The present paper reports on an investigation into an English un-participle pattern that is called unpassive, or is described as an adjectival passive. The main characteristic of the pattern is an (adjectival) past participle prefixed by un-, which is used as a predicative complement to a verb. Besides the different terms used for the pattern, there is also some indeterminacy with respect to its particular form. All of the descriptions focus on the verb BE, but mention is also made of GO and REMAIN. That is, the specifications of the pattern’s formal side differ to some extent. To provide information on this issue and to get hold of potential (verb-related) differences in the pattern’s function, we conducted an empirical analysis from a usage-based construction grammar perspective. Our focus is on the form-function interplay of the pattern in order to gain information about its constructional status and its exact formal and semantic make-up. The database selected for this study is the BNC, from which all occurrences of ‘verb plus un-participle’ were extracted. The data were submitted to collexeme and covarying collexeme analyses to identify the spectrum of meanings/functions associated with these forms, and distinctive collexeme analyses were carried out to see whether the un-participles found pattern differently with the individual verbs. The results indicate that, on closer examination, the un-participle construction does not represent a homogeneous category, but must be seen as a schematic template of related, though different, usage events that may have expanded analogously from a prototype construction. On the basis of our analyses and informed by findings from developmental studies, we suggest that the related constructions form a network.

Wissenschaftliche Gegenstände sind zum Großteil solche, die erst aus einer bestimmten Perspektive – das heißt von einem bestimmten Sichtpunkt aus mit einer bestimmten Blickrichtung und besonderen Fokussierung –interessant werden. Perspektiven dieser Art sind u. a. theoretische Ansätze, deren Prämissen es erlauben, in einer alternativen, aber bestimmten Weise auf schon vermeintlich bekanntes Material zu blicken und einen neuen Gegenstand herauszuarbeiten. Idealerweise stellen Ansätze dieser Art auch ein Methodenrepertoire zur Verfügung und belassen es nicht bei einer groben Andeutung des neuen Blickpunktes, so dass sich an empirischen Analysen die Tauglichkeit des Ansatzes prüfen lässt.

Entgegen traditionellen Vorstellungen, die bisher davon ausgingen, dass der politische Prozess und politisches Denken wesentlich durch objektive Faktenlage und vernunftgemäßes Handeln bestimmt seien, vertritt die Autorin Elisabeth Wehling die Auffassung, dass „gedankliche Deutungsrahmen […], Frames genannt“ den politischen Diskurs nicht nur beeinflussen, sondern sogar „entscheiden“.

No description available.

Im Alter von 71 Jahren entscheidet sich Johann Mattheson (1681-1764), nach dem Ur­teil Friedrich Blumes der »bedeutendste Kritiker, Ästhetiker, Polemiker, ja Enzyklopä­dist der deutschen M[usik]g[eschichte] des 18. Jahrhunderts« dazu,1 ein Philologisches Tresespiel zu publizieren.2 Anstoß dazu mag, wie Siegfried Kross vermutet,3 die Veröf­fentlichung der Lehre deutscher Vorwörter von Elias Caspar Reichard vom Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig gewesen sein, dem Mattheson das Tresespiel widmete. Ob tatsächlich eine frühere Fassung von 1742 existierte, wie Mattheson behauptet, lässt sich nicht bestätigen. Dieses Tresespiel stellt den Abschluss der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Mattheson und Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766) dar, die ihren Aus­gang nahm von der Veröffentlichung der Rezension Gottscheds über den Critischen Musicus Johann Adolph Scheibes (1708-1776) im »drei und zwanzigsten Stück« der Beyträge zur critischen Historie der Deutschen Sprache, Poesie und Beredsamkeit.

L’article suivant se veut un médiateur entre la linguistique systémique fonction-nelle (LSF, SFL en anglais), très répandue dans la linguistique anglophone et la théorie linguistique d’Eugenio Coseriu, mieux connue dans les études des langues romanes. Les deux théories se basent, au moins en partie, sur les concepts saussu-riens de langue et parole. Coseriu y a découvert des lacunes laissant inexpliqués certains phénomènes langagiers. A partir de ces lacunes l’article explique pour-quoi Coseriu et Elisabeth Burr propagent la nécessité d’un troisième plan linguis-tique, celui de la norme. Continuant par la reformulation des points critiques de Burr, selon lesquelles le modèle linguistique de la LSF ne dispose d’une norme ni pourrait en disposer, on étudie comment la LSF gère les lacunes saussuriennes identifiées par Coseriu. A la base de certains concepts centraux de la LSF, dont les méta-fonctions, l’instanciation et le modèle du système linguistique, on vise à montrer que le modèle linguistique de la LSF a déjà partiellement intégré des con-cepts comparables à celui de la norme, mais que la LSF pourrait aussi profiter de certaines idées développées par Coseriu. / The following article aims at mediating between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, the former well established in English linguistics, the latter better known by linguists of Romance languages. Both theories are based at least partially on the Saussurean concepts of langue and parole. Within these concepts, Coseriu has discovered certain gaps leaving unex-plained several linguistic phenomena. Taking these gaps as a starting point, the article explains why Coseriu and Elisabeth Burr advocate the necessity of a third linguistic layer, the one of the norm. Continuing by some of Burr’s claims towards SFL, according to which its linguistic model does not and will not be able to con-tain the idea of a normative layer, the article asks how SFL treats the gaps identi-fied by Coseriu. On the basis of certain key concepts of SFL, like meta-functions, instantiation and the linguistic system, the article wants to show that SFL has par-tially integrated concepts comparable to the one of norm, but that it could benefit from some aspects of Coseriu’s linguistic theory anyway.

In his paper “ELF and the alternatives,” Ian MacKenzie considers a number of options that are presently under discussion as possible alternatives to the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Their scope includes translation (a short section of two paragraphs only), code switching, receptive multilingualism, and Esperanto. It is the presentation of the latter approach that I want to address in this comment. As MacKenzie’s bibliography contains two articles of mine and as these seem to be important sources on which the author bases his argumentation, I suppose that I should react to his paper.

No description available.

Having emigrated from France to Russia, Charlotte Lemonnier has survived the cruelties of the Stalinist regime and the Second World War. Maintaining great serenity of soul, she lives freely among the inhabitants of a small village in Siberia, conveying to her grandson Alyosha a vivid image of the freedom available in France as well as a feel for the French language. The adolescent tries to reconcile Charlotte’s tales with the Russian mentality and the hardships of life in Russia, but fails in his aspirations, particularly in the domain of eroticism. He eventually emigrates to France, where he seeks to overcome Anthroponymes et toponymes dans Le testament français d’Andreï Makine 125 his disappointment by writing novels in French. Through Charlotte’s posthumous letter, Alyosha realizes that he was born in a gulag as the fruit of a coercive sexual relationship imposed on an imprisoned female kulak. The present study is based on the hypothesis that poetonyms contribute significantly to the constitution of the meaning of literary texts. Despite the centrality of literary names in Makine’s novel, however, its poetonyms have not yet been studied in any detail. I will therefore analyse symbolic, etymological, historic, geographic, anagrammatic aspects, etc. of the most important anthroponyms and toponyms that occur in this novel (Alyosha, Charlotte, Pashka, Félix Faure / Atlantide, Boyarsk, Saranza, Stalinka …). By combining the different names and placing them in their French and Russian linguistic contexts, I will show that there is a movement from one cultural background to the other. Thus, through name configuration in particular, Dreams of My Russian Summers portrays a multicultural migration between France and Russia – between East and West. Dreams of my Russian Summers is a Bildungsroman that encompasses several issues: identity formation (what shall I be: Russian, French, cosmopolitan?); sentimental education (love, what is it?); disappointment; and, finally, awareness of reality.]

In the German language, there are toponyms with initial elements that are largely similar or even completely identical in modern times. In this article, two names beginning with Schlett- from Central Germany are used to show that, in a Slavic-German contact zone, in certain cases the historically transmitted forms of toponyms do not reliably indicate their language of origin. This is due to the fact that the tradition begins late (14th century) and the phonetic syllables do not allow a clear differentiation with regard to primary suffixation or dialectally weakened case forms. In addition, the basic elements of the toponyms in the two source languages have two special features. First, they have a fairly identical structure: in both languages, they show the sequence of matching consonant phonemes, differing only in the vowel phoneme after the first two consonants. Second, the two lexemes underlying the formation of the name have a corresponding meaning in each of the two languages. For this reason, a number of facts derived from the history of settlement and rule and from church history and national history in the contact area are included in the article to clarify the original forms. The effort to verify their linguistic origin leads to the following result; in the case of one place in the language contact area, it must be assumed that two names temporarily existed which formed independently of each other and with an identical motivation and virtual homophony. In the case of the second place, an original form derived from a foreign language can be ruled out. Other toponyms with the element Schlett- from the Middle and Upper German-speaking areas are referred to for purposes of comparison and also as proof that other original forms could also lead to the present-day Schlett-.