Torsten Leuschner

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor at Ghent University

Along with a renewed interest in the empirical foundations of linguistics, the increasing accessibility of large-scale corpora has sparked a surge of corpus-linguistic work on the grammar of natural languages. Corpus-based methods enhance our knowledge and understanding of individual languages, and they are theoretically significant because they al...

A subgroup of German Nom-Dat verbs have received considerable attention in the literature due to the propensity of the dative to occur preverbally, which is unexpected on an object analysis of the dative (see references below). Here we argue for an alternative analysis, namely that the relevant verbs alternate between two different argument structu...

Zusammenfassung Anhand historischer Germanismen v. a. im Englischen, aber auch im Polnischen versucht der Aufsatz, einen Beitrag zu einer interdisziplinären Linguistik der Erinnerung zu leisten. Nach einer Literaturübersicht wird zunächst vorgeschlagen, das Denotat lexikalischer Erinnerungsorte als narrative Abbreviatur (J. Rüsen), das Konnotat als...

Anhand historischer Germanismen in Nachbarsprachen des Deutschen (v.a. des Englischen, aber auch des Polnischen) versucht der Beitrag aus interdisziplinärer Sicht die Frage zu beantworten, wie sprachliche Ausdrücke als immaterielle Erinnerungsorte (P. Nora) konzeptualisiert werden können. Nach einer Übersicht über die relevante geschichts- und spra...

Starting from the term “family of constructions”, the present article investigates lexical and syntactic variation in a subtype of German concessive conditionals which is marked by was (‘what’) in combination with expressions of irrelevance like egal (‘no matter’). 12,894 examples from the DeReKo corpus ( Deutsches Referenzkorpus ) are analysed man...

This squib sketches an approach to concessive conditionals (CCs) from the perspective of Radical Construction Grammar ( Croft 2001 ). It brings earlier functional-typological work on CCs to bear on language-particular constructionist analyses of CCs, using the notions of ‘family (of constructions)’ and ‘prototype’ as the bridge. After suggesting ho...

Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically re...

This squib sketches an approach to concessive conditionals (CCs) from the perspective of Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). It brings earlier functional-typological work on CCs to bear on language-particular constructionist analyses of CCs, using the notions of ‘family (of constructions)’ and ‘prototype’ as a bridge. After suggesting how th...

The separation or 'debonding' of prefixoids in informal language use in Germanic and the question whether spelling reflects re-categorization of such compound members as adjectives have recently been attracting increased attention among linguists. This contribution focuses on category changes involving lexical items with an evaluative function, bot...

The separation or ‘debonding’ of prefixoids in informal language use in Germanic and the question whether spelling reflects re-categorization of such compound members as adjectives have recently been attracting increased attention among linguists. This contribution focuses on category changes involving lexical items with an evaluative function, bot...

Recent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have demonstrated that apart from indexing cultural stereotypes (Stubbs 1998), public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of references to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes (Leuschner 2013, Schröter/Leuschner 2013). This paper i...

Der vorliegende Beitrag behandelt das Gebiet mit Deutsch als Amtssprache in Belgien (die Deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft, DG) im Hinblick auf deren Stellung in der Plurizentrik des Deutschen. Nach einem Überblick über die DG sowie über den Status und die Funktionen des Deutschen in der DG in soziolinguistischer und sprachen-/bildungspolitischer Hinsi...

Based on a comparative corpus study, the present paper contrasts conditionals containing the modal verbs sollte in German, should in English, and mocht/moest in Dutch. The conditionals are examined with respect to the linkage levels between protasis and apodosis, the tense/mood patterns in the two clauses, and the degree of syntactic integration of...

This edited volume brings together the latest research on fictive interaction, that is the use of the frame of ordinary conversation as a means to structure cognition (talking to oneself), discourse (monologues organized as dialogues), and grammar (“ why me? attitude”) . This follows prior work on the subject by Esther Pascual and other authors, mo...

Dependent V1 clauses: Conditional, contrastive, concessive - functional-typological and constructional perspectives Responding to the preceding article by Beekhuizen, the present contribution comments from a functional-typological and constructional perspective on Beekhuizen’s opinion that the V1-order is not a “strong” linguistic sign in Dutch. Be...

This chapter discusses the alleged emergence of verb-first (V1) conditionals in English and German from question-driven fictive interaction of the type A: p? (B: Yes.) A: Then q. Since this scenario proves impossible to maintain with regard to English, an alternative model is proposed treating V1 as the grammaticalized residue of a stage in ancient...

In German, the non-native lexical item Top(-)/top(-) is widely attested in both bound (Top-Sportler ‘top athlete’, Topwetter ‘great weather’) and free uses (top Veranstaltung ‘fantastic event’, Das Essen war echt top! ‘The food was excellent!’). To account for these different yet related uses, of which is the latter is a recent innovation, we sugge...

The present paper contrasts verb-first (V1-) conditionals in written usage in present-day English and German. Based on the hypothesis that V1-protases originated in independent interrogatives and then grammaticalized as conditional subordinate clauses in an asynchronous fashion in both languages, we use data from the British National Corpus (BNC) a...

This paper presents a contrastive study of on the one hand ('t) schijnt (‘it seems’), a form of the Dutch verb of appearance schijnen (‘seem’), and on the other hand, a similar use of the German cognate scheinen, viz. scheint(')s (lit. ‘seems it’). On the basis of corpus data, using a mainly qualitative methodology, we argue that these forms of sch...

Am Beispiel des deutschen »Drang nach Osten« plädiert der vorliegende Beitrag für eine linguistische Fundierung der historischen Stereotypenforschung. Ausgehend von der Entstehung und Funktion dieses Stereotyps im Kontext der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts wird nacheinander die kognitiv-diskursive, die syntaktisch-semanti...

This paper argues in favour of a more rigorous methodology for corpusbased translation studies. According to our proposal, research papers in the field should be minimally required to (i) provide a meticulous overview of the corpus materials used and of the exact procedures for selecting, annotating and sifting the data; (ii) comment on any specifi...

While concessives are well-known for their special semantic characteristics, most research has so far been oriented towards hypotactic construction types (although etc.). The present article seeks to complement this trend by investigating the paratactic zwar … aber-construction in German (roughly equivalent to English ‘true … but’), with a special...

One of the most enduring stereotypes concerning the history of Central and Eastern Europe is the notion of a German Drang nach Osten. While the impact of German influence on the region is beyond doubt, its alleged motivation in terms of a ‘drive to the East’ has been dismissed almost universally by historians (especially in Germany and Poland) as a...

Ausgehend von der im Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren, in der Deutschen Grammatik des IDS und anderswo erwähnten auffallenden Ausdrucksbreite der zwar … aber-Verknüpfung im Gegenwartsdeutschen setzt sich der vorliegende Beitrag zwei Ziele: wichtige Aspekte der Variation von zwar … aber zu dokumentieren sowie Fragestellungen im Hinblick auf einräu...

Although Dutch, English, and German all have a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, they differ in the way these stops are realized. While English and German contrast voiceless aspirated with phonetically voiceless stops, Dutch has a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and prevoiced stops. This study compares these three...

The present article examines asyndetic or conjunctionless conditionals in German and English. According to Jespersen’s Model (1940), this construction arose diachronically from a paratactic discourse sequence with a polar interrogative, but more recently Harris and Campbell (1995) have claimed that this model lacks any theoretical and empirical fou...

The present article investigates so-called prefixoids in German, Dutch and Swedish from a mainly qualitative perspective. Prefixoids are bound first members in compounds which are formally identical to free parent morphs but tend to be distinguished from the latter by, amongst other things, a high degree of productivity and a special delexicalized...

This volume and its companion one Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives offer a selection of papers from the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization , held at the University of Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. The overall aim of the book is to enrich our understanding of what grammaticalization entails via...

One of the most contentious issues in historical syntax at the moment is the problem of directionality, in particular its theoretical status in the debate over grammaticalization. Grammaticalization is usually said to proceed unidirectionally from less grammatical to more grammatical. Under a recent proposal by Haspelmath (2004), genuine violations...

Starting from observations from (Belgian-)Dutch usage, the present article offers a comparison of affixoids (better known in English as "semi-affixes") in German and Dutch. We begin with a discussion of recent developments in the affixoid debate with regard to both German and Dutch and then compare prefixoids and suffixoids in the two languages on...

In this article we offer a comparative survey of word-forming elements in German and Swedish known as “affixoids”. A highly controversial topic in German linguistics, the notion of affixoid does remain useful given the position of the elements in question midway along the cline between compounding and derivation – so useful in fact that we feel it...

Zusammenfassung Gegenstand des vorliegenden Aufsatzes ist das sprachenstatistische und nationalitätenpolitische Werk des preußischen Statistikers Richard Böckh (1824–1907), insbesondere der Aufsatz “Über die statistische Bedeutung der Volksprache” (1866), in dem Böckh die Ansicht vertritt, allein die Sprache definiere die Nationalität, und das Buch...

The present article discusses politically relevant aspects of the work of the Prussian statistician Richard Böckh (1824–1907), a renowned specialist on language statistics, nationality policy and general demographics in his day. Two of his publications are focused on: the article “Über die statistische Bedeutung der Volksprache” (‘On the Statistica...

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Examples from the Mannheim corpus are used to analyse the positional and combinatorial variation of the 'irrelevance particles' auch and immer in subordinate clauses with a w-word. The numerical predominance or absence of certain variants is attributed to a synchronically and diachronically observable specialisation of immer to left-leaning positio...

This paper explores similarities and differences among ‘ever’ words in English (ever), German (je) and Dutch (ooit) both synchronically and diachronically. The ‘always’ readings clearly attested for all three elements throughout the pre-modern periods of their languages seem to have involved marking them in different ways for ‘PAST’ and ‘FUTURE’ (‘...

Grammaticalization theory is, of course, part of the wider research programme of functional typology, i.e. the school of linguistics interested in how variation patterns within and across languages reflect external and internal pressures on linguistic structure. What appears to be relatively underdeveloped in this line of research, however, is an i...

The socio-constructivist approach has made a significant contribution to computer assisted language learning through its focus on peer collaboration and negotiation of meaning. The present paper shows how these insights can be applied to foster advanced foreign language (FL) writing skills. Based on our experience with FL writing proficiency course...

Rezension v.: Ruth Wodak et al.: Zur diskursiven Konstruktion nationaler Identität. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1998, 567 pp.

Am 28. August 1876 trat in Preußen ein Gesetz in Kraft, mit dem Deutsch als Geschäftssprache der Behörden (d.h. als Amtssprache) festgelegt wurde; damit sollte u.a. das Polnische in der Provinz Posen aus dem öffentlichen Leben verdrängt und die Assimilation der polnischen Bevölkerung beschleunigt werden. Vor dem Hintergrund der Reichsgründung geht...

Rezension v.: Henry Cord Meyer: Drang nach Osten. Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German-Slavic Relations, 1849-1990. Bern et al.: Peter Lang 1996, 142 pp.