German Linguistics Commons^™

"Do They Know The Normal Language?": Language Attitudes And Ideologies In German Hip Hop Culture, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

This article presents a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language ideologies and language attitudes and builds on previous work by providing an organized framework connecting these notions. This framework is evaluated with reference to online and offline ethnographic work surrounding attitudes and ideologies about anglicisms, or English loanwords, among German hip hop fans and artists. Language attitudes are theorized as individual thoughts and expressions about language, and are often, but not always, informed by individual reproductions of language ideologies, which are conceived of as systematic, shared over groups of individuals, enduring, and mediated. Language ideologies can then be organized …

Willkomen Beim German Journal - Welcome To German Journal, Paulina Broda, Carina Staudte

German Journal Sprache Literatur Kultur

No abstract provided.

Teaching German Modal Verbs Through Cognitive Linguistics Insights, Miglena Nikolova

German Journal Sprache Literatur Kultur

This study examined the acquisition patterns of the prototypical and epistemic semantic meanings of German modals. It investigated whether different instructional approaches (cognitive instruction approach based on force dynamics and metaphoric extensions, traditional translation based instruction) have the potential to foster modal verbs acquisition, and which of the two approaches was more effective. Thirty-three, fourth semester learners of German as a foreign language were subjected to one of the experimental conditions. Findings were compared to a control condition, which did not receive any instruction. Learning gains were measured by means of a multiple choice meaning recognition test that assessed students’ …

Entgrenzung Der Arbeit Durch „Bring Your Own Device“, Leo Roth

German Journal Sprache Literatur Kultur

Abstrakt

Die ehemals klaren Grenzen zwischen den Sozialsphären „Arbeit“ und „Leben“ verschwimmen immer stärker. So kann sich heute kaum noch jemand dem Prozess der Entgrenzung entziehen, da die derzeit vorherrschenden Phänomene wie „Vermarktlichung“ und „Dezentralisierung“ sowohl eine allgemeine Entgrenzung als auch die spezifische Entgrenzung der Arbeit unaufhaltsam befördern. Nach Belwe (2007) eignen sich im Besonderen die modernen Kommunikationstechnologien dafür, „Einbrüche in den bislang durch natürliche und soziale Rhythmen klar strukturierten sozialen Alltag zu provozieren“ (Belwe, 2007, S. 2). Demnach läuft heute jedes menschliche Individuum einer modernen Gesellschaft Gefahr übergeordneten Ansprüchen aus dem Erwerbsbereich zu unterliegen.

Mit der hier vorgestellten Arbeit …

Selbstinszenierung Im Deutschrap: Konstruktion Von Identität Und Authentizität Im Subgenre Des Gangstaraps Am Beispiel Von Kollegah Und Xatar, Sladana Gnjatic

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the construction of identity in German Gangsta rap by taking a close look at the rappers Kollegah and Xatar, who are both using their music for self-portrayal. The selection of those two rappers can be justified by their commercial success in Germany and further by their differences as well as similarities in the construction of their images. The first chapter gives a historical overview of American and German rap. It also analyzes specific features and trends in German rap and describes the current status of research. The focus of the second chapter is on the rapper Kollegah, …

The Space Of Alterity: Language And National Identity In Theodor Adorno And W.G. Sebald, Agata Szczodrak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The German Romantic monolingual paradigm of national identity emerged in the late eighteenth century to establish a mother tongue as a national backbone. This paradigm portrayed multilingualism as destabilizing, impoverishing, and unsuitable for aesthetics. Radicalized by the Nazis and overlooked in postwar debates over German national identity, this paradigm persists in contemporary societies and continues to conceal, belittle, and discredit multilingualism. To oppose that paradigm, this dissertation unveils the enriching and nourishing qualities of foreign languages, presents translingualism as a viable alternative to monolingualism, and reveals how translingual literature creates transnational connectedness. The limitations of the paradigm are traced from …

Modeling Deponency In Germanic Preterite-Present Verbs Using Datr, Marie G. Bourgerie Hunter

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In certain Germanic languages, there is a group of verbs called preterite-present verbs that are often viewed as irregular, but in fact behave very predictably. They exhibit a morphological phenomenon called deponency, often in conjunction with another morphological phenomenon called heteroclisis. I examine the preterite-present verbs of three different languages: Old Norse, Modern Icelandic, and Modern German. Initially, I approach them from a historical perspective and then seek to reconcile their morphology with the modern perspective. A criteria is established for a canonical preterite-present verb, and then using a lexical programming language called DATR, I create code that generates the …

"Stereotypisch Deutsch": An Examination Of Stereotypes Of Germans And The Effects In The Business Environment, Alicia Marvinetz

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Stereotypes can be seen as a tool to understand why a person or group of people behave the way they do. These stereotypes adapt over time as culture and cultural perceptions change. The purpose of this research is to analyze what stereotypes Americans have held of Germans over the years, starting in 1940, a couple years before the United States entered World War II, then the Cold War Era between 1947 and 1990, through today. The purpose of these time frames is to see how Americans viewed Germans just prior to entering the war, how the war may have changed …

What Is Contemporary Art?, Irina A. Hinkel

Open Access Theses

The topic of the thesis is “What is contemporary art?”. While exploring contemporary art, its conceptions, characteristics and remarkable events related to it, I concentrate mainly on research of contemporary art as universal, particularly on such phenomena as multicultural art, postdramatic theater, audience interaction, as well as challenged aesthetics. This thesis also considers postmodern art, since contemporary art in its current form departed from postmodern art. I rely on and address the German language prose and drama, as well as visual arts. The work of Elfriede Jelinek, John von Düffel, Peter Handke, Kristof Magnusson, and multicultural artists Vladimir Kaminer, Feridun …

Inhabiting The Discourses Of Belonging; Franz Kafka And Yoko Tawada, Aviv Hilbig-Bokaer

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

Inhabiting the Discourses of Belonging; Franz Kafka and Yoko Tawada examines the role of language in creating the identity of the foreigner in German prose. Writing at opposite ends of the 20^th century, Kafka and Tawada serve as harbingers for a broader sense of alienation that comes with writing as an Other. Using lenses provided by Spivak, Butler, Said and Deluze, this essay surveys the broader cultural concepts and theoretical implications of the notion of the metaphorical subaltern that can be created in prose, and the particularities presented by the German language in creating and articulating this identity. This …

Facilitating Lexical Acquisition In Beginner Learners Of Italian Through Task-Induced Involvement Load, Vanessa J. Natale Rukholm

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

This empirical study explores the facilitation of lexical acquisition and retention through an incidental experiment examining the effect of Involvement Load on Italian vocabulary growth among beginner learners. The experiment, with a pre-test/post-test design investigates the facilitative effects of elaborate processing on L2 lexical acquisition and retention. Participants in sections of the same first-year Italian course were divided into one of five groups consisting of a Control Group and four Treatment groups. Treatment groups were divided based on level of Involvement (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) such that some groups processed target words elaborately (Craik, 2002; Lockhart, 2002) through vocabulary exercises …

Kiezdeutsh In Den Kinos Und Auf Den Strassen: Mediendiskurse Zu Einer Neuen Sprechweise Und Ihre Darstellung Im Film, Andrew Simon Lubben

Masters Theses

The rapid and unique development of so-called “Jugendsprachen” (youth languages) in multicultural city spaces across Europe has been documented extensively in the past decade, receiving immense attention from linguists and the general public alike. As with countless other language registers, which from a grammatical standpoint depart from the accepted language norm, such “Jugendsprachen” have met with intense scrutiny and skepticism as to their legitimacy as expressive forms—a condition which is explored in this paper through a media discourse analysis of one such youth language: “Kiezdeutsch” or “hood German”. Spoken primarily in metropolitan areas such as Berlin and Stuttgart, “Kiezdeutsch” suffers …

The Mechanics Of Franz Kafka's 'In Der Strafkolonie': A Reading Through Verbal Associations, Charles Beck Cochran

Masters Theses

Theoretically based in a Judaic philosophy and in Kafka’s related mythology, which locates the origins of the world in language, this thesis takes its practical starting point from a relatively little-documented writing method of Kafka that appears inseparably linked to his language mythology. This writing method is one in which Kafka developed the fictional world of his narratives out of language or associations in language. In a unique attempt to document its full impact on the development of a literary text, the thesis seeks to utilize this writing method as a reading method, identifying the verbal associations from which Kafka …

Framing Urban Change: Gentrification Discourses In The Media Coverage Of The Gülbol Eviction In Berlin, Eric Daniel Gedenk

Masters Theses

This thesis examines gentrification discourses in Berlin by highlighting an extraordinarily large protest sparked by the eviction of the Gülbol family—long-time residents of Berlin who immigrated to Germany from Turkey. Media outlets chose to frame the event in very different ways. I analyze articles from various media sources in an attempt to discover how these sources chose to frame this event, then analyze how these frames are applied to the general gentrification discourse in Berlin. Non-traditional, or “advocacy” media outlets used technology to break away from mass media frames on the subject and frame the event as governmental oppression and …

Theory And Practice Of Translation: An Original Translation Of Regina E. G. Schymiczek’S Die Weide Der Seepferde (The Pasture Of The Seahorses), Bradley J. Davey, Ralph W. Buechler

Honors College Theses

This study outlines the original translation of the recently published Die Weide der Seepferde (2013) from Regina E. G. Schymizcek. We employ known translation techniques by following Hervey’s (2006) suggested gradients of degrees of translation and cultural transposition. While translating the work we discovered a unique aspect of German-English translation which we believe fundamentally adds to knowledge of translation theory.

A Questionnaire Study Of Two-Verb Clusters In West Central German, Shannon A. Dubenion-Smith

Modern & Classical Languages

Until recently, the West Central German dialect area was largely neglected in investigations of verb clusters. The article presents the results of a questionnaire study of two-verb clusters involving 55 participants in 17 localities in that dialect area. These results indicate that the occurrence of particular orders is subject to interspeaker, intraspeaker, and areal variation as well as morphosyntactic constraints. Furthermore, a comparison of these results with those from a corpus study of the same dialect area suggests diachronic stability in the relative areal distribution of verb clusters over the roughly 50 years since the spoken data for the corpus …

Number Marking In Western Armenian: A Non-Argument For Outwardly-Sensitive Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy, Bert Vaux, Neil Myler, Karlos Arregi

Bert Vaux

The Western Armenian possessive plural data originally reported in Vaux (1998, 2003) have been asserted by Wolf 2011 to involve outwardly-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphy, a phenomenon widely argued to be unattested (Carstairs-McCarthy 1987; Paster 2006) and predicted to be impossible by the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Bobaljik 2000). We show that the full complexity of the Western Armenian system is better captured in an account that makes no reference to outwardly-sensitive phonological conditioning of this sort. The analysis is based on standard DM mechanisms of morpheme copying, displacement, and spellout (Harris and Halle 2005, Arregi and …

Retroflex Variation And Methodological Issues: A Reply To Simonsen, Moen, And Cowen (2008), Janne Bondi Johannessen, Bert Vaux

Bert Vaux

We argue that the differences in the articulation of Norwegian retroflex consonants described by Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008) as individual variation may instead be due to factors such as individual and dialectal background, rather than variation across a single variety. Our main argument is based on existing dialect literature and speech corpus data, which show that the phonemes involved in the retroflexion process are not present in the same linguistic contexts in all dialects. SMC’s experimental stimuli and conditions include linguistic contexts which do not necessarily induce retroflexion naturally, and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate …

The Sound And The Fury: Comparative Sociolinguistic Studies In German, Logan C. Pecinovsky

Honors Theses

The German nation has a long history of fragmentation, from the mini-states of the Middle Ages to the eastern and western republics of the recent past. These barriers affected the speech community in particular. Among the various borders that shifted through Central and Eastern Europe for centuries, dialects arose as a result of strong political and cultural identities. Without a strong centralizing force to integrate them, the many communities remained relatively homogenous, which provided fertile soil for unique linguistic development. The most recent partition of East and West scarcely lasted half a century and did not create a discrete speech …

The Armenian Dialect Of Khodorjur, Bert Vaux

Bert Vaux

No abstract provided.