While the role of pragmatic skills in a foreign or second language has been receiving increased attention both from a research and a language teaching perspective, there is still a lamentable scarcity of systematic empirical studies into the effectiveness of instructional methods in the teaching of pragmatics. Addressing this research gap, this article reports about a quasi-experimental study into possible differences between an explicit-inductive and an explicitdeductive instructional approach in the teaching of pragmatic skills in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), more specifically the teaching of offer refusals to 49 advanced adult EFL learners in Germany. The instruction consisted of three 90-minute lessons, which were spread out over the duration of a 15-week academic semester and designed according to the deductive principle and the inductive principle, respectively. While the deductive group was provided with metapragmatic rules directly at the beginning of the instruction, the inductive group only encountered such rules after engaging in language use and guided discovery. Production data was elicited by means of DCTs and role play in a pretest-posttest format. Effectiveness of instruction was operationalized by means of two indicators: Indicator 1 measured the increased usage of the strategies taught in class, while indicator 2 measured the approximation to a native speaker target. The results indicate that the gains in the inductive group surpassed those in the deductive group, suggesting that when situated within the explicit framework, inductive instruction is more effective in the teaching of pragmatic skills.

In this paper we investigate the case split on the possessor in Udmurt. Traditionally, the choice between ablative and genitive possessor case is said to be driven by the grammatical function (GF) of the XP containing the possessor. We argue that the case split is not driven by GFs; rather, it is determined by the case value of the XP that contains the possessor. Importantly, there is no evidence which points to a possessor raising analysis in Udmurt. Instead, we present an analysis according to which the possessor always bears genitive but may be assigned another structural case by an external head. Due to a morphological constraint, stacked case features fuse into a single feature set in the postsyntactic morphological component. If accusative and genitive stack on the possessor, only the default semantic case marker, i.e., the ablative marker, can realize the resulting feature set. In any other context the genitive marker is chosen. We thus claim that there is no abstract ablative on the possessor; instead, the morphological ablative marker realizes a combination of two abstract structural cases.

Rezension zu Geoffrey K. Pullum: Rule Interaction and the Organization of a Grammar. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1979 (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics). 414 Seiten. [Veröffentlichung der gleichnamigen Dissertation von 1976, University College London]

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.