Reihe Germanistische Linguistik

German punctuation marks are considered to be a cohesive system in which every symbol is unambiguous, consistent, and distinct: a symbol has one function, not several; it always fulfills this function, and it cannot be replaced by any other symbols. This volume examines the punctuation symbols in the corpus under these premises and describes the respective functions of the symbols "in competition" with other punctuation marks.

This empirical study (N=657) compares how commas are integrated into a one’s own texts while writing and how they are inserted into a text written by someone else. The study reveals that integrating commas into one’s own texts only loosely corresponds to the insertion of commas into someone else’s texts. Moreover, the study shows in completely new depth what linguistic factors influence the difficulty of comma use for writers.

In German, there are nominal compounds with identical constituents (ICCs). This study is the first to provide comprehensive data on the formal and functional properties of ICCs and, building on this, a theoretical discussion in which these formations are divided into subtypes, allocated to the processes of composition and reduplication, and presented within the scope of pertinent compound theories.

The book is devoted to word-formation in written and spoken German. Corpus analyses trace diamedial usage patterns and functions of word formations in single texts, text complexes, text types as well as in linguistic interaction. From a theoretical point of view, the study draws on textual and interactional linguistic approaches as well as cognitive semantic and constructional grammatical approaches.

Since it was coined in 1908, the term schizophrenia has undergone a remarkable transformation. As well as being a medical diagnosis, the term is now also used to describe contradictory situations and as an everyday insult. This study traces the term’s evolution over more than 100 years from a linguistic and historical perspective, providing an empirical foundation for contemporary psychiatric debates about the “abolition of schizophrenia.”

One of the reasons for the social significance of pop-cultural formats like TV series is how they are communicatively processed in interactions. This book uses video recordings of conversations between students about series to develop an analytical model that allows researchers to investigate community-forming activities and knowledge construction, and to relate them to the media and aesthetic resources of series for practices of positioning.

Toponomy has a long tradition but has been marginalised in the field of German linguistics in recent decades. This volume shows that toponyms provide great potential for new insights in a number of research fields, develops innovative research questions and methods, and sounds out the intersections between linguistic toponomy and relevant neighbouring disciplines.

Prototype, schema and construction are three central concepts that can be used to model mental representations of grammatical structures and relations within the frame of functional-cognitive grammar theories. This volume reviews these concepts using new linguistics analyses of the morphology and syntax of the German language from applied disciplines, taking into consideration a wide methodological spectrum.

Why are linguistic skills and educational success so intertwined with the parental home? What role do debate and explanation play in lessons, the family and the peer group for the development of different opportunities to participate? This volume examines various discursive acquisition contexts for children of secondary school age in terms of how they meet school requirements by looking at three major empirical studies.

Witch trial protocols are important written witnesses to the early modern period. The examination of such protocols as a language-history corpus requires an interdisciplinary approach, given the special context of their creation. Against this backdrop, this volume seeks to illustrate the potential offered by witch trial protocols as a historical corpus for conducting studies in corpus linguistics, graphematics, and morphosyntax.

This extensive research report on language acquisition focuses specifically on case acquisition. It presents the findings of a longitudinal study that examined the development of case marking in Russian and German in simultaneously and successively bilingual Russian-German speaking four- to five-and-a-half-year-old preschool children with and without language development problems.

This study suggests a new definition of the highly disputed class of noun-verb combinations. The new approach offered here does not begin, as before, with the verb, but rather, examines the semantic and pragmatic properties of the noun-verb construction as a whole. Another important aim is to explain the status of noun-verb combinations in the transitional realm between lexicon and grammar, and between regularity and irregularity.

In studying language usage in politics, this collection of essays amplifies the earlier methodological focus in German linguistics on discursive, lexical, and pragmatic analysis to include grammatical, cultural, and dialectological perspectives. It also takes into account research from English and Romance studies.

Expressivity refers to a dimension of meaning that is difficult to grasp either theoretically or descriptively. This volume concentrates on the analysis of expressive phenomena in German from various perspectives and at different levels of linguistic description. Based on empirical-descriptive studies, it develops different theoretical and methodical paths to access the phenomenon.

This empirical sociolinguistic study of written language skills examines persuasive letters written by fifth-graders. Based on extensive data from the FUnDuS Project, it integrates resource-based variables related to text (argumentation structure), family (socioeconomic status), and individual (native language, writing experience) to develop four profiles of written language skills.

Little is known about the conditions that led to German-Swiss diglossia. Based on public discourse about Swiss German, the study shows that with respect to the history of language awareness, today’s typical bilingualism in Swiss German and standard German became consolidated in the 19^th century in close relation to societal processes. The study is a major contribution to the linguistic history of German-speaking Switzerland.

The genitive marker -s of strong masculine and neuter nouns is sometimes omitted in German (e.g. des Tsunami/Tsunamis). Based on comprehensive corpus studies, this book describes and explains this variability, comparing it to related phenomena (such as the plurals of loan words). Building on these findings, it examines the theoretical implications of these phenomena – for example, in connection with the system of German declension classes.

Linguistic cultural analysis is a fairly new branch of linguistic research that has seen increasing recognition in recent years. The seventeen contributions in this volume present the field’s latest scholarship while developing perspectives for its future.

Adjectives are defined grammatically by their primary attributive function; pragmatically, they shift between evaluation and description, and in adjective acquisition, the speaker has to overcome a space between a primary interactional relationship and progressive conceptualization. This volume aims at combining a presentation of grammatical and pragmatic aspects of the adjective along with problems of adjective acquisition.

This study investigates museum exhibitions as multimodal communication offerings, of which texts and exhibits are just as much a part as exhibition architecture and design. It reconstructs the communicative potential of exhibitions from a text-linguistic and semiotic perspective before using conversation analysis to examine how visitors use exhibitions to construct knowledge about the exhibition topic.

The study uses the methodology of sociocultural construction grammar to trace the linguistic development of Middle Low German. Using historical legal texts as an example, it describes and explains the development and transformation of function word constructions. These developments are understood as socio-genetic processes that contribute to differentiating the communal “constructicon” of legal writers.

Do teachers of German and biology shift the ways they talk to students between primary and secondary school, increasing their emphasis on conceptual literacy? Do they employ linguistic interactional tools in their teaching to help their students acquire relevant vocabulary? This video study focuses on teacher talk across four school grades and two curriculum subjects.

This study examines the empirical differences between children with strong and weak language skills in the area of written language acquisition. While learning age has been extensively studied by researchers as the critical factor in variation between individuals, this study also considers global language competence. In conducting the study, the author used standardized language level measurements, psychological tests, and questionnaires.

The study begins from two premises not previously considered together: that written communication represents a social reality sui generis, and that this social reality is constituted in the medium of writing. The authors invoke a new understanding of the concept of readability as a fundamental condition for communication with and through writing, and elaborate its theoretical and empirical implications.

Farewells are a universal element of human experience, but their situational expressions and communicative structures are highly variable. In this history of leave-taking, Juliane Schröter shows how various forms of leave-taking changed during the 19^th and 20^th centuries and the ways these changes are linked to other cultural transformations.

The notion of a 'language of immediacy and language of distance' by Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher has been widely applied since its initial publication in 1985, especially in the field of German Linguistics. This edited volume documents the approach's discussion in the areas of Variational Linguistics, Language History and Media Theory. Also, the book provides theorectical explanations as to why the concept continues to be so successful.

This study examines the function and acquisition of German capitalization. It aims to generalize previous theoretical approaches to develop an integrated model. The empirical portion investigates performance data from approx. 5,700 subjects, extending the findings into an acquisition model. Using neural network simulations, it differentiates between types of learners and offers evidence for qualitative shifts in learning strategy.

The book addresses previously little-known forms of the German participial attribute (PA), which is from a verbal complex (= complex PA) rather than from a verb. It describes and examines different types of complex PAs in terms of their frequency of use and acceptability. The heart of the work is an exemplary determination of the systemic status of a grammatical structure based on the Type PII + habend.

This is the first study devoted exclusively to the typically overlooked non-sentential usage form of the “postfield” (Nachfeld) in German. The essays present findings from empirical studies and examine theoretical aspects related to syntax, information structure, stylistics/pragmatics, and language acquisition. They address written as well as spoken language from both synchronic and diachronic viewpoints.

What is to be done with the verb? Parts of speech, and the verb in particular, have always been a key focus of school grammar instruction, even though there has never been a canonical analysis of the German verb in academic linguistics or language didactics. This compendium suggests productive approaches for exploiting the grammatical and didactic potential of the verb.

Are modal particles grammatical signs? This study investigates whether the modal particle meets the two key criteria for classifying it as a grammatical element. Do all modal particles have a relational function? And do they constitute a grammatical paradigm? Describing this paradigm lends insight into the distribution and significance of specific particles and the internal structure of this part of speech.

Until now, researchers in linguistics and writing development have devoted little attention to the junction as a grammatical means to link the propositions in a text. In this representative corpus study, junctional analyses use an expanded model of junctions to examine writing development, thereby opening up new prospects for research in grammar and writing development.

The demarcation between adjectives and adverbs has been a matter of ongoing controversy in German linguistics. This book starts by presenting traditional options for categorizing words such as schnell [quick/ly] and sofort [immediate/ly]. Building on this history, it proposes a model of parts of speech that integrates lexicography and word formation research to include adjective-adverb connections in addition to strict categorization.

According to Freud, psychotherapy is “nothing more than an exchange of words.” This linguistic study explores how it is that such an exchange can, by itself, cure psychological illnesses, and examines key moments of actual therapeutic discourse. The detailed analyses of the dialogues reconstruct how mental structures are altered through language, thereby expanding our overall understanding of the relationship between language and psyche.

The compendium offers an up-to-date picture of international research on language didactics. The aim is to re-examine the importance of grammar in the university training of future teachers by confronting established assumptions about working with grammar and language instruction in primary schools with newer concepts emerging from linguistic research.

For a number of years, there has been concernin Germany about the “decline of language”. From a linguistic perspective, this hypothesis cannot be substantiated. Public debate, however, does raise some new questions about the stability and mutability of language norms. This volume undertakes a linguistic examination of the relationship between empiricism and standards in various forms and domains of communication.

The articles in this volume provide an insight into the richness of narrative. In the process they focus on two main areas: oral narrative as part of everyday interaction and the acquisition of narrative abilities as part of more comprehensive discursive competencies. From a linguistic perspective, the variance of the narrative form also points to the esthetic dimensions of literary narrative. The concept of this volume is derived from the work of Uta Quasthoff, whose 65th birthday prompted its creation and publication.

The theory of communication series is suggested as an alternative to discourse linguistics because it focuses not only on mass communications with reference to a thematic context, but examines every social communication including interpersonal communication between two persons or within a small group. Each element of communication is subject to three areas of level: (1) speech act and speech act sequences; (2) communication (conversations, text-based communication); (3) series as purpose-constituted consequences of communication. Series can be recursively embedded, extending as far as society-related and international series. Series are diachronic quantities with evolutionary levels.

This volume gives an up-to-date view of international research on the practice and theory of language teaching. It shows the relevance of grammar research to the demands of language teaching today, set between German lessons, teacher training and study of the German language. It also contributes to a confrontation of established views of grammar work at school and in lessons with current linguistic approaches.

This book systematically applies the so-called principle of compositionality to substantive composition and investigates whether this semantic principle can be judged a sufficient basis for the understanding of unknown terms. The central question concerns how far the meaning of a substantive composite with two nominal elements can be ‘calculated’ from the meaning of its constituents. Using various empirical studies, the author shows that the principle of compositionality must be reformulated.

Carl Vogt’s quarrel with Rudolph Wagner is considered to be a culmination of the materialism dispute in the 19th century. Out of this basically academic issue on the nature of human mental functions, a personal dispute quickly developed which was unrivalled in thematic incisiveness and expression. The aim of this study is the detailed linguistic analysis of the polemics and argumentation in this dispute based on extensive text excerpts, in which for the first time detailed linguistic studies on Vogt and Wagner are presented.

Text-image combinations can authenticate events and establish a visual memory. Here this phenomenon is explored: A pragmatic theory of text-image relationships is developed and empirically tested on the example of print media reports about terrorism in the FRG during the 1970s. The analyses show how texts unambiguously illuminate the meaning of images and how photographs substantiate and intensify interpretations of spectacular events to an extent which cannot be attained through language alone. It thus becomes clear that “terrorism” is not only to be understood as a kind of violence, but also as a series of media events.

The collective volume brings together the linguistic and didactic findings on the structure and acquisition of the German writing system. Based on current research on the German written language it is shown that its structures can be systematically described in the core area. The book discusses whether these insights can be used for didactic conceptions on written language acquisition. Concrete examples from German instruction illustrate the acquisition problems and discuss effective learning measures based on learning by discovery.

This work focuses on the development of the spectrum of text types in medical journals in order to enable statements on science culture and knowledge transfer within one scientific field. What changes could be determined in three medical journals over a period of 30 years and what effects do these changes have on science culture? The empirical evaluation reveals interesting developments.

What are the elementary building blocks of language? Which categories can they be assigned to, based on which criteria? What function do parts of speech or lexical categories have for the speakers of a language? This study provides answers to these theoretical questions, showing on the example of German that lexical categorization is dependent on cognitive and functional conditions ― not as a static structure, but rather as a dynamic process. The empirical part of the study shows that this has consequences, especially for writers of German.

This monograph illuminates the origin and development of psychiatric terminology from a linguistic perspective. The study begins with the period around 1800 when the first mental hospitals were founded, then goes on to describe the consolidation of academic psychiatry at the beginning of the 20th century and ends by elucidating the use of psychiatric terminology during the Nazi era. The development of a specialized vocabulary and the kinds and styles of texts specific to psychiatry are presented using case studies derived from the evaluation of extensive source material.

The volume brings together papers on new developments in the theory of writing systems, above all from the perspectives of linguistics, philosophy, media theory and language education. Firstly there is the question of the methods and categories used for analysing writing, and how written language as a medium is different from spoken language. Secondly, the influences of alphabetic scripts on the historical development of these disciplines are traced, and various types of writing system are described in relation to each other. The starting point for the contributors was Christian Stetter's work on the theory of written language, especially his theses that alphabetic script is not to be seen as a kind of phonetic script and that the specific characteristics of this writing system have had a decisive influence on the genesis of formal language reflection in linguistics and philosophy. The papers in the volume reflect on the difficulties of spelling reform and on didactic controversies around the acquisition of written language, on the pragmatics of writing and on the aesthetics of various types of script.

The study provides a deciphering reading of the language-reflexive and poetological poems of the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose texts are interpreted as encrypted signatures of the epoch. The linguistic artistry of the lyric work is opened up and made legible as a document of linguistic history.

The linguistic analysis starts from the conviction that the selected poems by Hofmannsthal arise from an individual experience of language which gains its aesthetic presence in the lyrical text. By approaching an outstanding protagonist of modernism, the account adds an important chapter in German-Austrian language history. The poems as an expression of a literary linguistic awareness are placed in a context with reflexive statements on language, critical linguistic notes and documents of engagement with language culture. This (linguo-)political, social and cultural contextualisation provides the prerequisite for sketching Hofmannsthal’s literary language work - here in his lyric poetry - as a paradigm of classical modernism.

With surface and performance, this collected volume places two concepts centre-stage which could be regarded as key terms for the object of linguistics. At the same time, they delineate the field which the papers in the volume sound out both theoretically and in empirical studies.

An introductory section containing methodological explorations of surface and performance is followed by three thematically distinct sections. The first main section contains papers examining surface and performance from the aspect of order. A second block is concerned with understanding as a quality of communication essential to the concept of language, and a third section focuses on the concepts of mediality and medium. The volume presents the proceedings of a conference held on Monte Verità (Switzerland), which followed on epistemologically from an earlier conference and the resultant collected volume (Linke/Ortner/Portmann: Sprache und mehr. Ansichten einer Linguistik der sprachlichen Praxis. Tübingen 2003). The present volume progresses the discussion of how the object of linguistics is understood and demonstrates the innovative potential of a linguistics oriented on the materiality of linguistic surface structures and which explicitly sees its object as the dynamics and communicative added value of linguistic performance.

Academic texts are regarded as impersonal texts. They follow what is known as the “I” taboo. The present study resolves the question of how the “I” is to be seen in academic texts. The concept of the author moves on a multiplicity of levels. On the one hand, typical academic acts (such as “solving a research problem”) are continually being explicated, on the other, typical attitudes are also being indicated (such as uncertainty). In the model, the marking levels are integrated. Thus the ‘author in the text‚ can be determined both as typical of a domain and as an individual figure.

The study sees itself as a strictly empirical investigation into light verb constructions (LVC) in present-day German which focuses on the faits de langue in the Saussurean sense. It takes as its starting point ten functional verbs regarded in the literature as ‘typical’. As well as providing quantitative data, it also presents a detailed analysis of the contexts in which they are used – their internal and external valency. The analysis of the complements deals both with their syntactic form (description of the LVC patterning) and with the semantically determined combinations into which they can enter.

German universities presume students are able to produce academic texts. At the same time, it is an everyday experience for students to have major problems when it comes to academic writing. The study demonstrates that a language acquisition problem lies at the heart of these difficulties, the problem of acquiring academic textual competence. A multi-stage model of development is presented, based on the analysis of comprehensive corpora of student essays and specialist articles written by experts.

Do popular forms of representing politics in the media endanger the quality of public communication? Or do they provide an appropriate modern entertaining way of putting politics across to wide sectors of the public? The present volume takes up this current discussion from a linguistic point of view. Anybody enquiring into changing political processes an a media society should look carefully at the evidence and beware of idealising myths, false comparisons and overhasty conclusions.

This volume draws together current studies and research findings from the fields of university research into German grammar and grammar teaching in schools. The contributors outline the relevance of grammatical research in meeting the demands of present-day school German teaching between the requirements of competence in grammar, literature, language and text, and confront established views of grammar teaching
in schools with topical problems.

Ernst Jandl (1925–2000) is a spectacular phenomenon. For an avant-garde experimental lyric poet he achieved a completely unusual level of popularity. Poems such as ottos mops (‘fritz’s bitch’) have long been in common currency. It is not the case, as is often argued, that laughing at Jandl’s poems is not a coincidental effect of his
unusual use of language. There are multiple varieties of humour which Jandl transforms anew in his language. Despite this, the comic aspects of Jandl’s work have hardly been researched. Anne Uhrmacher uses careful analysis to get to the bottom of his unparalleled effectiveness.

Imo undertakes an empirical analysis of constructions with ten verbs capable of being used in matrix sentences to combine the approaches of “Conversation Research”, “Conversational Analysis” and “Interactional Linguistics” with the theory of language and grammar advanced by “Construction Grammar”. He enquires into the advantages which the theory-poor “Conversational Research” could derive from a framework theory and examines whether “Construction Grammar” is adequate to the task of providing this framework, i.e. is able to describe the units of spoken language.

Matthias Hölzner undertakes a systematic analysis of the valency behaviour of selected nouns in authentic texts. The studies are based on a multi-dimensional noun valency concept and provide important insights into the realisation of arguments within the noun phrase. As the analyses show, the arguments of valent nouns are however frequently realised outside the noun phrase, i.e. at the sentence or text level. Matthias Hölzner demonstrates how these freedoms in realising arguments in texts are used as a means of establishing coherence.

Which spelling rules require less grammatical knowledge – the 'old' ones or the reformed ones? Sabine Mayr examines the rules given in three popular 'old' and 'new' spelling dictionaries (Duden, 20. ed. 1991 and 22. ed. 2000; Bertelsmann 1999) to determine which grammatical terms they assume the users know, where comprehension problems arise and whether or how these are solved (e.g. which grammar gives further assistance). The comparison shows that with the spelling reform the comprehensibility of the rules had also improved somewhat.

In this book, writing done by students in an academic context is investigated as a writing development phenomenon. A style-biographical part-corpus (various pieces of written work for seminars by a student author) and two experimental, quantitative part-corpora (writing samples from a fill-in-the-gaps test and parodistic introductory texts) are drawn upon to reconstruct the acquisition process in which student writers gradually conform to the institutional requirements bound up with the style of writing employed in academic texts.

Up to the present Goebbels' speech at the Sportpalast has been regarded as a supreme example of manipulation, not least because it has frequently been reduced to the one question cited in the title of this study. As 'total war' has also been misinterpreted, the investigation goes beyond a purely linguistic analysis to examine the speech in pragmatic terms as a semiotic totality. In this endeavour it addresses not only linguistic and rhetorical features, but also religious, semiotic, psychological, historical, and sociological phenomena, drawing additionally on text, sound, and film documents for the purpose. The result is a reevaluation of the speech itself, of Goebbels, and of the manipulation theory.

This collection of articles derives from a conference organized in Szeged (Hungary) in 2003. It represents a contribution to the ongoing discussion on approaches to the grammar of spoken language. Proceeding on the conviction that existing theoretical deficits can only be offset by broad discussion of all potential sources of theoretical insight, the volume discusses various approaches to a more precise grammatical definition of spoken language, including construction grammar, interactional linguistics, the theory of proximate and distanced speech, and ideas on the constitution of meaning in spoken language.

How do we argue in exceptional situations? What argumentative patterns do we fall back on in a bid to justify decisions with major ethical repercussions? What kinds of text are produced under these circumstances? The book analyses two prototypic editorials on the Gulf War of 1991 with a view to demonstrating how discourses function in explosive situations, how they can be analysed, and how they can be tested for coherence. The study gives equal attention to compliance with the rules of argumentation, subtle floutings of these rules, and totally unwarranted conclusions.

The study examines the structure and function of explanatory practices (Begründen) in everyday German conversation. It indicates, among other things, the forms of explanation favoured by speakers operating in various contexts, e.g. on what occasions they opt for a grammatically unmarked construction as opposed to one introduced by a conjunction or some other grammatically marked connection. Syntactic, semantic, prosodic, and action-related parameters are discussed in their respective usage context. In addition to the empirical analysis the study also investigates issues connected with the representation of linguistic units in grammar and the lexicon.

The book discusses the central concepts of National Socialist art policy: 'degenerate art' and 'German art'. With the aid of linguistic discourse analysis the history of these concepts is traced from their emergence in the 18th century and their development investigated up to the deontic potential they were invested with in National Socialist criticism of literature and art. The author demonstrates how these two concepts were drawn upon in word and text as a foundation for bans on artists and the burning of paintings in the Third Reich.

The study is devoted to intercultural communication between German and North American students. Conversations in German between English-speaking North American learners of German and German native speakers are analyzed on the basis of a framework model relating to the linguistic work involved in everyday encounters and the differences and commonalities such work displays. The conversations discussed involve narrative, discursive, and directive dimensions, and contain differing degrees of face threatening. The analysis covers all the elements typical of conversations.

The Phraseological Dictionary of Middle High German contains phrasemes, i.e., proverbs, idioms, formulaic greeting and farewell expressions, imprecations, standardized pairings (like 'good and bad'), and other firmly established word-combinations, arranged in alphabetical order under different headings. The material is drawn from several hundred texts dating from the period 1050-1350, Minnesang, heroic epics, Arthurian romance, non-fictional literature, etc. The dictionary proper is preceded by a study on the identification, classification, and lexicographic description of established word-combinations in historical texts.

The study describes everyday 19th century written German as the 'unmarked case' displaying developments that are crucial for the understanding of the tendencies discernible in the present-day form of the language. Based on analyses of 19th century emigrant correspondence, 'Language History from Below' advocates a dual shift in perspectives for research on language (history): first a greater concern for language use in broad sectors of the population, and second a focus on the socio-communicative foundations of German as a modern cultural idiom.

Social stereotypes (e.g. images of women) are language-based and are thus reflected in a society's designative and descriptive practices. With reference to literary discourse in 19th century girls' books, the present study develops a method for the reconstruction of such language-based images by analyzing (a) references to persons and (b) collocations. The author demonstrates inter alia how the category of the Backfisch (a now largely obsolete but formerly widely used expression for »teenage girl«) and the image of women bound up with it developed between 1850 and 1914. Thus the book also represents a contribution to the history of mentality in the 19th century.

This is a contrastive politico-linguistic study analyzing the semantic operations serving specific communication strategies in speeches by representatives of the extreme left. Speeches by Lenin, Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg form the empirical basis for the study. Central to the analysis are concepts and catchwords attaining a special impact in the language use displayed by the extreme left in setting itself off from the moderate social democrats (1914-1919). The analysis itself examines concept-splitting mechanisms and techniques of semantic upgrading and stigmatization.

This study inquires into the difficulties besetting communication via answering machines and ways of dealing with those difficulties. It regards communication from the perspective of conversation analysis and centres both on the pre-recorded texts callers are confronted with and on messages left by callers. It transpires that communication via answering machines is subject to the tensions existing between oral and written language, dialogue and monologue, and interpersonal and mass communication. The complex demands made on both participants produce interesting phenomena related to the acquisition process involved in the use of this medium.

»No one's going to make me spell Schifffahrt with 3 f's!« Categorical statements of this kind are typical of the discourse on the new German spelling and punctuation reform. But why is such a fuss made about Schifffahrt, Stängel, and other examples that hardly ever occur in ordinary writing anyway? And why do people get so emotional about the whole issue? This book looks at the selective and emotional nature of the dispute on the reform from the perspective of discourse linguistics, drawing upon an extensive corpus of press texts (from Der Spiegel, Focus, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung) for the purpose.

Against the background of the 'crisis of the humanities' in the Weimar Republic, the present volume examines representative linguistic topics and concepts prevalent in the period in question. In so doing, it demonstrates how the radical change in the public perception of language problems after 1918 was involved in the moral decline of German academic research on modern languages and on comparative historical linguistics. This decline led to a serious loss of reputation and the establishment of a species of linguistic research informed by political motivations and geared almost exclusively to the rallying concept of Volk (people/nation/race). After 1933, however, the expectations placed in the new regime by this 'ethnicized' form of linguistic research were quickly and thoroughly disappointed.

The primary concern of this interdisciplinary and empirical study is to explain language switching and language preservation in terms of linguistic behaviours. With reference to the language behaviour of the German-speaking community in Hungary in the last third of the 19th century, the attempt is made to establish whether and to what extent the theory of planned behaviour - one of the most influential attitude and behaviour models in modern social psychology - is in a position to resolve this central and much-discussed problem of sociolinguistics. In so doing, the book sets out to indicate the sociolinguistic benefits of socio-psychological ideas that in the relevant research have hitherto only been drawn upon in the form of isolated concepts regarded in isolation.

The language-norm debate in the last third of the 18th century did not revolve solely around the linguistic question "What is High German?" Rather, it was preformed and organized by mentalities, general schemata of thought and evaluation. By collapsing a number of different social-constructivist theories (sociology of knowledge, cultural memory, discourse analysis), the study develops a model of the genesis of language awareness that draws on deep-semantic analyses to enable us to read the language-norm debate as a discourse on national identity inspired by cultural criticism.

On the basis of existing empirical studies, the study demonstrates that it is questionable to equate grammar knowledge with explicit knowledge of school grammar. For the retrieval of genuine linguistic knowledge, this knowledge has to be subtended by specific syntactic information. The author develops and utilizes an empirical method designed to capture the presence of such information. The results indicate that though syntactic information is very widely accessible this does not make it reliably available. The handling of it has to be learned. This might well be the central task of grammar classes relating to the mother tongue.

The present study offers a stock-taking of the knowledge of German as a foreign language identifiable at different levels of the education system in Ticino. Alongside the learner languages of the different groups of students, it also describes development sequences observable in connection with morphosyntax, lexematics, and pragmatics. Another aspect is the discussion of interrelationships between progress in written and spoken skills. Based on these findings, didactic recommendations are made for the conduct and planning of instruction in German as a foreign language.

The linguistic and discursive processing of computer technology is studied here from its beginnings to the year 2000. The approach is based on discourse lexicology and corpus linguistics and centres around the popularization of information and communication technology and of the corresponding special languages. Alongside the periodicity of the discourse in parliament and the popular press, its main findings are bound up with the detailed description of the lexical development (semasiological and onomasiological inventories) and the de-specialization of technological vocabulary.

This pilot study in contrastive pragmatics provides a detailed introduction to the problems of intercultural communication between Germans and Russians. Culture-specific conversation behaviour (structuring signals, organization of turn-taking, feedback behaviour, etc.) is pinpointed and described on an empirical basis. The contrastive analysis of opening gambits, core structure of verbal exchanges, and the termination phase in German and Russian conversations points up both typical structural features and also different forms of politeness, address, and other semantic and pragmatic particularities. The book is angled at all those interested in German/Russian communication and provides useful aids for the successful handling of conversations in German or Russian.

The complex challenge of political language in democracy centers on the way in which it is caught up between the individual interest in effectiveness, on the one hand, and ethical claims on the other. It is this nexus that makes political language counseling necessary. Political linguistics has so far regarded itself exclusively as a descriptive science. To enable it to square up to the task of counseling, the study proceeds on the basis of theoretical considerations and proposes a methodological symbiosis of linguistics and language criticism (rhetoric, etc.). It develops a corresponding model, which it then applies to concrete examples with a view to testing its validity.

These ten articles discuss language contacts between German and other Germanic languages and dialects: English, Frisian/Low German, Yiddish, the Scandinavian languages, and German dialects. As such it provides the first overview of its kind on this area of German and Germanic language history. In some of the articles, recent proposals for a theory of language contact are introduced, and there is also discussion of present-day issues in language policy.

The aims of the book are twofold: (a) to unite language, literature, and history in the framework of a biographically supported and educationally well-founded historiography of language, and (b) to analyze the conversational structure and the lexical particularities of Joachim Heinrich Campe's (1749-1818) writings against the background of the philanthropist reform movement. Campe was a pedagogue and lexicographer from Brunswick, and the study focuses on his »Robinson der Jüngere« (1779/80), the most successful single instance of literature for young people in German. The edifying exchanges to be found in the book are discussed in terms of the principles of historical linguistic pragmatics.

This collection is a sequel to the volume published by the same editors and with the same title in 1990 (RGL 102, out of print). It assembles articles describing, with reference to the present status of research, the incidence of 'internationalisms' in languages hitherto entirely or largely neglected in this respect (Dutch, Hungarian, Turkish, Japanese, Thai, Singhalese). These studies indicate the practical purposes that the results of research on internationalism can serve, notably in connection with lexicography and foreign-language teaching.

The book sets out to extend the constricted view of linguistics that the discipline itself has favoured so far. Language performance, the >eternally recurring work of the mind< (Humboldt), is seen here as the focal concern of linguistic theory formation. The articles essay a revision of what linguistics is centrally about from four different perspectives: the discussion of scientific theory, the practice of linguistic analysis, research on language teaching and learning, and the discussion on norms.

How can we analyze an instance of public discourse using linguistic methods? What patterns of argumentation and thinking in connection with the subject of the immigration of workers to the Federal Republic remained much the same over a lengthy period of time, what others changed in the course of time, what new ones joined them? To answer these questions, the author substantiates a concept of topic based on argumentation theory, and uses that concept as a category in the 'deep-semantic' analysis of a major text corpus. The empirical analysis indicates how the linguistic construction of the subject of 'migrant workers' developed between 1960 and 1985.

The grammatography of historical stages of German and related languages was for a long time a central preserve of the series "Collection of Short Grammars of German Dialects". Progress in historical language description and the grammatical description of modern languages has led to a wave of revisions to existing historical grammars and also to a variety of new conceptions for them. The Heidelberg Conference from 28 January to 3 February 2001 discussed the effects of new linguistic insights on the practice of grammatical description. Major attention was given to such topics as the corpus problem, coverage of varieties, normalization, and the specific requirements of literary studies in connection with historical grammars.

Vocabularies are complex structures. This complexity derives on the one hand from the large number of elements (words and their usages) and on the other from the fact that there are a multiplicity of structuring principles at work. We can regard the development of vocabulary as the interplay between factors favouring both stasis and change in complex systems. The aim is to describe, document, and, if possible, explain this interplay. The book has two major objectives, (a) lexicological: developing a coherent 'pragmatic' conception of the organization and dynamics of vocabulary, and (b) empirical: using this conception to describe German vocabulary around 1600 and - in a longitudinal study - to chart the astonishing history of cross-referential vocabulary in German.

Starting with an analysis of constitutive and pioneering sessions in central German parliaments since 1848, the study demonstrates how plenary debates have become more and more strongly ritualized and are progressively deteriorating into media events. Major chapters of the book are devoted to the linguistic description of political language and communication, the structural changes undergone by parliamentary publicity, the semiotics of plenary halls, and specific aspects of parliamentary communication. Additionally, the Wende debate (1982) serves as a demonstration of the most important phenomena of parliamentary language: catchwords, key terms, evaluative expressions, metaphor, allusions, the play on proper names, rhetorical figures, presuppositions, forms of address, the 'inclusive we', quotations. Following a comparative analysis of the 'identity' debate in the Church of St. Paul (1848) and the 'capital' debate in the German Bundestag, an extensive final chapter discusses the history, the practicalities, and the reliability of stenographic reports.

The volume assembles papers from an eponymous colloquium held in Brunswick on the 18th/19th September 2001. It sets out to provide a documentation and overview of key concerns, currents and developments in German linguistics over the last few years.

Central to this volume is an empirical study on the following questions: What media experience do eighth grade students have? What subjective theories of written and spoken language have they developed? Are there differences according to sex, type of school and media socialization? The study takes account of standard methodological procedures in the social sciences and combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings are drawn upon for conclusions of a practical nature in connection with a meaningful interplay between media didactics and the teaching of German in school curricula.

The study proceeds from the identification of a paradox in communicative foreign-language learning: only a minority of school learners develop into competent, conversationally versatile speakers. This negative showing is discussed in the theoretical section of the book. Sensitization of perception and drama-group work encourage a verbal use of language that approximates the natural development of oral communication skills and stimulates acquisition mechanisms. The result is a communication culture sui generis that creates the very conditions required for communication: closeness, cooperation, solidarity.

This study undertakes a systematic analysis of neologisms in authentic German texts, both for the structural principles and regularities involved in their formation and the constitution of their respective meanings. Previous linguistic research has contributed little of any genuine relevance on these aspects. New words evolve in a force-field generated by the tensions between pattern-conformity and context-dependency, tensions conditioned both by the species of word formation and the type of (con)text involved. The latter, in its turn, frequently owes much to neologisms for its coherence.

Though ordinary language has long since attracted linguistic interest, there has been little attention paid to declarative knowledge about language phenomena in everyday life (i.e., outside the academic context). This is surprising, given the fact that such knowledge is of major relevance for the optimization of communication, etc. The present study indicates avenues for research into this kind of knowledge. Theoretical and empirical approaches combine to explore its nature, its content, and its function in ordinary life-world situations.

This study investigates misunderstandings between Germans and Arabs caused by politeness. The data are mostly conversations in the course of private social gatherings. Gumperz' approach to intercultural communication and Brown/Levinson's theory of politeness supply the theoretical framework for the study. The two-sided concept of 'face' - distancing (negative face) and rapprochement (positive face) - points up cultural differences. Germans attach great importance to privacy and individuality, while Arabs prefer in-group relations.

'Reflective didactics' is a method based on a theory of interpersonal (teaching) communication that proceeds from experience gleaned in classroom reality, makes that experience the object of theoretical reflection, and derives from that reflection concepts and material for use in teaching situations. The thematic emphasis of the present study is overt and covert multi-lingualism in schools. After discussing the empirical evidence for this assertion, it addresses its central purpose, which is to provide encouragement for as many learners as possible by means of suitable didactic measures designed to make the most of individual potentialities in the field of writing.

The study provides a theoretical and methodological grounding for historical dialogue research by engaging in a critical discussion and systematic dovetailing of approaches deriving from conversation analysis, dialogue grammar, and the history of mentality. It subsequently applies the results to didactic dialogues from the 17th and 18th centuries. The focus is on the didactic dialogue as both a subject of and a language-change factor in the linguistic practice of school instruction. For one suspended moment in the history of the language, it is thus possible to engage in closer observation of the evolution of standard New High German. A major turning-point in the history of educational communication is brought into a clearer perspective by tracing the development from religious catechetics to philanthropic Socratic maieutics.

The volume assembles 25 papers delivered at (and additional contributions to) the conference on »Historical Word Formation in German« held 10-14 October 2000 in Erlangen. The main headings are: I. General aspects of historical word formation, II. Word formation in various epochs of the history of German, III. Word formation and language contact.

This study is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive analysis of authentic everyday emotions as opposed to the simulated or stylized variety. Extensive material distinctive for its combination of unforced language behaviour, extremely good recording quality, and a high frequency of recurrent interaction sequences makes it possible to propose an empirically well-founded and at the same time surprisingly simple model of German prosody. On this basis, the study identifies four fundamental emotional dimensions directly connected with prosodic units and acoustic parameters.

This workbook gives an initial overview of fundamental problems addressed by interaction research and text linguistics (notably research on text varieties). At the same time, it represents a compendium of approaches to the practical side of work on texts, both the analysis of texts from different communication settings and - for the first time - the design and authorship of specific varieties of texts.

The study sets out to identify the processes and dynamics responsible for the transformation of Switzerland from a country in which in 1700 only a minority could read and write into a nation of fully literate citizens by 1900. The literacy standard that, as of 1760, insisted that every adult should be able to read and write fell on fruitful soil, arriving at a time when Swiss society had already been sensitized to the importance of written correspondence and book-keeping.

The subject of this volume is 'discussion culture' in German lessons at school. Studies of teaching scenarios undertaken from the perspectives of conversation analysis and didactics show how students conduct discussions with their peers or with the teacher, more specifically, how they introduce, develop, and conclude exchange sequences of an adversative, convergent, or divergent nature. The result is an empirically based stocktaking of discussion processes in the institutional context. As such it is eminently well suited as a basis for didactic reflection on the potentialities and limitations of this form of teaching.

The form of language used to accompany actions performs different functions from a conversation; it differs in its structure, and analysis reveals hitherto largely neglected phenomena such as the tendency to employ terse, compressed utterances. The study investigates 'terse linguistic expression' and describes selected forms of it using the methods of conversation analysis. Discussion of a corpus of exchanges recorded while the participants were watching television indicates explanation strategies for dealing with terse utterances. Special reference is made here to the connection between terseness and sociability.

The expansion of the concept of style has its roots in the diversity of theories on the subject and the different language elements to which style is ascribed. Alongside the print media, a whole plethora of other sectors clamor for attention, including the electronic media and oral as much as written utterances. This calls for perspectives no longer limited to traditional stylistics and text linguistics but extending to sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, pragmatics, LSP research and translation studies. This situation shows the necessity for discussion on the present state of research and future research issues in connection with style as a semiotic, cultural, and social phenomenon.

Popular medical texts from the early modern age to the present are drawn upon to show how an intermediary communicative world has developed between science and everyday life and how the transfer between specialist language and the scientific world on the one hand and everyday language and the everyday world on the other is managed in such texts. It transpires that non-specialist communication is oriented both to science and the world of the everyday, albeit in different ways. With a view to clarifying their theoretical status, the varieties thus identified are related to the system of varieties in German. Non-specialist communication is defined and distinguished from other forms of knowledge transfer.

Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923), famed for his parodies in the Berlin of the Gründerzeit, is best known today for his huge »Contributions to a Critique of Language« (1901/02). In addition, he wrote various novels, worked for many years as a journalist and drama reviewer and finally retired to Meersburg on Lake Constance to devote his final years to the philosophy of language. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1999, a commemorative ceremony, a staged reading and a symposium were organized in Brunswick. The volume contains the texts by Mauthner performed at the reading, the papers presented at the event and a cross-section of the discussion following the papers.

Hitherto, research on grammaticalization has been largely language-typological and universalist in its leanings and as such has been consistently gaining ground within the framework of German studies. The present monograph proposes a theory of grammaticalization collating various approaches and discussing them on a broad empirical basis. The material drawn upon is largely taken from spoken West Central German. The area covered by the grammaticalization phenomena discussed is documented on 16 language maps. The inclusion of diachronic analyses places the present-day grammaticalization processes in a broader context.

In the early modern age Rechenbücher (arithmetic books) were texts in German for an illiterate audience. A pragmatically oriented text analysis model is used to study these counting books, compare them with texts of different content and in other languages and locate them in the history of text varieties in German as an integral part of European cultural history. As a prototypic example of this text variety, the study contains a complete edition of the work by J. Widmann (approx. 1460/5 - after 1504) together with information on the author's life and works, on the place his book on arithmetic has in the history of mathematics, a brief commentary, an index of measurement units and a glossary.

On the basis of a study of reproach activities ('in situ reproaches', 'mock reproaches' and reconstructions of previous reproach interactions in 'complaint stories') the monograph examines prosodic, grammatical, rhetorical/stylistic processes and their functions in everyday usage. Following an analysis of the constitution of these reproach genres the study charts the consequences for a theory of communicative practice and discusses aspects such as the genre-specific function of grammatical structures, the interaction between prosodic and syntactic procedures in the production of communicative meaning, and the role of indexical signs in the negotiation of meaning.

In the linguistic research on the Wende undertaken so far, phenomena like vocabulary change and political language usage have been in the forefront of interest. This has involved a high degree of neglect for broad areas of everyday and spoken language and their socio-cultural moorings. The present volume sees itself as an empirical contribution to rectifying that situation. There are three main subjects: >East< and >West< as categories of social affiliation established and concretized in communication; patterns and strategies of oral communication employed by East and West Germans (e.g. in job and guidance interviews); changes within the East German communication society.

The articles gathered here go back to papers held at the colloquium on »Language Criticism« held at the German Studies Department of the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH) on 19 February 1999. Their common theme is the joint interest of German Studies scholars, whether in literary studies or linguistics, in a perspective that can be referred with terms like "language criticism", "language reflection", possibly also "language culture" or "cultivation". The contributions can be read as a plea to re-establish a language-critical component (as opposed to a merely descriptive one) in the engagement with (German) language and literature.

The focus here is on the codification of spelling in the »Duden« and the »Österreichisches Wörterbuch« prior to the present spelling reform. First a closer look is taken at features of spelling norms and the role of orthographic dictionaries in their codification. After a discussion of the traditions of the two dictionaries, an attempt is made to establish to what extent the »Duden« and the »Österreichisches Wörterbuch« have 'insidiously' reformed German spelling, i.e. how from edition to edition their codification of spelling has gradually moved away from the basis common to them both: the rules resolved at the Second Orthographic Conference of 1901.

Mainzer Republik is the name given to the period from October 1792 to July 1793 when Mainz was French and the French and the 'Mainz Jacobins' attempted to revolutionize the population of the city. In terms of language history the Mainzer Republik represents a sharp caesura. It was the first time in German history that a political part-public took shape displaying a close-knit and highly innovative form of persuasive communication. This monograph looks especially at the historical semantics and pragmatics of the Mainzer Republik, centering its argumentative focus on the interdependence between language and society.

The study proceeds from an inquiry into the way in which affiliation to social groups is signalized communicatively. The question is examined on the basis of a large corpus of authentic verbal exchanges (conversations) recorded in the years following German reunification. 'East German' and 'West German' are the social categories forming the basis for the empirical elaboration of how individuals are allocated to group(ing)s and how - both on the basis of that allocation and beyond it - group-specific characteristics and behaviours are ascribed and evaluated. The main result of the study is the establishment of a descriptive linguistic framework for social categorizations in conversations and texts.

Difficult assignments and long texts force writers to adopt strategic behaviours. This study looks at strategies employed by adult writers composing long texts, i.e. thinking as they write, processing, working over and elaborating knowledge in the act of writing, as opposed to merely reproducing it. In more academic terms we might say: engaging in epistemic and heuristic activity. The book presents ten different types of writer. The typology it proposes is based on the evaluation of statements by approx. 6,000 persons, both professionals and students.

The volume describes the highly varied forms of linguistic action involved in business contexts and encounters. It provides an overview of central exchange types: sales and complaint exchanges, exchanges between laypersons and experts in the technical service sector, negotiations and discussions. Specific features and problems are described in discourse-analytic terms with reference to authentic examples. Written forms of communication are also covered. Studies such as these can find application in communication guidance and training and in language instruction contexts.

This study looks at the language community constituted by a Swiss primary school class of children with a highly assorted mixture of mother tongues. The language used in class is described in terms of variety linguistics and the social processes within the class are examined sociographically. Dialectologic and socio-psychological variables are related to one another; in addition, observations on social solidarity and demarcation are subjected to a qualitative analysis. The language of the class is interpreted as a cumulative product of individual communicative interests. The findings contribute to a better understanding of language and its development in multifactorial contexts.

Central to this study are Fritz Mauthner's (1849-1923) literary parodies published between 1878 and 1884 under the title »Nach berühmten Mustern« (On Famous Models). Today, Mauthner is known (if at all) for his major language-critical works (though there has been a revival of interest in him over the last few years), but linguistic, stylistic, and content-oriented analysis reveal him even in his early works as a notable critic of the age he lived in, the prevailing cultural climate, and above all linguistic style. It is thus possible to read his early literary work as a precursor of his later epistemologically oriented critique of language and language usage.

The study examines German modal auxiliaries from the perspective of grammaticalization. The thrust is a dual one. First the attempt is undertaken to provide a systematic description of the coexistence of usages with differing degrees of grammaticalization in present-day German; second, a model is developed for the diachronic evolution of the more strongly grammaticalized usage of modal verbs as deictic facticity markers. Corpus analyses are drawn on both for the synchronic and the diachronic approaches.

The syntax of natural spoken language is not susceptible of description with the traditional system of categories, which is tailored to the analysis and description of written language. The volume sets out to open up a new syntactic research avenue through the comparison of extensive written and spoken text corpora. On the basis of a grammar description instrumentarium allowing for the analysis of syntactic structures independently of the media in which they occur, a theoretical basis for a realistic and everyday-language-oriented approach to syntax study is proposed and empirically substantiated.

The study proceeds on the following premise: in his apprentice years (1963-1975) the young Botho Strauß (b. 1944) elaborated a poetics centering around historical theatre reality and focussing on a reflective linguistic critique of the ideologies and epistemologies operative between public and mass media in the context of the student revolution. The discussion traces the development of the student Botho Strauß with reference to examples of his narrative prose (1963), theatre criticism (1967-1970), and dramaturgic writing (1970-1975). In so doing it charts his progress from student prose-writer to theatre critic, theatre critic to dramatic adviser, and finally from dramatic adviser to freelance writer.

The study approaches the question of the origin of idiomatic phrases from the point of view of classical rhetoric. After a detailed theoretical discussion of phenomena such as metaphor, metonymy, irony, antithesis, etc., some 400 German idiomatic phrases and sayings are subjected to close rhetorical/semantic examination. This empirical section of the study conveys a differentiated picture of the meaning structure of 'figurative' expressions, points up links between the literal and idiomatic meaning of such expressions, and shows the high and varied degree to which 'ornamental' rhetorical elements participate in the formation of idiomatic vocabulary units.

Are the Japanese really courteous, conciliatory, and group-oriented, whereas Germans are direct, adversative, and individual? With reference to the linguistic phenomenon of the directive, the study closely examines these much-rehearsed stereotypes. With a consistently contrastive approach based on an empirical survey, systematic differences and overlaps in the pragmalinguistics of directives are established for German and Japanese. The study describes the extent to which factors like social field of interaction, age, gender, social norms and values, etc. have a significantly different bearing on directive usage behavior in the two language communities.

Evaluations of the significance of 17th century German grammarians for the standardization process in written language usage tend to take the form of sweeping statements lacking any concrete empirical substantiation. With reference to usage changes identifiable in publications that went through a number of editions (including Luther's Bible translation), the author demonstrates that the language norms advocated by scholarly theorists were largely congruent with practical usage and in addition that the grammarians exerted a noticeable influence both on local and supraregional usage.

The present study has a dual purpose in examining oral examinations as a specific conversation/dialogue type. First it takes its bearings from Michel Foucault to develop a model suitable for a conversation-analytic investigation of the viva voce at university level. This model is also designed to establish the scope and limits determining what can and cannot be said in such exam situations in terms of the specific positions occupied by the participants. From there it proceeds to draw on the findings yielded by these observations to formulate conclusions of a didactic nature geared to the institutional possibilities open to the persons involved.