexicographic and phraseological research. The essays in this volume form a part of this current trend and examine discursive aspects of the problematics of frozenness and stability, including grammaticalization, lexicalization, and phraseology. Each essay explores phenomena of frozenness in discourse at the interface between pragmatics and morphology/syntax.

This book describes and compares at different systemic levels the contractions of prepositions and articles in German and Italian, two languages that are representative of divergent grammatical development. The author’s intra and inter lingual analyses consider both diachronic and synchronic aspects and are empirically supported by large-scale quantitative and qualitative corpus investigations.

This volume presents the findings of a European research network on the comparative description of German. The key area of exploration was corpus-assisted comparative research on grammatical variations in the left sentence periphery. The compendium provides insight into topological and information structural aspects of German in comparison to the French, Norwegian, Polish, and Hungarian languages.

The volume covers the development of concurrence in morphological and syntactic A+N naming units such as Gelbfieber (yellow fever) and schwarzer Markt (black market) in German and Dutch since 1700. Using historical case studies, it examines the development of such combinations in view of the principles of construction grammar. In addition, the study also explores potential factors that have fostered divergence between the two languages.

In addition to the canonical expression of the argument structure of verbs in the form of intransitive or transitive constructions with noun or prepositional phrases, arguments can also be structured in diverse ways in complex non-canonical form. Such argument structures show interesting variations, especially in comparative linguistics, as this volume illustrates based on studies of German, Romanian, and English.

This study examines the issue of substantive determination in German and Hungarian from a perspective that contrasts typologies. Starting from the semantic-pragmatic functions of the determinative, the author describes its use in these two languages as an expression of definiteness, indefiniteness, and genericity.

In diesem Buch werden deutsche und englische Satzstrukturen kontrastiv untersucht, und zwar in typologischer Hinsicht. Im Mittelpunkt steht der Valenzaspekt der Satzstruktur: Es werden aber nicht nur die deutschen und englischen Ausdrucksmittel – die einfachen Ergänzungen und die Ergänzungssätze – vorgestellt und kontrastiert, sondern sie werden in einer Korpusanalyse quantifiziert. Es ist das Anliegen dieses Buches, zu einer Typologie der Textrealisierung beizutragen. Hierzu wird ein deutsch-englisches bzw. englisch-deutsches Übersetzungskorpus definiert und ausgewertet. Die beobachteten Kontraste werden im Zusammenhang typologischer Tendenzen und bevorzugter Vertextungsstrategien bewertet. Ziel der Arbeit ist die Überprüfung des einflussreichen typologischen Bildes von John A. Hawkins, das Deutsche sei semantisch transparenter als das Englische. Die Einzelanalysen sind für alle, die sich theoretisch oder praktisch für Übersetzung und Spracherwerb interessieren, von Bedeutung.