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October 16, 2009
Abstract
In the second half of the eighteenth century, a far-reaching change took place in the language of Southern Germany and Austria. This change from the traditional baroque Upper German written language [oberdeutsche Schreibsprache] to modern High German occurred not only in the language of printing, but also in private letters. One result of this transition is a broad variety of linguistic forms. The extensive correspondence between members of the Mozart family (father, mother, daughter, son) is an extremely useful subject for the investigation of this language variation. After a series of introductory sections, the usage of written language by the different members of the family will be analyzed in part one of this paper. The range of variety reaches from Leopold Mozart's modern, educated German to the traditional, partly colloquial language of Mozart's mother. A separate chapter deals with W. A. Mozart's creative use of language (and varieties), his fancy for artificial jokes and word play [Sprachspiele]. Part two deals with the question of what we can learn from the written language of the letters about how the Mozarts spoke with each other and with other members of their society.
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October 16, 2009
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The denominal use of the agent suffix -er is often overshadowed by the highly productive deverbal use of the suffix and its portrayals in the research literature have tended to be incomplete or contradictory, often concluding that denominal derivation is a minor or even unproductive role of -er . Contemporary usage data show denominal -er to have several productive niches, including attachment to native complex idiomatic bases (e.g. Goldwäscher, Rollenspieler ) and, most notably, attachment to English bases (e.g. Boarder, Spammer ). As such, while less widely used than its deverbal counterpart, denominal -er is shown to be increasing its sphere of use and importance in a manner not yet reported in the literature.
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October 16, 2009
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Unlike nun (“now”), a German time adverb of Indo-European origin, the synonymous adverb jetzt , created in medieval times, has not produced any uses which would allow it to be allocated to the word class ‘discourse particle’. But since 1983 some examples have been discussed—first for the Alemannic speech area—of a jetzt which does not refer to the present, real or imagined, but expresses the speaker's concern and his wish to control the hearer's attention. Such non-referential uses of jetzt in today's spoken German are the subject-matter of the following paper. The attempt is made to describe and classify these usages by analyzing examples drawn from various sources, mainly from corpora of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim). The common denominator for all occurrences of jetzt is its temporal deixis, while the main differences lie in the respective tasks the deixis is meant to fulfil: either, in the referential case, to link the sentence proposition with the speaker's present; or, non-referentially, to evoke various implied meta-communicative contents: or as ‘pure’ deixis, to highlight the relevance of what the speaker is saying. Special functions of the meta-communicative usage are: emphasizing relevance, marking examples and counterarguments, focussing on constituents and increasing contrasts. Some of these functions seem to be reserved for jetzt , rather than nun . In all cases, jetzt remains a syntactically integrated adverb which, besides its normal referential use, can be functionalized for non-referential purposes: a deictic time adverb functioning as a ‘discourse marker’
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October 16, 2009
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Sociolinguistic variation in Austria and the German-speaking part of Switzerland has traditionally been described in very different terms. In Austria, the linguistic range between the standard language and the local dialects has been referred to as a ‘standard-dialect-continuum’, whereas the German-speaking part of Switzerland has often been cited as the typical example of a ‘diglossic’ language community. The sociolinguistic situation in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg, which is part of a primarily Bavarian-speaking country but also of the Alemannic dialect region, has not been thoroughly examined in any studies up to date. In this paper, we present results from an online-survey in Austria and Switzerland on the everyday use of dialect and the standard language. According to our informants' estimates, the sociolinguistic situation in both Austria and German-speaking Switzerland is characterised by a significant percentage of dialect use. Still, the standard language is regarded quite differently in the two countries. A considerable proportion of the Swiss informants perceive the standard language as a ‘foreign language’. However, this does not seem to be a common attitude among the Austrian informants. The main difference between the two countries lies in the observation that Austrians feel they use an intermediate form between dialect and the standard language, a so-called ‘Umgangssprache’, in many situations, whereas the Swiss indicate that they speak their local dialect or the standard language under specific communicative circumstances. However, the German-speaking Swiss population, as well as the informants from Vorarlberg, do not seem to use an intermediate form. The situation in Vorarlberg is particularly interesting. On the one hand, as far as the status of dialect and the dichotomy of dialect and standard are concerned, Vorarlberg patterns similarly to the German-speaking part of Switzerland. On the other hand, people from Vorarlberg have to adapt to their Bavarian-speaking fellow countrymen and women and switch to standard German in intra-national communication (e.g. at the workplace or on national help lines).
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October 16, 2009
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This paper argues that wieder (‘again’) can be used in wh -questions as a modal particle. This use derives from the use of wieder as a temporal adverb, due to grammaticalization, in accordance with Traugott's hypothesis of a semantic-pragmatic tendency for meanings to become increasingly situated in the speaker's belief-state or attitude toward the situation. By using wieder as a modal particle, the speaker can indicate that s/he knew the answer to the question previously but is at present not aware of it. It is shown that several other temporal adverbs, such as noch (‘still’) and gleich (‘soon’), may serve as modal particles in questions, with a function very similar to that of wieder . This is due to semantic bleaching, a concomitant of grammaticalization, which neutralizes the differences in lexical semantics between these elements. These modal particles indicate that the answer to the question is part of the speaker and recipient's common ground, but not activated at the moment in the speaker's and/or the hearer's consciousness.
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October 16, 2009
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On the basis of 35 qualitative interviews this article focuses on the pronominal and nominal ways pupils and teachers address each other in German primary schools. It shows that the way of addressing each other in West German schools since the 1960s has seen a profound change towards a certain dominance of nonhierachical and nonformal communication that no longer expresses the different social roles. Sometimes school children even address their teachers with a nickname and vice versa. Since the German unification in 1990, the communication style in East Germany seems to be following this trend. Apparently, the institutionally framed communication in German primary schools has opened itself to a certain degree for the general sociocultural tendency towards informalization and individualization which also determines the long term development of other communicative routines in German society.
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