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Summary
English is by far the most widely spoken Germanic language, with approximately 400 million native speakers, another 500 million L2 speakers, and at least a billion of moderately competent speakers of English as a Foreign Language. In close to 60 countries, English enjoys official status or is one of the native languages. With several fully...
Wie treffen wir mutigere Entscheidungen, um zukunfts- und konfliktfähig zu werden? Und warum ist das so schwer? Im Angesicht der Situation Deutschlands und dem Agieren der Regierung in der Frühphase des Ukrainekriegs möchten die Beiträger*innen ein Zeichen für mehr Mut setzen - in der Politik wie in der Gesellschaft, in Krisenzeiten wie im Alltag....
Wie treffen wir mutigere Entscheidungen, um zukunfts- und konfliktfähig zu werden? Und warum ist das so schwer? Im Angesicht der Situation Deutschlands und dem Agieren der Regierung in der Frühphase des Ukrainekriegs möchten die Beiträger*innen ein Zeichen für mehr Mut setzen - in der Politik wie in der Gesellschaft, in Krisenzeiten wie im Alltag....
Wie treffen wir mutigere Entscheidungen, um zukunfts- und konfliktfähig zu werden? Und warum ist das so schwer? Im Angesicht der Situation Deutschlands und dem Agieren der Regierung in der Frühphase des Ukrainekriegs möchten die Beiträger*innen ein Zeichen für mehr Mut setzen - in der Politik wie in der Gesellschaft, in Krisenzeiten wie im Alltag....
Wie treffen wir mutigere Entscheidungen, um zukunfts- und konfliktfähig zu werden? Und warum ist das so schwer? Im Angesicht der Situation Deutschlands und dem Agieren der Regierung in der Frühphase des Ukrainekriegs möchten die Beiträger*innen ein Zeichen für mehr Mut setzen - in der Politik wie in der Gesellschaft, in Krisenzeiten wie im Alltag....
The FRIAS Co-Fund Fellowship Programme gives leading researchers from all disciplines the opportunity to study at Freiburg, helping them broaden their experience and build networks that can support future projects. The FCFP programme is designed to support international researchers and help them build their careers in the academic sector, as Dr Kat...
Linguistics, English linguistics in particular, has witnessed a remarkable quantitative turn since the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was a turn both in scale and in quality, a turn concerning the degree (including the degree of sophistication) to which quantitative empirical studies, statistical techniques, and statistical modelling have come to be...
Die Corona-Pandemie hat unser aller Leben einschneidend verändert. Wir sind Zeugen eines multiplen Systemschocks - Schwächen und Verwundbarkeiten wurden auf vielen Ebenen bloßgelegt. Was bleibt von der Krise und ihren tief greifenden Veränderungen? Stellt sie eine Zeitenwende dar oder ist sie nur eine Delle in langfristigen Trendlinien? Wie wird Co...
Based on a data set comprising some 70 varieties of English, this chapter offers an overview of the syntactic and, marginally, morphological variation in the following six grammatical subsystems: the noun phrase, tense and aspect, mood and modality, negation, agreement, and subordination. The focus will be on the most pervasive tendencies and disti...
Semantics (Greek semain- = to mean) is the only branch of linguistics which is exclusively concerned with meaning. Semantics studies the meaning or meaning potential of various kinds of expressions: words, phrases, and sentences. This chapter is mainly confined to the study of word meaning (lexical semantics; lexicology). Research in lexical semant...
Morphology is concerned with the internal structure of words and with the various processes which allow us to constantly expand the vocabulary of a language.
Pragmatics (from Greek pragma = action) is the newcomer among the major branches of linguistics. Its precise definition and status within linguistic theory are, to some extent, still subject to debate: Is it a linguistic subdiscipline like, for example, phonology, morphology and syntax, or is it a broad, interdisciplinary approach which is concerne...
Outlook and appetizer: This chapter is meant to serve as an outlook and appetizer for the rich world of English linguistics lying beyond the essential core of the discipline outlined in the previous chapters. It will put the spotlight on turns and major trends in the development of novel theories, methodologies, research questions, and overall rese...
The following links will guide anyone interested in exploring the rich world of the English language and (English) linguistics to some of the most interesting online resources currently available (corpora, databases, sound archives, electronic atlasses, podcasts, apps, etc.). Many of them have been selected with an eye to their potential as serving...
Basic formal structure of English: What will take centre stage in this and the next chapter is the basic formal structure of English, or what could also be called the ground plan of the language. The most important structural characteristics of English will be presented from two different perspectives: in the current chapter by way of introducing t...
Linguistics is the scientific discipline concerned with the study of language and languages, either by themselves or in comparison. Language (note: without an article preceding it) is to be understood as the vehicle for the expression or exchange of thoughts, concepts, information, feelings, attitudes, etc., while a language stands for entities lik...
The present chapter aims to give an overview of the most important structural differences between English and German. It will reconsider some issues discussed earlier in this book, albeit from a decidedly different point of view, and explore how the basic structural differences between English and German are related to each other.
Phonetics and phonology are the two branches of linguistics which deal with the properties and functions of sounds. Although they are tightly interrelated, they differ clearly from each other with regard to their research objects and the questions they ask.
The following general reference works will prove to be useful in addition to the chapters in the present volume. Of course, this is only a selection. For almost any branch of (English) linguistics there exist specialized textbooks, handbooks and journals. Students preparing for their exams may proceed as follows.
Language as a social phenomenon: Similar to pragmatics, the field of sociolinguistics studies language use in real life. It is an illusion to think that language communities are homogeneous; instead, heterogeneity determines everyday language use. Linguistic heterogeneity has many different facets. Besides differences in linguistic competence and e...
Die Corona-Pandemie hat unser aller Leben einschneidend verändert. Wir sind Zeugen eines multiplen Systemschocks - Schwächen und Verwundbarkeiten wurden auf vielen Ebenen bloßgelegt. Was bleibt von der Krise und ihren tief greifenden Veränderungen? Stellt sie eine Zeitenwende dar oder ist sie nur eine Delle in langfristigen Trendlinien? Wie wird Co...
Die Corona-Pandemie hat unser aller Leben einschneidend verändert. Wir sind Zeugen eines multiplen Systemschocks - Schwächen und Verwundbarkeiten wurden auf vielen Ebenen bloßgelegt. Was bleibt von der Krise und ihren tief greifenden Veränderungen? Stellt sie eine Zeitenwende dar oder ist sie nur eine Delle in langfristigen Trendlinien? Wie wird Co...
Die Corona-Pandemie hat unser aller Leben einschneidend verändert. Wir sind Zeugen eines multiplen Systemschocks - Schwächen und Verwundbarkeiten wurden auf vielen Ebenen bloßgelegt. Was bleibt von der Krise und ihren tief greifenden Veränderungen? Stellt sie eine Zeitenwende dar oder ist sie nur eine Delle in langfristigen Trendlinien? Wie wird Co...
This handbook provides an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. Following an introduction from the editors, the volume’s expert contributors explore a range of core topics in English grammar, beginning with issues in grammar writing and methodology. Chapters in part II then examine...
This handbook provides an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. Following an introduction from the editors, the volume’s expert contributors explore a range of core topics in English grammar, beginning with issues in grammar writing and methodology. Chapters in part II then examine...
This is the completely revised, updated and enlarged 2nd edition of a classic textbook widely used at German universities for more than 20 years. It serves both as an introduction for beginners and as a companion for more advanced students, familiarizing its readers with the major and distinctive properties of English and its major varieties, inclu...
What is the role of national language(s) and foreign languages vis-à-vis English in education and research at European universities? How can universities ensure and enhance the quality of teaching in foreign languages? The paper “Language Policies at the LERU member institutions”, published by LERU today, addresses these questions in at twofold way...
http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/3812/perceptual-linguistic-salience-modeling-causes-and-consequences
In usage-based linguistic theories, the assumption that high-frequency language strings are mentally represented as unitary chunks has been invoked to account for a wide range of phenomena. However, neurocognitive evidence in support of this assumption is still lacking. In line with Gestalt psychological assumptions, we propose that a language stri...
This chapter provides an outline of the major patterns of variation in contemporary British English on both the phonological (Section 2) and the morpho-syntactic level (Section 3). In Section 2 it will be shown that although rich patterns of variation exist on the consonant system, these are mainly a function of socioeconomic factors as well as spe...
Introduction This chapter is solely concerned with areal patterns in the domain of morphosyntax in varieties of English around the world. Thus it tries to discern areality on that structural level of language where it is notoriously hardest to find; moreover, its focus is on areality, that is, ‘the areal concentration of linguistic features’ (Hicke...
The question how substrate features and extralinguistic conditions interact in shaping contact varieties is an ongoing debate in the study of world Englishes. The present study tries to describe substrate influence by identifying an areally marked morphosyntactic feature, subject pronoun deletion, and comparing its occurrence and structural conditi...
The Viking Hypothesis neglects (i) the significant degree of stability from Old to Middle (and even Modern) English grammar and (ii) parallel, but independent, developments not induced by North Germanic in the grammars of continental West Germanic dialects.
Creoles (here including expanded pidgins) are commonly viewed as being more analytic than their lexifiers and other languages in terms of grammatical marking. The purpose of the study reported in this article was to examine the validity of this view by measuring the frequency of analytic (and synthetic) markers in corpora of two different English-l...
HildeHasselgård, Adjunct adverbials in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-0-521-51556-6. - Volume 17 Issue 3 - Bernd Kortmann
Since the end of the 1990s, we have been calling for an integration of typological methods and insights into dialectological enterprises (e.g. Kortmann 1999; Anderwald and Kortmann 2002; Kortmann 2003, 2004). This new perspective informed among other things the Freiburg project on ‘English Dialect Syntax from a Typological Perspective’ (2000 to 200...
Frequency is defined in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. While the default assumption is that...
Frequency is defi ned in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. While the default assumption is that...
Jeder, der in seinem Leben eine Fremdsprache gelernt hat — und sei es nur eine eng mit dem Deutschen verwandte wie das Englische —, hat dadurch einen kleinen Einblick darin erhalten, wie unterschiedlich Sprachen sein können. In der Welt werden heute 6000 bis 7000 Sprachen aus ganz unterschiedlichen Sprachfamilien gesprochen. Eine wichtige Aufgabe d...
This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...
This book is the result of a unique collaborative research effort. The outcome of this collaborative effort were two volumes, the first of which turned into the current monograph. The second volume includes the data which form the basis for this book, organized into two dictionaries (one language-based, the other semantics-based). It is hoped that...
This paper contributes to an objectification of Chambers' notion of vernacular universals and somewhat relativizes the predominantly critical opinions that have been voiced concerning this notion in the recent literature (especially in Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto 2009). Focusing on the morphosyntax of non-standard varieties of English around th...
Drawing on naturalistic corpus data, this study is an exercise in establishing
typological profiles of learner varieties (as sampled in the International
Corpus of Learner English) vis-à-vis indigenized L2 varieties of English
(as represented in the International Corpus of English), though we also include
in our dataset, for benchmarking purposes,...
This book presents research on grammaticalization, the process by which lexical items acquire grammatical function, grammatical items get additional functions, and grammars are created. Scholars from around the world introduce and discuss the core theoretical and methodological bases of grammaticalization, report on work in the field, and point to...
English (dialects) in the eighteenth and nineteenth century From a linguistic point of view, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are very different from the preceding centuries in the history of English. The radical changes the (grammatical) system had been undergoing in the Middle and (though much less so) in the Early Modern English period ha...
What are the large-scale patterns and generalizations that emerge when investigating morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a bird’s eye perspective? To address this question, this study draws on the questionnaire-based morphosyntactic database of the Handbook of Varieties of English, utilizing a number of quantitative analysis technique...
This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some langu...
World Englishes is a vibrant research field that has attracted scholars from many different linguistic subdisciplines. Emphasizing the common ground of all research on World Englishes, the 22 articles in this collected volume, selected from more than a hundred papers presented at the 2007 conference of the International Association for World Englis...
Report on the inaugural conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (Freiburg, Germany, 8–11 October 2008)
This paper deals with variation in agreement systems in English dialects. We will argue that a usage-based constructionist approach offers a compelling explanation why certain theoretically possible agreement systems noted in previous resarch are not attested. Our corpus study attempts to apply insights of usage-based constructionist models to the...
Presentation at the International Spring School Pavia (6-10 April 2009)
Aims and Scope This volume offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on three domains of grammatical variation in the British Isles. All studies draw heavily on the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a computerized corpus for predominantly British English dialects comprising some 2.5 million words. Besides an account of F...
Key features: indispensable textbook for students of English linguistics; exercises and study questions; interactive CD-ROM. Aims and Scope This volume gives a detailed overview of the varieties of English spoken on the British Isles, including lesser-known varieties such as those spoken in Orkney and Shetland and the Channel Islands. The chapters,...
