Researches on the image of women in religion and in literature are often a big topic in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The literary image of women are created or made by male authors ab initio because the orient, the birth place of the three religions, was dominated by patriarchy for a long time. Most male authors were writing patriarchal oriented stories, where women were degraded or demoted to second class beings. This brought about stereotypes, prejudices and a prior condemnation of woman, and men placed themselves in the centre of leading stories as well as in literary canons. On the one hand, men were writing about what they thought about women; their image of woman, however, hardly corresponded with what women thought about themselves. On the other hand they were abusing the religious feelings of women and exploited them. This work deals with further research on the concept of women in the above religions and on their fictional portraits in selected novels and stories of Heinrich Böll. The goal of this work is to find out the efforts of feminist literary scholars in their discovery of the lost stories about woman. Feminine identity is more strongly developed in Europe than in Africa. The European women have fought over the years, in order to liberate themselves from patriarchal oppression and subjectivity. That notwithstanding, there remains desiderata. As already mentioned an analysis of the history of women in the religions and in the cultures shows many examples of injustice, prejudice and discrimination. Hitherto in most religions (Christianity “Catholic Church”), Islam, Judaism and African Traditional Religion, women have no chance of leading as chief celebrant in the services. They could always undertake lower functions, but when it is about a higher office, there is always a boundary. My first Ph.D. research: “Women’s Experiences in Selected African Feminist Literary Texts (part of which was published under the title: “Women in World Religions and literatures” (Munster, imprint Verlag ISBN 978-3-936536-25-5), is preoccupied inter alia with this issue: It is an exercise in solidarity with the outsiders, the marginalized and oppressed of the society. Literature can be taken as a reflection of the happenings in the society. In this sense, fictional texts play big roles in the idea of the societal events and experiences. Heinrich Böll’s trend literature represents literary engagement. He remains close to the masses and the oppressed gender/sex. This solidarity with the masses brought him negative Press of the Mass Media as well as the persecutions of the government. Feminist literary writing on one side and feminist political engagement on the other side are of the same opinion that the image of women in the predominant male literatures turned out to be one sided, stereotyped and negative to the advantage of the domineering gender. The ultimate writing of women and feminist activists; be it the left-wing extremists, the liberals or the conservatives, is to fight against this situation: they look for the female identity in the society as well as in literature. Extreme feminist and chauvinist groups in Europe, America and partly in the Third World countries, have made a strong influence through their words and actions, such that the church and the society are bearing the brunt: marital crisis, decline in population, neglect of maternal duties, erosion of family and social values, suicides, running amok and the decline of moral and religious values. According to Böll, these experiences are as a result of the mass reaction of the feminine gender against the tyranny of masculine gender, the church and its supporters. However, such a reaction should not be exaggerated. At this juncture, the argument is between the womanists and the Western feminists. For my case study, I will like to bring in the following fictional works of Heinrich Böll: Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Gruppen Bilm mit Dame, Ansichten eines Clowns and Frauen vor Flusslandschaft. The goal of this work is to proffer possible suggestions and to give some indication of a way forward towards the amelioration of the situation of women as shown by Böll. In order to achieve this goal, I prefer to apply the womanist theoretical frame-work as a solution that can be found in a multicultural society; a kind of recourse to the source (to nature, to the roots). One understands womanism as an ideology of African women, in which they see their interests as that of their children and husbands. Their needs are deeply rooted in the well-being of the community. In order to achieve their goal, African womanists prefer gender-supplement, dialogue and complementarities. Here, Complaints are rare, because the female Gender is part of an administrative system, which has a male and a female hierarchy and in which men and women share the power. When there is complaint, Dialogue and settlement is preferred to confrontation. Obviously, this method is social and historically based and therefore, is not contextual. The womanist method is originally African and considers man and women as complementary. The biological differences between the genders are as evident and undeniable as the need for their combined division of labour in the bearing of off-springs. Apparently, the genders should complement each other instead of confronting each other. In this context, no one is expected to talk about replacement, aping the other or pushing out the other. This world view exists also in Europe and only needs to be rediscovered. The image of the church and the society in Heinrich Böll’s work is womanist oriented, as exemplified by the themes and motives in his novels and stories like authority, love, moral and sexuality, the marry-able woman, the trinity of the female, aesthetic of the human, the pure lady, realism, humanism mercifulness and solidarity with the masses and the rejects. Here, we are quite far away from the l’art pour l’art trend. In these texts, that is the womanist literary texts, a hermeneutic contextual interpretation and aesthetics may not be applicable. As an African, I cannot afford the luxury of l’art pour l’art under the conditions shown above. Here one attempts therefore, to make certain German literature African. One may ask oneself: “How can one, with the above selected background, make the German authors accessible to the African recipients. Consequently, one tries to study how the African readers can read, understand and evaluate German literature – even when this has already been translated into English or French. In my own opinion, a womanist interpretation is step one in the arousing of interest of African recipients. This mediatory role should play the part of laying the foundation for literature readership – the reading of literature- being used as a means of mobilizing Africans to love German studies even at the University level. The question here is: if one wants to communicate to the Africans the feminist novels and stories of Böll, will it then be more appropriate and more result oriented to analyse these texts using womanism or the western feminism? In my own understanding, it is clear that womanism is more appropriate here. The above mentioned works of Böll, in my own opinion, belong to the trend literature Tendenzliteratur as well as the literature of ruins Trümmerliteratur, that is why it is more appropriate, to take them to Africans by means of womanism, an ideology that suites people who are in pains and whose spirits are wounded, and are been daily bruised by the Euro-Americans and their local collaborators – the so called ten percent of the contemporary African polity. In summary, it is worthy to say that Heinrich Böll proved his worth as a womanist in his literary creation. His male and female protagonists realized his vision of traditional community of people. The marriage between the church and the state constitutes or forms a great hindrance in the expected prophetic roles of the church in the society and the evils highlighted above. Religious structure should prevent paragraph-riding, materialism, casuistry, and hypocrisy from encroaching into their hierarchy and membership. Immediately after the Second World War, -1945, Böll himself experienced how inhuman and heartless the church was to the homeless and hungry population. The church committed the sin of conformity or should one say, she sinned by omission and by commission. Her meagre solidarity with the suffering masses – the women and the children and of course the men proved this.

This dissertation focuses on Hungarian-Romanian language contact in Northwest Romania. In the bilingual region of Crişana, a major ethnographic change has occurred since 1920. This has resulted in Hungarians becoming the minority. Migration of ethnic Romanians from the countryside into the cities caused a significant sociolinguistic split between modern urban and traditional rural populations. There has been no sociolinguistic study of the Romanian language in this region up to now. Prior dialect research in the 1960s and 1970s limited itself to contact-induced language change. It contains conflicting views of a number of features of the old, rural Crişana subdialect: mid-open vowels, quantity variation of all vowels, and palatal stops and nasals. Since these features appear in Hungarian too, some scholars consider them to be loans from the contact language, while others do not. An analysis of folk-linguistic beliefs may help explain these inconsistencies. Prior research has not considered this metalinguistic view of the speakers. This dissertation fills this gap. It starts methodologically from a model developed by Krefeld and Pustka (2010), that speakers’ knowledge is manifested both in discourse about language and in actual behavior. A survey was carried out, comprising thirty six hour of interviews with a sample of local people of all linguistic backgrounds and ages. The goal was to collect spontaneous folk linguistic discourse (a method suggested by Niedzielski/Preston 2000). In addition there was a questionnaire with open-ended questions. The present dissertation shows conclusively that phonetic borrowing is not the case but, on the contrary, a folk belief about language. It is argued that the Hungarian contact language effects as a negative model for the development of an urban variety that draws from both the Romanian standard and from eliminating similarities with Hungarian. Another major contribution of the dissertation is a taxonomy of speakers which goes beyond the established dichotomy of „Hungarians” vs. „Romanians”. A distinction between practicing bilinguals („communicators”) and practicing monolinguals („segregators”) turns out to be more convincing. In the field of variational linguistics, the results of this study imply that consideration of folk beliefs can be an important factor for determining the value of older research. Furthermore, in this study it proved to be indispensable for establishing a taxonomy of speakers to take into account not only their linguistic competence but their actual performance.

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The study investigated the ways L2 learners of English reflect on their use of English while completing a writing task and the strategies learners apply in order to resolve their language-related problems. Factors which might have some influence on the learners' noticing and problem-solving behaviour were explored using a qualitative, inductive research approach involving the detailed analyses of ten participants. Think-aloud protocols and stimulated recall interviews were used to investigate learners' noticing while composing and their use of strategies. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted in order to analyze the learners' language learning background and preferences. The analysis was purposely inductive, deriving units of analysis and categories from the data rather than basing it on existing theories. At a later stage, the data-grounded analysis was compared to existing research, terminology and theories, and adapted where necessary. The results of the study revealed three basic tendencies (called types for a better clarity in describing the results) in noticing and strategy use behaviour. Learners of the first type frequently reflected on their language use and effectively applied a wide range of strategies to resolve their problems. The second type also used strategies effectively but applied a low range of strategy types. These learners did not often encounter linguistic problems and their linguistic problems occurred only in a few basic areas such as lexis. The third type were learners who, while encountering different numbers and ranges of language-related episodes, preferred to act intuitively rather than using problem-solving strategies in order to resolve their language-related problems. The different noticing and strategy use profiles were linked to the characteristics of the learners. Learners of the first type all had differentiated views on the importance of communication or accuracy in writing and speaking. Besides this, they exhibited two different sets of characteristics. The first subgroup was confident learners who were motivated to learn English and willing to invest some effort into learning English and other languages. The second subgroup considered learning English as an obligation and their English learning was strongly influenced by school. They were anxious learners with low communicative confidence who seemed to feel forced to reflect on their language use in order to avoid negative consequences. Learners of the second type also saw learning English as an obligation and were influenced by school in their English learning, but as confident learners, they found ways to handle the L2 effectively and to invest only as much effort as necessary. Learners of the third type exhibited a strong private influence on their English learning, combined with the motivation to learn English and other languages. Two of them had a clear preference for oral communication, linked to a less effective use of strategies in writing, whereas one learner used written and spoken English equally and at the same time demonstrated knowledge and effective use of strategies specific to writing. This study complements other studies which were concerned with noticing or strategy use in L2 output, adding new insights concerning the types of language-related problems, the different problem-solving strategies, and the links between these and the learner profiles. Based on the results, possible implications for English language teaching are drawn, stressing the balance of communication and accuracy in English language teaching, and illustrating how the different tendencies found in this study could be considered in foreign language instruction.

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Gegenstand dieser Dissertation sind Konstruktionen ‘am linken Satzrand’ (die sogenannte ‘Linksversetzung’ und das ‘freie Thema’) im gesprochenen Deutsch und Italienisch. Diese Strukturen werden aus der Perspektive der interaktionalen Linguistik und der Konversationsanalyse betrachtet und mit Methoden der Gesprächsforschung analysiert. Es werden insbesondere die folgenden Fragen behandelt: Welche interaktionalen Aufgaben werden durch die Verwendung einer Konstruktion am linken Satzrand gelöst? Welche Merkmale weisen diese emergenten Konstruktionen in der Rede-in-der-Interaktion auf? Gibt es Unterschiede zwischen Deutsch und Italienisch hinsichtlich der interaktionalen Dynamiken, die solche Konstruktionen charakterisieren? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten wurden die Konstruktionen in ihrem sequentiellen Kontext in verschiedenen Korpora des gesprochenen Italienischen und des gesprochenen Deutsch analysiert. Die Datenanalyse hat ergeben, dass die untersuchten Konstruktionen im Deutschen und im Italienischen mit ähnlichen interaktionalen Aufgaben verbunden sind: Sie werden übereinzelsprachlich als Ressourcen für die thematische und konversationelle Strukturierung benutzt. Die Analyse hat ferner gezeigt, dass diese Konstruktionen keine feste Strukturen darstellen, die bestimmten a-priori etablierten formalen Kriterien zugeordnet werden können, sondern flexible Ressourcen sind, die strategisch eingesetzt werden, und je nach Kommunikationssituation unterschiedliche Merkmale zeigen. Ein allgemeineres Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, Ansätze und Methoden der Gesprächsforschung und der interaktionalen Linguistik mit der italienischen Gesprochene-Sprache-Forschung zu verbinden. Trotz der Aufmerksamkeit, die die gesprochene Sprache erfährt, werden in den Arbeiten zum Italienischen Aspekte wie der Zusammenhang zwischen Syntax und Interaktion oder die Zeitlichkeit des Gesprochenen kaum betrachtet. Darüber hinaus zielt die Dissertation darauf ab, Überlegungen über die Adäquatheit der Nutzung der Termini ‘Linksversetzung’ und ‘linke Saztperipherie’ in Bezug auf Phänomene der gesprochenen Sprache zu fördern, indem alternative Termini vorgeschlagen werden.

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This thesis is concerned with the mechanisms by which pre-aspiration changes into post-aspiration in Andalusian Spanish. In this variety pre-aspiration is the result of the weakening of syllable final /s/ before a voiceless stop (e.g. [ˈpasta] -> [ˈpahta]). An apparent-time study was carried out to investigate whether there is a sound change in progress from pre- to post-aspiration ([ˈpahta] -> [ˈpatha]) in Andalusian Spanish. An acoustic analysis of isolated words (e.g. espanto, estado, escapa) produced by younger and older Eastern and Western Andalusian speakers was carried out. The results provided evidence for a sound change in progress by which pre-aspiration is gradually giving way to post-aspiration. Further durational analyses suggest that the sound change is more advanced in Western than in Eastern Andalusian Spanish, and that post-aspiration lengthening and pre-aspiration shortening are not directly linked. A perception experiment was carried out to test whether listeners of Andalusian Spanish use post-aspiration to distinguish /t/ and /st/ in the minimal pair /pata/-/pasta/. Younger listeners and Western Andalusians, who produced a longer post-aspiration, were also more sensitive to post-aspiration as a cue to /st/ than Eastern Andalusians and older listeners. The aim of a second perception experiment was to test how listeners of Argentinian Spanish, a non-post-aspirating variety, perceive pre- and post-aspirated stops. The results suggest that in a stimulus [ˈpahtha] with pre- and post-aspiration, post-aspiration is perceptually more prominent. These findings support a model of the Andalusian sound change in which not only articulatory but also perceptual factors are involved. / Gegenstand dieser Dissertation sind die sogenannte Präaspiration und die Mechanismen, die einem diachronen Wandel von Prä- zu Postaspiration im andalusischen Spanisch zu Grunde liegen. Präaspiration ist im andalusischen Spanisch als Folge der Schwächung von silbenfinalem /s/ vor stimmlosen Plosiven entstanden (z.B. [ˈpasta] -> [ˈpahta]). In einer apparent-time Studie wurde untersucht, ob im andalusischen Spanisch für /sp, st, sk/ gegenwärtig ein Lautwandel von Prä- zu Postaspiration ([ˈpahta] -> [ˈpatha]) stattfindet. Wörter mit medialem /sp, st, sk/ (z.B. espanto, estado, escapa), gesprochen von jüngeren und älteren West- und Ostandalusiern, wurden phonetisch-akustisch analysiert. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass im andalusischen Spanisch ein gradueller Lautwandel stattfindet, durch den Postaspiration entsteht und Präaspiration zunehmend schwindet. Weitere Daueranalysen zeigten auf, dass der Lautwandel im Westandalusischen weiter fortgeschritten ist als im Ostandalusischen, und dass die Entstehung der Postaspiration nicht unmittelbar mit dem Verschwinden der Präaspiration einhergeht. In einem Perzeptionsexperiment wurde untersucht, ob andalusische Hörer die Postaspiration nutzen, um /t/ und /st/ im Minimalpaar/pata/-/pasta/ zu unterscheiden. Jüngere Hörer und Westandalusier, die selber eine lange Postaspiration produzierten, waren sensibler für die Postaspiration als Cue von /st/ als Ostandalusier und ältere Hörer. In einem zweiten Perzeptionsexperiment mit Argentiniern wurde getestet, wie Prä- und Postaspiration in einer Varietät des Spanischen wahrgenommen wird, die keine Postaspiration kennt. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass in einem Stimulus [ˈpahtha] mit Prä- und Postaspiration die Postaspiration perzeptiv dominanter ist und unterstützen damit ein Modell für den andalusischen Lautwandel, das auch perzeptive Faktoren berücksichtigt.