The present study examines food and meals in the Icelandic Family Sagas. While often inconspicuous, references to the production, distribution and consumption of food and drink can be shown to fulfil crucial functions in this body of mediaeval texts. As a starting point, the food sources and eating habits of Icelanders in the Viking and Middle Ages are examined in the light of archaeological, historical and ethnographic research. When the results are compared to the economy of food as visible in the Family Sagas, the latter can be demonstrated to carry a distinctive bias for those forms of agriculture that translated most easily into wealth and status and/or lay in the responsibility of men, while being less concerned with the economic reality of the poor(er) or women. It is further observed that the Family Sagas avoid the picturing of food and eating in most of their numerous meal and feast scenes. This is argued to reflect a distinction between the social institution of eating (together) and the physical act of (individual) eating, which, as a basically egotistic bodily activity, is at odds with the social implications of a shared meal. Meals, feasts and the hosting of guests are means of status policy as well as of the establishment and maintenance of social bonds, while the potential of both humour and aggression inherent to themes of food and eating is put to use in the context of conflict, insult and battle. In the final chapter, some conspicuous alimentary imagery of Eiríks saga rauða and Njáls saga is shown to carry strong intertextual references to the Bible and clerical writings, aiding a religiously informed reading of some central passages in these sagas.

This thesis is concerned with the rhythmical structure of speech under the influence of alcohol. All analyses presented are based on the Alcohol Language Corpus, which is a collection of speech uttered by 77 female and 85 male sober and intoxicated speakers. Experimental research was carried out to find robust, automatically extractable features of the speech signal that indicate speaker intoxication. These features included rhythm measures, which reflect the durational variability of vocalic and consonantal elements and are normally used to classify languages into different rhythm classes. The durational variability was found to be greater in the speech of intoxicated individuals than in the speech of sober individuals, which suggests, that speech of intoxicated speakers is more irregular than speech of sober speakers. Another set of features describes the dynamics of the short-time energy function of speech. Therefore different measures are derived from a sequence of energy minima and maxima. The results also reveal a greater irregularity in the speech of intoxicated individuals. A separate investigation about speaking rate included two different measures. One is based on the phonetic segmentation and is an estimate of the number of syllables per second. The other is the mean duration of the time intervals between successive maxima of the short-time energy function of speech. Both measures denote a decreased speaking rate in the speech of intoxicated speakers compared to speech uttered in sober condition. The results of a perception experiment show that a decrease in speaking rate also is an indicator for intoxication in the perception of speech. The last experiment investigates rhythmical features based on the fundamental frequency and energy contours of speech signals. Contours are compared directly with different distance measures (root mean square error, statistical correlation and the Euclidean distance in the spectral space of the contours). They are also compared by parameterization of the contours using Discrete Cosine Transform and the first and second moments of the lower DCT spectrum. A Principal Components Analysis on the contour data was also carried out to find fundamental contour forms regarding the speech of intoxicated and sober individuals. Concerning the distance measures, contours of speech signals uttered by intoxicated speakers differ significantly from contours of speech signals uttered in sober condition. Parameterization of the contours showed that fundamental frequency contours of speech signals uttered by intoxicated speakers consist of faster movements and energy contours of speech signals uttered by intoxicated speakers of slower movements than the respective contours of speech signals uttered in sober condition. Principal Components Analysis did not find any interpretable fundamental contour forms that could help distinguishing contours of speech signals of intoxicated speakers from those of speech uttered in sober condition. All analyses prove that the effects of alcoholic intoxication on different features of speech cannot be generalized but are to a great extent speaker-dependent.

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The present empirical study investigates how university language teachers approach their own professional development (PD) and which forms their development can take. Research into teacher professional development largely tends to concentrate on school teachers, whereas in this study university language teachers are the focus of interest. Furthermore, the role of teachers’ personal contributions to their own professional learning is the main concern of the study rather than which features of teacher programmes might have a positive impact on teachers’ development. The way the teachers proceed in accomplishing their PD task has been documented through a Grounded Theory approach to data. Questionnaries and follow-up semi-structured qualitative interviews were used to explore the approaches of ten university language teachers. Two professional profiles were identified and were named the 'Learners' and the 'Developers' because they correspond to Vygotsky’s (1978) distinction between learning and development and because this best characterises the teachers' differences in this study. The characteristics of the two profiles centre around their awareness, the way they arrange their learning environment and their attitudinal orientation. The teachers with a “developer”-profile display a high capacity of ‘professional self’-revision, have a highly developed awareness of their own learning concerns and set long-term and demanding professional goals that require them to go beyond routines. They maintain a focused attention on their goals and on the various tasks to pursue them, and are attentive to their positive emotional well-being as teachers as well as to their cognitive needs. One critical result is that they adopt and develop appropriate strategies that lead them to their goals. As a consequence, they enter a cycle of change and ultimately achieve their affective goals. The teachers with a ‘learner’-profile on the contrary are less attentive to all the relevant dimensions involved in their own professional learning. Contrary to the ‘developer’-colleagues, they lack the strategies appropriate for them to realise their goals and to reduce the complexity of the teacher development task. Their personal contribution to their own development is limited, their learning environment is consequently more secure, but less challenging than for the previous profile, and requires less effort on their behalf. Overall, they do not seem to be completely in charge of their own learning and reproduced “traditional” learners’ behaviours. Their attitudes towards their own professional development did not accord with their lifelong learning goals. Their ‘professional self’ could be more intensively developed. The present study aims to complement the existing debate on language teachers’ professionalism and to add new insights on the dynamic way in which teachers make sense of their professional development. Based on the results, it is hoped that a contribution will be made to bridging the gap between research and practice by indicating how to augment existing reflective tools, such as teachers’ portfolios, designed to sustain reflection in language teachers and thus advance their professional development.

Earlier studies of Estonian showed that vowel quantity words (i.e. words dif- fering only in vowel quantity) produced with an H*+L pitch accent differed in their peak alignment: While words with a short and a long vowel had a peak late in the vowel of the stressed syllable, words with an overlong vowel were characterised by a peak earlier in the vowel (e.g. Asu et al., 2009; Lippus et al., 2013). The main aim of this dissertation is to shed light on these peak alignment differences: firstly, whether these alignment differences can be ex- plained with the help of a segmental anchor; secondly, whether alignment is similarily affected by quantity differences in consonants and vowels; thirdly, whether such alignment differences are stable in regard to the prosodic con- text, more precisely in regard to the number of post-focal unstressed syllables (i.e. the vicinity to the sentence boundary) and a variation of the speaking rate. Additionally, not only the peak alignment in regard to the vicinity of an upcoming sentence boundary was investigated, but also the influence of the sentence boundary on segment durations (phrase-final lengthening - PFL). Previous studies (e.g. Krull, 1997; Asu et al., 2009) showed that PFL occurs in Estonian, but it was not studied yet whether PFL affects vowel and consonant quantity words differently. Furthermore no attempt made to explain PFL in Estonian with the help of abstract phonological models. The purpose of this dissertation is to fill this gap. This dissertation contains three different experiments which are presented in one chapter each. The first experiment (chapter 2) explored the influence of the upcoming sentence boundary and its interaction with vowel (VQ) and consonant (CQ) quantity on the peak alignment of falling nuclear H*+L pitch accents. Disyllabic target words (C 1 V 1 C 2 V 2 ) only differing in either the quantity of V 1 (VQ-words) or C 2 (CQ-words) were embedded in two different carrier sentences: in one carrier sentence the target word was followed by two unstressed syllables (long tail context) and in the other by none (short tail ixcontext). All target words occured in three quantity degrees: short (Q1), long (Q2) and overlong (Q3). There were two main results: (1) In the short tail context the peak was aligned earlier. (2) The peak alignment of VQ- and CQ-words was similar. Quantity degree differences of both VQ- and CQ- words were cued by the peak alignment in proportion to the V 1 C 2 -duration. The proportional peak alignment had the order Q3 < Q2 < Q1, where < denotes that the peak of Q3-words was proportionally timed earlier than the peak of Q2-words and so on. The second experiment (chapter 3) analysed the influence of the sentence boundary, i.e. phrase-final lengthening (PFL), on the segment durations of VQ- and CQ-words. The data used for the analysis was the same as in the first experiment. There were two main results: (1) The domain of PFL in Estonian was the main bearer of the quantity contrast, i.e. V 1 in VQ-words and C 2 in CQ-words and can be best accounted for in terms of a Structure- based model for explaining PFL (Turk and Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2007). (2) Progressive lengthening, i.e. the nearer a segment is to the final boundary the more it is lengthened, occured in the data if the lengthened segments were not in adjacent word-final position. The third experiment (chapter 4) investigated whether speaking rate in- fluences the alignment of the peak. VQ- and CQ-words were embedded in carrier sentences with one unstressed syllable following the target word. They were read in normal and fast speaking rate. There were two main results: (1) In both VQ- and CQ-words the peak alignment in proportion to the V 1 C 2 -duration had the order Q3 < Q2 < Q1, where < denotes that the peak of Q3-words was aligned earlier than the peak of Q2-words and so on. (2) Speaking rate did not influence the peak alignment in proportion to the V 1 C 2 -duration. The results of this dissertation favour in interpretation in the sense of the segmental anchoring hypothesis (see e.g. Ladd et al., 1999, 2000; Schepman et al., 2006) that tonal targets are anchored with specific points of the seg- mental string. The results of the current dissertation created the impression that in Estonian the offset of the first mora could be the anchorpoint for the peak - regardless of quantity degree and type. Differences in the proportional peak alignment emerge because the anchorpoint interacts with the temporal correlates of the quantity contrast. Compatibly with Ladd (2008), the results of the dissertation also show that peak alignment in Estonian is influenced by phonologically-induced (an increase in the number of post-focal syllables) but not phonetically-induced (faster speaking rate) time pressure.

Der Philosophiedozent und Schriftsteller Aleksandr Sekackij ist Mitglied der Petersburger Fundamentalisten, einem seit 2001 bestehenden Zusammenschluss Petersburger Schriftsteller, der dem neoimperialen Lager zugerechnet wird. Bekannt ist die Gruppe vor allem durch einen offenen Brief an Vladimir Putin aus dem Jahre 2001. Darin fordern sie Putin auf, Car’grad und die Dardanellen zu erobern. Sekackij gilt als Vordenker der Gruppierung. Die Arbeit untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen dem Petersburger Fundamentalismus und Sekackij und analysiert Sekackijs Subjektpositionen, die dieser in seinen Werken anhand verschiedener Figuren ausarbeitet. Im Ergebnis offerieren Sekackijs Texte einen Umwertungsmechanismus, der Orientierung in Form eines vielfältigen Überhöhungsprogramms für Individuen anbietet. Das Individuum kann sich mit Bezug auf Sekackijs fiktionale Welten überzeichnen und durch die dort geschilderten Subjektkonsolidierungen mit verschiedenen Arten von Handlungsmacht ausstatten. Dergestalt wird das Individuum, wenn auch nur fiktional, von aller Kontingenz befreit. Im Petersburger Fundamentalismus wird dieses Kompensationsprinzip zum Sekackij-Prinzip und dort nachhaltig mit Vorstellungen einer imperialen Jüngerschaft verbunden, die sich um den zum Seher oder zum Weisen stilisierten Sekackij gruppieren.

Diese Dissertation geht von einem Zusammenhang zwischen der Grundfrequenz und der Perzeption von Vokalen, speziell der Höhe von Vokalen, aus - wie viele Vorgängerstudien auch - und diskutiert Konsequenzen, die sich aus diesem Umstand ergeben; außerdem führt sie neue Evidenzen an, dass unter bestimmten Bedingungen die Grundfrequenz auch zur Produktion von Vokalhöhendistinktionen aktiv variiert werden kann. In einer longitudinalen Studie wurden Aufnahmen aus mehreren Jahrzehnten, die von den selben britischen Sprechern stammten und auf Gleichwertigkeit der Kommunikationssituation kontrolliert worden waren, daraufhin untersucht, wie sich Alterungsprozesse in erwachsenen Sprechern auf die mittlere Grundfrequenz und die Formanten F1, F2 und F3 im Neutrallaut Schwa, bzw. auf die als äquivalent hierzu festgestellten gemittelten Formantwerte in allen stimmhaften Signalanteilen auswirken. Die Grundfrequenzen von Frauen werden als mit dem Alter fallend beschrieben, während Männer eine zunächst absinkende, später ansteigende Grundfrequenz aufweisen. Der zweite Formant ändert sich nur marginal, und auch F3 weist keine über alle Sprecher konsistenten, signifikanten Änderungen auf. Im Gegensatz hierzu ändert sich F1 mit zunehmendem Alter deutlich, und zwar bei den meisten Sprechern in die selbe Richtung wie die Grundfrequenz. In Daten eines Sprechers und einer Sprecherin, die in kurzen Abständen regelmäßig über ein halbes Jahrhundert hinweg aufgenommen worden waren, wird eine deutliche Kovariation des ersten Formanten mit der Grundfrequenz deutlich, wobei der Abstand zwischen F1 und Grundfrequenz auf einer logarithmischen Skala auch über Jahrzehnte hinweg relativ invariant bleibt. Die Hypothese hierzu ist, dass altersbedingte Formantänderungen weniger auf physiologisch bedingte Änderungen in den Abmessungen des Ansatzrohrs zurückzuführen seien, sondern auf eine kompensatorische Anpassung des ersten Formanten als Reaktion auf eine Perturbation des Vokalhöhenperzepts, welche hervorgerufen wird durch die (physiologisch bedingten) Grundfrequenzänderungen. Diese Hypothese schließt mit ein, dass das Vokalhöhenperzept der Sprecher/Hörer durch den in Relation zu f0 zu beurteilenden ersten Formanten bestimmt ist. Um diese letzte Schlussfolgerung weiter zu testen, wurden deutsche Sprecher in zwei Experimenten in Quasi-Echtzeit einem akustisch verändertem auditorischen Feedback ausgesetzt, und ihre akustischen Daten untersucht. Beide Perturbationen hatten das Ziel, das Vokalhöhenperzept (direkt oder indirekt) zu beeinflussen: Für eine Perturbation des ersten Formanten kompensierten die Sprecher mit einer F1-Produktion in Gegenrichtung zur Perturbation. Gleichzeitige Änderungen der produzierten Grundfrequenz sind teilweise als automatisch eintretende Kopplungseffekte zu deuten; unter bestimmten Bedingungen scheinen manche Sprecher jedoch f0 unabhängig von F1 aktiv zu variieren, um die intendierte Vokalhöhe zu erreichen. Bei einer Perturbation der Grundfrequenz variieren einige Sprecher den ersten Formanten dergestalt, dass zu vermuten ist, dass der aufgrund nur partiell durchgeführter f0-Kompensation weiterhin gegenüber den unperturbierten Werten veränderte F1-f0-Abstand das Vokalhöhenperzept beeinflusste, was zu einer kompensatorischen Gegenbewegung in Form einer Vokalhöhenvariierung führte. Ein Perzeptionsexperiment mit ausschließlich durch Grundfrequenzvariierung beeinflussten Kontinua zwischen vorderen halb-geschlossenen und geschlossenen Vokalen in Wörtern gleichen Kontexts, welche in Trägersätze eingebettet präsentiert wurden, ergab, dass die Grundfrequenzvariation nur etwa bei der Hälfte der deutschen Hörer das Vokalperzept beeinflusste. Das vokalintrinsische Merkmal wird aber trotz des störenden Einflusses extrinsischer Faktoren genutzt, und auch trotz der intonatorischen Funktion der Grundfrequenz. Die durch Ergebnisse von Untersuchungen zur Intrinsischen Grundfrequenz im Deutschen motivierte Hypothese, dass deutsche Hörer den F1-f0-Abstand als Vokalhöhenmerkmal in stärkerem Ausmaß in einem Kontinuum zwischen ungespannten Vokalen nutzen, als in einem Kontinuum zwischen gespannten Vokalen, konnte nicht bestätigt werden. Generell liefern alle drei experimentellen Teile dieser Dissertation weitere Evidenz dafür, dass - zumindest in den vergleichsweise vokalhöhenreichen Sprachen Englisch und Deutsch - viele, aber eben nicht alle Sprecher/Hörer zur Vokalhöhenperzeption und -produktion neben F1 auch die Grundfrequenz nutzen.

The present thesis illustrates how metaphors can offer a glimpse into people’s worldviews; they can enable insights both into individuals’ and nation’s attitudes and beliefs. It is suggested, however, that in order to assure a greater validity of results a flexible methodological approach needs to be adopted, or, more precisely, a combination of methods is almost indispensable. A mixture of methods (corpus, sociocultural information gained from sociological studies and questionnaire) was applied in order to seek authentic ways of conceptualisation of the EU, but also ways of conceptualising of prevalent source domains in the EU debate.

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