https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/33233 2026-04-29T00:37:24Z https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/48043 A reference guide to the syntax of North American Norwegian Kinn, Kari; Putnam, Michael T. Synopsis: North American Norwegian (NAmNo) is a diasporic heritage variety of Norwegian spoken primarily in the Upper Midwest of the United States. NAmNo has been in use since the mid-19th century, but it is now moribund. This volume serves as a synopsis of previous research focusing on the syntax of this language while also expanding upon these findings in key domains. Beyond the rich empirical description of facets of North American Norwegian syntax, the chapters in this volume also contribute to theory-building efforts from a Minimalist perspective. Kari Kinn and Michael T. Putnam begin the volume introducing the language and the theoretical preliminaries of aspects of the Minimalist Program found throughout the volume. The introductory chapter is followed by a detailed history of the emigration and language during the settlement period by Arnstein Hjelde. Brita Ramsevik Riksem and Mari Nygård explore the intricacies of agreement in determiner phrases, while Yvonne van Baal investigates its properties of definiteness. Kari Kinn rounds out the contributions on aspects of determiner phrases by taking a closer look at how possession is licensed in these structures. Shifting focus to the verbal and clausal domains, Kristin Eide’s chapter addresses the syntactic reflexes of tense, modality, and aspect in NAmNo. The structure of non-finite clauses is the theme of Michael T. Putnam and Åshild Søfteland’s contribution, which is followed up by Merete Anderssen, Helene R. Jensberg, Terje Lohndal, Björn Lundquist, and Marit Westergaard’s treatment of verb second (V2) word and finite verb placement. Ida Larsson and Kari Kinn analyze argument placement in NAmNo, focusing particularly on subject shift, object shift, and verb particles. Michael T. Putnam and Kari Kinn conclude the volume with an epilogue, highlighting the key empirical and theoretical findings of these contributions as well as charting a course for future research on the syntax of NAmNo. In summary, this volume is the first of its kind whose mission is not only to simultaneously summarize previous and ongoing research on the syntax of NAmNo, but to also demonstrate the important role heritage language syntax contributes to our understanding of the acquisition, attrition, change, and maintenance of heritage language syntax. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/48035 Bewertung und Variation der Präpositionalkasus im Deutschen Vieregge, Annika Synopsis: Die Arbeit untersucht den Einfluss der metapragmatischen Bewertung von Genitiv und Dativ auf die Nutzung der Kasus in Präpositionalphrasen. Die Variation zwischen Genitiv- und Dativrektion betrifft insbesondere Präpositionen, die noch nicht vollständig grammatikalisiert sind. Daher wurde das Phänomen bisher vor allem aus grammatikalisierungstheoretischer Sicht betrachtet. Dies greift jedoch zu kurz – vielmehr hat die metapragmatische Bewertung der Kasus entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Kasuswahl. Genitiv und Dativ werden von SprecherInnen sehr unterschiedlich bewertet: Der Genitiv gilt als Prestigekasus, der Dativ wird mit geringer Bildung und Umgangssprachlichkeit verbunden. Die Arbeit untersucht daher einerseits Sprachideologien zu Dativ und Genitiv genauer und andererseits den Einfluss der metapragmatischen Bewertung auf die Kasuswahl. Hierfür wurden exemplarisch die ursprünglichen Genitivpräpositionen wegen und während sowie die ursprünglichen Dativpräpositionen dank und gegenüber untersucht. Zusätzlich wurde die Primärpräposition seit in die Studie aufgenommen. Die metagpragmatische Bewertung der Kasus wurde mitihlfe eines Akzeptabilitätstest und Abfragen freier Assoziationen untersucht, der Einfluss auf die Kasuswahl mithilfe von Produktionsdaten. An der umfangreichen Onlinestudie nahmen 400 Muttersprachler:innen des Deutschen teil. Die Arbeit ist damit die erste, die die metapragmatische Bewertung von Genitiv und Dativ in den Mittelpunkt stellt, systematisch erhebt und im Rahmen der Sprachideologieforschung diskutiert. In der Studie zeigt sich deutlich, dass den untersuchten Rektionsvarianten eine ganze Reihe unterschiedlicher indexikalischer Bedeutungen zugeschrieben werden: Der Genitiv wird als formell angesehen und steht für hohe Bildung, gute Sprachkenntnisse, Arroganz, Professionalität und Verkrampftheit. Der Dativ gilt als informell und steht für geringe Bildung, mangelnde Sprachkenntnisse und Schlampigkeit. Die im Fragebogen erhobenen Produktionsdaten verdeutlichen den Einfluss dieser metapragmatischen Bewertungen und bestätigen das mangelnde Erklärungspotenzial der Grammatikalisierungstheorie: Sowohl bei ursprünglichen Genitiv- als auch bei ursprünglichen Dativpräpositionen lässt sich eine Tendenz zum Genitiv erkennen, insbesondere im formell gehaltenen Produktionsteil. Diese Ergebnisse sprechen dafür, dass die Variation der präpositionalen Rektion in hohem Maße von der metapragmatischen Bewertung der Kasus beeinflusst wird und die Varianten entsprechend ihrer sozialen Bedeutung genutzt werden. Der Preis der gebundenen Ausgabe ist in Deutschland auf 45,00€ festgesetzt. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/48701 Discourse structure and narration Demske, Ulrike; Bloom, Barthe Synopsis: The volume Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic deals with questions of information structuring at discourse level, focusing on narrative discourses. More precisely, it is about the contribution of grammatical devices to the organization of texts as well as their diagnostic potential for the narrative text type. Although it is well-known that information packaging had a much greater impact on the distribution of grammatical patterns in historical stages of a language than it does today, so far many studies on the relationship between information structure and grammatical patterns do not go beyond the sentence level, in other words, they do not take into account the possible influence of the text type on the manifestation of certain grammatical patterns. How and to which degree changes in grammatical patterns correlate or are affected by changes in either discourse and/or narrative structure, how the two layers interact with each other and affect each other, and how such issues can be operationalized are still understudied. This volume aims to shed more light on these issues by presenting eight papers, which address these questions more or less explicitly. As the research questions imply, the papers all take a historical or diachronic perspective. Another commonality between the studies is that they all focus on data from Germanic languages, as we assume that by comparing closely related languages, the relationships in question become more pronounced. Specifically, the languages in question are German, Dutch, English and Icelandic. Understandably, the contributions in this volume can only highlight some aspects of the complex relationship between grammar and narration(s). Addressing among others questions of narrative progression, temporal structure, reference tracking and discourse functions, the contributions discuss phenomena such as temporal adverbials at the left periphery as well as later in the clause, left dislocation structures, fronting of the finite verb in dependent and independent clauses, linguistic means to express aspectual and tense information, and the distribution of nominalization patterns across text types. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/41154 Encyclopaedia of German diatheses Cysouw, Michael Synopsis: Diathesis ("valency alternation") is a sentence structure that reshapes the roles of a verb. The prototypical example of such a diathesis is the well-known passive. However, there are very many other such role-remappings, like antipassives, applicatives, causatives, etc. This book presents an encyclopaedic survey of diathesis in German. The objective is to catalogue all diatheses that exist in this language. Currently almost 250 different German diatheses are described in this book, some highly productive, some only attested for a handful of verbs. The main goal of this book is to present this wealth of grammatical possibility in a unified manner, while at the same time attempting to classify and organise this diversity. A summary of the about 80 most prominent diatheses is also provided, including many newly-minted German names, because most these diatheses did not have a German name yet. It might come as a surprise that there are so many different diatheses in German, but my impression is that in this respect German is no exception among the world's languages. I expect that all languages have a similar abundance of different ways in which to construe a sentence around a lexical predicate. In a sense, a diathesis allows for the expression of a distinct perspective on the event described, something that is arguably a common desire of any language user. Except for diathesis this book also aims to completely catalogue its counterpart: epithesis. An epithesis is a derived sentence structure in which the marking of the verb roles remains constant. Basically, these are the grammaticalised constructions expressing tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality in German. The list of major epitheses is also quite long (about 40 constructions), but it is quite a bit smaller than the list of major diatheses (about 80 constructions). This indicates that from a purely grammatical perspective, diathesis ("grammatical voice") is about a two-times more elaborate topic than epithesis ("tense-aspect-mood marking") in German. 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z