Wie bei der traditionellen Beschreibung der meisten afrikanischen Sprachen dominierten auch bei der des Bambara lange Zeit Vorstellungen von den Wortarten in den (indo-)europäischen Sprachen. Erst neuere Arbeiten zu den Mande-Sprachen, so u. a. das Kleine Wörterbuch der Bambara-Sprache von E. Ebermann (Wien 1986) und das Dictionnaire Bambara-Français von G. D umestre (Paris, ab 1981), gehen hier neue Wege. Auch ich habe in dem Lehrbuch des Bambara (Leipzig 1974) Vorschläge zur Neubewertung der Wortarten bzw. der Wortklassen des Bambara unterbreitet, die hier präzisiert und in einigen Fällen auch korrigiert werden sollen.

This paper gives an overview of differential placemarking phenomena and formulates a number of universals that seem to be well supported. Differential place marking is a situation in which the coding of locative, allative or ablative roles depends on subclasses of nouns, in particular place names (toponyms), inanimate common nouns and human nouns. When languages show asymmetric coding differences depending on such subclasses, they show shorter (and often zero) coding of place roles with toponyms, and longer (often adpositional rather than affixal) coding of place roles with human nouns. Like differential objectmarking, differential place marking can be explained by frequency asymmetries, expectations derived from frequencies, and the general preference for efficient coding. I also argue that differential place marking patterns provide an argument against the need to appeal to ambiguity avoidance to explain differential object marking.

Als derzeit produktivster Herausgeber auf dem Feld der arabischen Papyrologie legt Werner Diem hier bereits seinen neunten umfangreichen Editionsband mit 52 hauptsächlich arabisch sprachigen Originaldokumenten vor, bestehend aus privaten, geschäftlichen und amtlichen Briefen, Eingaben bei Behörden und Edikten oder deren jeweiligen Entwürfen. Bereits der im Titel genannte Beschreibstoff Papier als Auswahlkriterium gibt Hinweise darauf, was den Leser erwartet. Mit ihm ist ein Zeitraum etwa zwischen dem 4. und dem 9. islamischen Jahrhundert vorgegeben. Eine interne Datierung weisen dabei jedoch nur die allerwenigsten Schreiben auf, Diems jeweilige Schätzungen nach paläographischen Kriterien ergeben aber ein starkes Übergewicht auf dem 4. bis 5. Jahrhundert (36 der 52 Briefe). Damit bewegt sich der Band in einer Periode der Schriftentwicklung, die im dokumentarischen Kontext von zunehmender und oft extremer Verschleifung der einzelnen Buchstaben geprägt ist. Oft kann hier nur der Kontext entscheiden, was zwar nicht mehr zu sehen ist, aber dennoch gelesen werden muss. Doch weder sind die Texte selbst in diesem Punkt sehr beredt – Absender und Empfänger wussten ja, worum es ging – noch erlaubt die fragmentarische Überlieferung oft eine eindeutige Kontextualisierung. Das hier präsentierte Material stellt also ganz besondere Herausforderungen an seinen Bearbeiter.

Emojis are pictographs added to messages on social media and websites. Researchers have observed that emojis representing kissing faces are often used to close instant messaging conversations. This has been interpreted as an imitation of cheek kissing, a common behavior in some cultural contexts. We analyze the use of seven types of kissing emojis in three corpora of WhatsApp chats, one from Spain (where cheek kisses in face-to-face interaction are commonplace in many situations), the other from Germany (where kisses are occasionally given), and the third from the German-speaking part of Switzerland (where cheek kisses are a common greeting between relatives and friends). To do so, we systematically categorize and compare the use of a sample of these emojis on WhatsApp. The analysis suggests that there are differences between the three corpora in the use of the kissing emojis. The emoji “face throwing a kiss” is often included in closing messages in the Spanish and Swiss-German data, while in the Federal German corpus kisses do not appear at the end of a conversation; using these emojis in openings is uncommon in all three corpora. This suggests that these emojis can exhibit cultural variation, but they do not clearly mirror face-to-face behavior.

This paper first of all gives a panoramic overview about the state of studies and investigation of Phraseology of Languages for Special Purposes (LSP). Secondly, a proposal is made for the delimitation and classification for phraseological units in legal context. From an Applied Linguistic and Translation point of view, a reference is being made to German and Spanish language in this field.

We propose a syntactic approach to apparent blocking effects in the realization of definiteness marking in the Scandinavian languages. The claim is that the differences in definiteness marking can be attributed to a requirement that a definiteness feature ([def], a property of N) must be located at the left edge of the DP phase in order to be PIC-accessible for probes outside of the DP. As a result, [def] can be spelled out on N if N is the only element within DP and [def] is therefore part of DP’s edge domain (giving rise to suffixal marking). In contrast, the presence of an (overt) adjectival modifier (at the left edge of DP) requires feature movement of [def] to D, which is then realized as a prenominal article (with additional spell-out of the lower copy of [def] in Swedish). The paper also addresses the (slightly different) behavior of definiteness marking in the context of relative clauses and certain issues pertaining to the interpretation of the different strategies.

In this article I propose a new construction algorithm for the phonological word in Hungarian. Based on a detailed discussion of the di¤erences between so-called ‘postpositions’ and ‘case su‰xes’, I show that both types of adpositional elements are of the same morphosyntactic category, and that phonological word status depends not on an arbitrary division between a‰xes and syntactically free items, but on phonological properties of the respective adpositions: Bisyllabic adpositions form phonological words on their own, while monosyllabic adpositions are integrated into the phonological word of their lexical head. Generalizing this result, I argue that all functional elements of Hungarian traditionally called ‘inflectional a‰xes’ are syntactically independent functional heads integrated into the phonological word of a preceding lexical head because they are prosodically too small. I show that apparently bisyllabic inflectional a‰xes must either be decomposed into di¤erent markers or are underlyingly monosyllabic, and develop a ranking of optimality-theoretic alignment constraints implementing the construction algorithm for the phonological word in formal detail.

With the development and renovation of digital information technology, images, sounds, animations, colors and other models are integrated into one system to convey information. Multimodality is also applied in language research. One example of multimodal discourse are tourism video commercials, which combine written, visual and auditory signals to construct the metaphorical meaning of advertisements. Therefore, this paper selects six pieces of German and Chinese tourism video commercials as objects, which are parsed, transcribed and annotated by ELAN 5.1. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze the selected corpus. The theoretical framework for this study is Systemic-Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar, and it aims to explore the similarities and differences in the fusion of multimodal features between German and Chinese tourism video advertisements by comparative analysis.

Typological distributions are the combined result of universal structural principles, areal diffusion, and shared descent. The core concern of quantitative typology is to disentangle and to identify these various factors.While areal and structural factors can be tested against each other in standard multivariate designs based on sample stratification, genealogical factors cannot be handled by sample stratification since about one third of all proven families (the strata needed) are isolates, i.e. count only one member. In response, typologists have since long sought to control for genealogical relations during sampling rather than during statistical testing. But available methods suffer from a number of drawbacks. Most importantly, they are not sensitive to the fact that different typological variable have different degrees of stability (genealogical dependence) within families, and that this again varies from family to family.This article proposes a refined method for genealogical control during sampling, which is based on DRYER’s (1989) proposals but is sensitive to actual distributions within genealogical units at each taxonomic level.

India belongs to those multilingual countries in the world, which have on their disposal a systematic and scholarly well-founded survey about the stock of their languages, pursuing it continuously and methodically. Of great importance in this field are the Allindian census, taken respectively in the first year of each decade since the end of last century. In these census tho linguistic dates are un important and extensive part. From the progress in linguistics and in society new demands spring up, which have consequences for the approach to the inclusion and representation of linguistic dates in each census and lead to appropriate changes. This paper considers some questions and problems in this connection.