This thesis will focus on the supposed ongoing changes in the use of the s-genitive form. It will examine 200 genitive constructions found in on-line versions of quality newspapers, and describe them in terms of parameters that have been established as determining factors for the choice of genitive construction, for example possessor animacy, syntactic weight, final sibilant and semantic relationship holding between the constituents of the phrase, as well as those connected to the journalistic prose itself (e.g. language economy). Key words: Genitive, s-genitive, of-genitive, genitive variation, journalistic prose

Slags och sorts är båda gamla genitivformer av substantiv med grammatiska genus, men trots detta kan orden förekomma tillsammans med artiklar som kongruerar efter huvudordet i de nominalfraser som följer dem. Genom att studera den syntaktiska och semantiska utvecklingen hos fraser av typen ett/en + slags/sorts + NP under tre decennier – 1830-talet, 1910-talet och 2010-talet – ämnar denna studie få klarhet i hur orden har fungerat och vad de är nu. Analysen visar på en variation i kongruensmönstret särskilt gällande ett/en slags under alla perioder. Ett sorts förekommer knappt i början men utgör till 2010-talet en tredjedel av materialet. Båda enheterna har alltid haft en betydelsevariation i vilken grad de kategoriserar eller blott ger subjektiva associationer, men den sistnämnda betydelsen dominerar allt mer med tiden. Det visar sig att denna syntaktiska och semantiska variation gällande ett/en slags och sorts har motiverat de grammatikaliseringsartade förändringar som ses i materialet.

This diploma thesis - in its theoretical part - deals with the position of adnominal genitive in contemporary Czech language, its semantics and syntax. First, it defines this case (its semantical and syntactical structure in contemporary Czech) and after that it describes- with the theoretical linguistic background - the semantical types of adnominal genitive in Czech. The semantical types of adnominal genitive then serve as a criterion for determining specific cases in the texts of the Czech language and Literature Journal. This diploma thesis is focused on the texts published between 2010-2019.

Das Hauptgewicht der vorliegenden Arbeit liegt auf dem reinen Flexionskasus Genitiv und der Beschreibung der Satzgliedfunktionen und der semantischen Funktionen des Genitivs in deutscher und litauischer Sprache. / Pagrindinis dėmesys šiame darbe yra skiriamas kilmininko linsniui be prielinksnių ir jo sintaksinių ir semantinių funkcijų aprašymui vokiečių ir lietuvių kalbose. / The main significance of this paper is attached to the Genitive without the prepositions and the description of its syntactical and semantic functions in German and Lithuanian.

Kinesiska och miao-språket hmu har nära kontakt med varandra och påverkan från kinesiskan har iakttagits i hmu på lexikal och fonologisk nivå. Denna studie undersöker hur påverkan från kinesiskan ser ut även på syntaktisk nivå i fråga om användningen av genitiv och nominalisering. På kinesiska uttrycks detta med en och samma partikel, vilken har en motsvarighet i hmu. Studien delades upp i två delar: en korpusundersökning och en meningsanalys över två olika upplagor av Nya testamentet på hmu. I den tidigare upplagan användes den partikel flitigt som på hmu sägs uttrycka genitiv och nominalisering och korpusundersökningen visade en minskad användning av denna partikel i den senare upplagan av Nya testamentet. Meningsanalysen visade att kinesisk påverkan finns på användningen av genitiv men inte på nominalisering i hmu. Med detta har vi fått en klarare bild av hur kinesisk påverkan ser ut på just dessa syntaktiska funktioner i hmu. / The Chinese language and the Miao Language Hmu live in close contact with each other. The influence from Chinese has been noted in the language of Hmu in both lexicon and phonology. This research examines what the influence from the Chinese language looks like in the syntax of Hmu when it comes to genitive and nominalization. In Chinese this is expressed with one single particle, which has an equivalent in Hmu. The research is divided into two parts: a corpus study and an analysis of sentences based on two different editions of the New Testament in Hmu. In the earliest edition the Hmu particle, which is said to express genitive and nominalization, is used frequently and the corpus study showed a decreased usage of this particle in the later edition of the New Testament. The analysis of sentences showed that there is a Chinese influence on the usage of genitive but not on the nominalization. The picture of what Chinese influence looks like on these particular syntactic functions in Hmu is now clearer.

This diploma thesis deals with the topic of the variation in genitive and dative government. The subject of analysis are the following thirteen prepositions: (an)statt, innerhalb, längs, mangels, mittels, trotz, während, wegen, zugunsten/zu Gunsten; binnen, dank, laut, zufolge. The aim of the thesis is to capture the use of the mentioned prepositions as detailed as possible. The focus is on the question and the attempt to determine in which cases within the variation in prepositional case government in the written language one or the other case is preferred and whether certain tendencies or systematics common to all thirteen prepositions can be followed. The prepositions are analysed by means of nine selected sources (both dictionaries and grammar books) and German reference corpus.

Adverbiale Kasus sind Substantivgruppen ohne Präposition, die im Satz die Funktion einer temporalen, lokalen oder modalen Adverbialbestimmung erfüllen. Im Satz treten sie in der Regel als Adjunkte auf und sind in ihrer Form syntaktisch unabhängig. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Dissertation ist, adverbiale Kasus des Deutschen anhand zahlreicher Belege sowohl synchron als auch diachron aus verschiedenen Perspektiven zu beschreiben. In den älteren Sprachstufen sind adverbiale Kasus häufig belegt. Bis zum Gegenwartsdeutschen wurden viele davon adverbialisiert, durch Präpositionalphrasen ersetzt oder sind zu Phraseologismen erstarrt. In dieser Arbeit wird auf die semantisch-lexikalischen Restriktionen, Struktur, interne Ausfüllung bzw. Besetzung, Bezugsmöglichkeiten, Bedeutungen und die stilistischen Besonderheiten adverbialer Kasus ausführlich eingegangen. / Adverbial case is a noun phrase without preposition, functioning as the adverbial modifier of time, place or manner in a sentence. Syntactically they usually serve as adjuncts and are independent in their form. The aim of the present investigation was to describe the German adverbial case synchronically and diachronically on the basis of a large number of speech samples from different points of view. Adverbial cases have been very frequent at the earlier stages of German. Many of them have been adverbialised, replaced by prepositional phrases or have turned into phraseologisms in the course of language development up to the modern German. The present doctor thesis provides a detailed study of the lexical-semantic restrictions of the adverbial cases as well as of their structure and inner filling, their relation to other sentence constituents, aspects of their meaning and stylistic peculiarities.

The goal of this dissertation is to propose and develop theoretical linguistic basis for the branch of Czech as a foreign language. Specifically, it deals with the complex linguistic description of Czech grammar in the function of a foreign language, which would introduce a theoretical solution for the processing of didactic grammars of Czech for foreigners. This description is supposed to provide such a range of linguistic information, which depending on the purpose, enables the variable processing of language structures and simultaneously clarifying the relationships and connections between them. Above mentioned linguistic description of Czech as a foreign language is focused on a specific group of non-native speakers, in our case, a group of non-native speakers, whose mother tongue is German. As it is a model process of description in this dissertation, the attention is only paid to the selected grammatical categories of Czech, namely the grammatical category of the genitive of substantives and verbal aspect. The issue of the description of the grammar of a natural language is initially discussed in general terms, in the part where we define the types of grammars that are relevant to our work. Subsequently we characterize both languages, i.e. Czech and German, in the terms of their differentiation, stratification and typological point of view. The particular linguistic description and its model application, which is the core of this work, is called a modified linguistic description with the reference to Dolník J. (1993). This description is based on five sources. These are the theoretical works of leading Czech and Slovak linguists, dealing with the issue of natural language and works describing Czech grammar. Further starting points for the proposed comprehensive description of Czech grammar is to define particular reference levels according to SERR for Czech as a foreign language, a research unit focused on the target group of non-native speakers and their perception of the difficulties of Czech grammatical phenomena, and last but not least, the research probe carried out in the particular corpora of the Czech National Corpus.

How to teach English as a second or foreign language has been heatedly debated as long as the subject has been taught. One of the many issues regarding the teaching of English as a second or foreign language is the issue of whether or not to teach grammar, and if we teach it, how should we go about it?   This study examines two different approaches to teaching English grammar at the Swedish upper-secondary school level. Experiments were conducted in four different groups of students (a total of 64 informants were used), all from the same upper-secondary school in a medium-sized Swedish city. The experiments were based on teaching the genitive construction to the informants during a 75-minute class. The results were analyzed mainly quantitatively with the help of test results from the 64 informants; the aspect of gender differences in the results was also analyzed.   According to the study, one of the approaches seemed to be slightly superior to the other. There were also factors (other than the test results) which may speak in favour of one approach rather than the other.

Teil I dieser Arbeit untersucht Effekte einer semantischen Eigenschaft von syntaktisch transitiven Prädikaten auf die Satzverarbeitung: den Grad der Affiziertheit, den solch ein Prädikat für eines seiner Argumente impliziert, also das Ausmaß in dem ein Teilnehmer eine Zustandsveränderung während des ausgedrückten Ereignisses erfährt. Drei Experimente (zu Akzeptabilitätsurteilen, Lesezeiten & ereigniskorrelierten Potentialen [EKP]) überprüften den Einfluss von Affiziertheit auf die lexikalisch-semantische Verarbeitung des Prädikats und die Integration folgender Argument-Nominalphrasen (NPn) beim Satzlesen. Um den Effekt von Affiziertheit auf Verarbeitungsprozesse beim Argumentlinking zu maximieren, machten die Experimente Gebrauch von deverbalen, eventiven, deutschen -ung-Nominalisierungen, die von Verben mit verschiedenem Affiziertheitsgrad abgeleitet sind. Hierbei wurde der Einfluss der Affiziertheit ausgenutzt, folgende Objekts- oder Subjektsgenitive als Argument zu lizensieren. Während sich keine klaren Effekte bei der Verarbeitung der Nominalisierungen ergaben, zeigten die Ergebnisse zur Integration der Genitiv-NPn eine spezifische Interaktion zwischen dem Grad der Affiziertheit und der Akzeptabilität, einen Objekts- bzw. Subjektsgenitiv zu verwirklichen. Dieser Befund wurde von übereinstimmenden Lesezeiten- und EKP-Interaktionseffekten begleitet. Die EKP-Ergebnisse legen eine zentrale Rolle von zwei späten Positivierungen bei der Integration der Genitivargumente nahe. Diese Befunde werden im Kontext theoretischer Modelle von abgestufter Affiziertheit und von Satzverarbeitungsmodellen diskutiert, mit Fokus auf der möglichen Rolle der Prototypikalität von Argumenten und Unterschieden zwischen prädikatsinduzierter und argumentinhärenter semantischer Argumentprominenz. Teil II stellt zwei Softwarepakete für die statistische Umgebung R vor, die Schnittstellen für die zur Analyse der EKP-Daten verwendeten WFMM Software (Morris & Carroll, 2006) bieten. / Part I of this thesis investigates the effects of a semantic feature of syntactically transitive predicates on online sentence processing: the degree of affectedness such a predicate implies for one of its arguments, taken to indicate the extent to which an event participant undergoes a change of state during the event expressed. Three experiments (using acceptability judgements, reading times & event-related potentials [ERPs]) probed the effects of affectedness on the processing of the predicate and on the integration of following argument noun phrases (NPs), thus assessing the impact of affectedness on lexical-semantic processing and its influence on processes related to online argument linking. Maximising the effects of affectedness on linking-related processes, the experiments used German -ung nominalisations derived from verbs implying different degrees of affectedness, exploiting a paradigm involving the linking of either object or subject genitive argument NPs to deverbal, eventive nominalisations. While no clear effects of affectedness emerged for the processing of the nominalisations, results related to the integration of genitive NPs revealed a specific interaction between the degree of affectedness and the acceptability of realising either object or subject genitives. This pattern was accompanied by consistent reading time and ERP interaction effects. ERP results suggest a prominent role of two late positivities with different spatial foci in the integration of the genitive arguments. These findings are discussed in the context of theoretical models of graded affectedness and sentence processing models, considering possible roles of argument prototypicality and differences between predicate-induced and argument-inherent semantic argument prominence. Part II introduces two software packages for the statistical platform R, offering interfaces for the WFMM software (Morris & Carroll, 2006) used for the analysis of the ERP data in part I.