09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät
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Item Open Access Use of embedded clauses in heritage and monolingual Russian(2024) Martynova, Maria; Zuban, Yulia; Gagarina, Natalia; Szucsich, LukaThis study investigates the production of clausal embeddings by 195 Russian speakers (67 monolingually raised speakers, 68 heritage speakers in the US, and 60 heritage speakers in Germany) in different communicative situations varying by formality (formal vs. informal) and mode (spoken vs. written). Semi-spontaneous data were manually annotated for clause type and analyzed using a binomial generalized mixed-effects model. Our results show that heritage speakers of both groups and monolingually raised speakers behave alike regarding their use of embedded clauses. Specifically, all speaker groups produce embedded clauses more frequently in formal situations compared to informal situations. Mode was not found to influence the production of embedded clauses. This behavior suggests an underlying register awareness in heritage speakers of Russian. Such register awareness might be a result of the high involvement of heritage speakers with Russian. This study contributes to our understanding of linguistic outcomes of heritage speakers and highlights the influence of communicative situations on language production.Item Open Access Databases, science communication, and the division of epistemic labour(2022) Mößner, NicolaThere are many ways in which biases can enter processes of scientific reasoning. One of these is what Ludwik Fleck has called a “harmony of illusions”. In this paper, Fleck’s ideas on the relevance of social mechanisms in epistemic processes and his detailed description of publication processes in science will be used as a starting point to investigate the connection between cognitive processes, social dynamics, and biases in this context. Despite its usefulness as a first step towards a more detailed analysis, Fleck’s account needs to be updated in order to take the developments of digital communication technologies of the 21st century into account. Taking a closer look at today’s practices of science communication shows that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a major role here. By presenting a detailed case study concerning the database SCOPUS, the question will be investigated how such ICTs can influence the division of epistemic labour. The result will be that they potentially undermine the epistemic benefits of social dynamics in science communication due to their inherent tendency to reduce the diversity of scientific hypotheses and ideas.Item Open Access Research on rhetorical devices in German : the use of rhetorical questions in sales presentations(2022) Neitsch, Jana; Niebuhr, OliverPrevious literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth? ) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what that matters in using stylistic devices like RQs, but also the how , i.e., the RQs’ prosodic realization. To date, however, virtually no handbook on the way of giving a good presentation scrutinizes this prosodic how . Therefore, our investigation focuses on the prosodic realization of German RQs in sales pitches. Specifically, we carry out a perception experiment in which 72 listeners rated both the sales pitch and its speaker based on presentations that contained questions that were lexically biased towards a rhetorical interpretation. They were realized with either the prosody of RQs or information-seeking questions (ISQs: What time is it? ). An additional baseline condition was constituted by regular declarative statements with the corresponding prosody. More precisely, we investigate whether particular identified prosodic realizations-previously found for German RQs and ISQs-meet the listeners’ expectation in the context of a presentation situation. We found that listeners prefer lexically marked RQs that are produced with a prosody that is characteristic of German ISQs. We therefore suggest that handbooks should provide their readers not only with clear definitions of RQs as a stylistic device in presentations (i.e., the what ), but also with the respective prosodic realization (i.e., the how ) to make them a properly implemented stylistic device.Item Open Access On the role of informal vs. formal context of language experience in Italian-German primary school children(2024) Piccione, Mariapaola; Ferin, Maria Francesca; Furlani, Noemi; Geiß, Miriam; Marinis, Theodoros; Kupisch, TanjaThis study focuses on the contexts of language experience in relation to language dominance in eighty-seven Italian-German primary school children in Germany using the MAIN narrative task. We compare current language experience in the heritage language (Italian) and the majority language (German) in both formal and informal settings, and we examine the respective impact on micro- and macrostructure measures, including different language domains. Some previous findings emphasized the importance of language experience in formal contexts. By contrast, our results suggest that, in particular, language experience in informal contexts determines vocabulary and fluency in the heritage and majority language, while there are no effects of exposure on syntactic complexity. Furthermore, while the younger children are relatively balanced, the older children are more dominant in the societal language. Our findings imply that the use of the minority language in informal contexts should be encouraged to promote its development and maintenance.Item Open Access An overview of contact-induced morphosyntactic changes in Early English(2023) Walkden, George; Klemola, Juhani; Rainsford, ThomasThis chapter gives an overview of changes in morphology and syntax during the medieval English period that are plausibly induced or catalysed by language contact. Our emphasis is on accurately characterising the contact situations involved, and evaluating the evidence, rather than exhaustively listing every possible contact-induced change, and so the discussion is structured around a few case studies involving each of the three languages that medieval English was in most intense contact with: British Celtic, Old Norse, and Old French. We compare and contrast the contact situations in terms of van Coetsem’s (1988) distinction between borrowing and imposition and Trudgill’s (2011) framework of sociolinguistic typology.Item Open Access Word order in heritage Russian : clause type and majority language matter(2021) Zuban, Yulia; Martynova, Maria; Zerbian, Sabine; Szucsich, Luka; Gagarina, NataliaHeritage speakers (HSs) are known to differ from monolingual speakers in various linguistic domains. The present study focuses on the syntactic properties of monolingual and heritage Russian. Using a corpus of semi-spontaneous spoken and written narratives produced by HSs of Russian residing in the US and Germany, we investigate HSs’ word order patterns and compare them to monolingual speakers of Russian from Saint Petersburg. Our results show that the majority language (ML) of HSs as well as the clause type contribute to observed differences in word order patterns between speaker groups. Specifically, HSs in Germany performed similarly to monolingual speakers of Russian while HSs in the US generally produced more SVO and less OVS orders than the speakers of the latter group. Furthermore, HSs in the US produced more SVO orders than both monolingual speakers and HSs in Germany in embedded clauses, but not in main clauses. The results of the study are discussed with the reference to the differences between main and embedded clauses as well as the differences between the MLs of the HSs.Item Open Access Cognitive mechanisms driving (contact-induced) language change : introduction to the special issue(2024) Percillier, Michael; Schauwecker, YelaThis special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented to investigate language change, and how language change can be theoretically modeled in terms of cognitive mechanisms. In this introductory article, we first outline our aims by describing the call for papers and the workshop which laid the foundation for this special issue. We then provide a state of the art on the integration of research on cognitive mechanisms and language change before introducing the contributions and listing which of the central questions they address.Item Open Access Adjunct control in German, Norwegian, and English(2022) Fischer, Silke; Høyem, Inghild FlaateThis paper presents an overview of adjunct control in German, Norwegian, and English, comprising adverbial infinitives, adverbial present and past participle constructions, as well as adverbial small clauses headed by the particle als in German, som in Norwegian, and as in English. We show that the height of the adjunction site (and thus, following scope-based adjunct theories, the underlying semantics of the adjuncts) determines the control possibilities. Based on a large set of data, we argue that event- and process-modifying adjuncts, i.e. adjuncts adjoined in the verbal domain (at the vP- or VP-level, respectively), display obligatory control (OC) properties, whereas sentence and speech act adverbials, which are adjoined at the TP- and CP-level, respectively, rather involve non-obligatory control (NOC). To capture these data theoretically, we propose a structural account that assumes that OC relations are syntactically licensed under upward Agree with PRO being the referentially defective probe that needs to be referentially identified in the course of the derivation by the controller, i.e. the goal. If the adjunct is adjoined in the verbal domain, such an Agree relation can be successfully established and OC is derived. If adjunction occurs in higher adjunction sites, i.e. outside of the verbal domain, feature valuation under Agree fails; as a last resort strategy, the control relation is then licensed on the basis of pragmatic factors, which yields NOC.Item Open Access Tolerating subject-experiencers? Yang’s Tolerance Principle applied to psych verbs under contact in Middle English(2022) Trips, Carola; Rainsford, ThomasThis article investigates the acquisition of psych verbs in diachrony by applying Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency principles. It has been observed that psych verbs change from expressing the EXPERIENCER as object to expressing it as subject cross-linguistically. According to van Gelderen (2018) and others, this development has also taken place in the history of English. What is much less well-known, however, is that a considerable number of Old French psych verbs were copied to Middle English. Using lexicon-based and corpus-based data, we will apply Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles to evaluate historical “tipping points” in the development of the psych verb class, i.e. examine whether either amuse-type or admire-type argument structures were productive in Middle English. Since subject-EXPERIENCERS were commonly used with intransitive and reflexive constructions we will further investigate whether a more general rule that any psych verb may take a subject-EXPERIENCER passed the productivity threshold. We will show that this was indeed the case in Middle English and that the copying of Old French verbs accelerated this development.Item Open Access Wreading on online literature platforms(2022) Kraxenberger, Maria; Lauer, GerhardMillions of users write and read freely accessible texts every day on online literary platforms (OLPs). Intra-platform surveys aside, only very few studies have considered the demographics of digital readers and authors. Our exploratory study of avid OLP users helps to close this research gap. We requested an international sample of OLP users (13 years and above) to complete an online questionnaire. Our survey gathered demographic data and information about participants’ OLP usage, motivation, (communicative) relationship with other users, and perceptions of the positive effects of OLP usage (Nmax = 315). Among others, our results not only reinforce the theoretical concept of wreading but also indicate that OLPs are likely to enhance the pleasure derived from writing and reading. Our data show that OLP usage is not limited to adolescent users. Reportedly, for participants from Generation Y as well as from Generation Z, the experience of creative freedom and the possibility to get direct reader feedback are major motivational factors to write on OLPs. Also, our data indicate that our surveyed writers on OLPs prefer short stories. We call for more longitudinal investigations and for a common theoretical framework, in order to strengthen future research on digital literature practices and to be able to implement the didactic potential of OLPs in the classroom.