Irmengard Rauch – författare

The Phonology / Paraphonology Interface and the Sounds of German Across Time is an excursion into the phonology of the German language in the present, the remote prehistoric past (Indo-European and Germanic), and throughout the almost thousand-year historical era. It accordingly addresses all eras pertaining to the study of the German language in its innermost core, namely, its phonology. This book makes accessible to linguists and non-linguists alike the elements of acoustic and articulatory phonetics. It provides the reader with insight into phonological methods from the Prague Structuralism and Chomskyan Generativism of the last seventy-five years to an array of today’s non-linear approaches by applying them to given phonological changes that act as leitmotifs in the research of German sounds through time. The dynamic acts that infuse the structure of German phonology, such as ablaut, umlaut, and various other assimilations, diphthongizations, monophthongizations, and consonant shifts, are all woven into the book. In each of the three time frames, the interface with ample paraphonological data allows the reader to experience «flesh and blood» phonology, that is, how it occurs and to what purpose in the mouth / ear of the speaker / listener of the German language. Not least, the reading of a piece of literature, be it a Runic inscription, the Old High German Otfrid, a Middle High German dawn song, the Early New High German Ackermann aus Böhmen, or a Rilke poem, adds delight to the understanding of the sounds that belong to our most vital and prized human possessions.

The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings, now in its second edition, is designed for students and scholars of the oldest known language with a sizeable corpus, belonging to the English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian language clade. The Gothic language is seminal to the history of the study of each of these languages. Gothic grammar is a standard text in courses on Indo-European and general linguistics since Gothic serves as the prototype Germanic language in the study of historical comparative world language typologies. Particularly pan-Germanic is the innermost core of the grammar, the genetic phonology, which is reconstructed within the most recent approaches of laryngeal and glottalic theories. Most challenging to traditional viewpoints is the total novel restructuring of Gothic synchronic phonology via current theoretical approaches such as underspecification theory and optimality theory. While the Gothic inflectional morphology is rendered in full paradigmatic display, its understanding is enhanced by the application of underspecification theory and the use of inheritance networks, a computational linguistic concept. Brief "Syntactic Considerations" concluding the grammar present a network of head-driven phrase structures. This book also brings the reader into the ambience of the fourth-century Goths. Readings from the Wulfilian Bible, the extant eight pages of the Skeireins, together with a glossary, definitions of linguistic technical terms, a bibliography, and an index complete this volume.

Although the Franco-American communities of Southbridge, Massachusetts, and Woonsocket, Rhode Island, have much in common historically, the shift from French to English has advanced to differing degrees in the two locations. In this book, Louis Edward Stelling explores morphosyntactic variation and the advance of language shift using historical documentation, U.S. census figures and interviews conducted with sixty-nine informants.After comparing and contrasting the sociolinguistic profiles of the two communities, Stelling describes some of the linguistic consequences of the shift from French to English in these traditional Franco-American centers through an analysis of two morphosyntactic variables: use of auxiliary verbs (être and avoir) in the passé composé and use of synthetic (inflected) and analytic (periphrastic) future forms. Findings provide new insight for understanding linguistic change during situations of language decline.Southbridge and Woonsocket stand out as unique cases of language shift. Despite the differing degrees to which a gradual shift from French to English has advanced in the two communities, speech norms are remarkably similar today. While certain aspects of grammar are certainly changing, this is also the case in settings where French is the majority language. Moreover, variation among forms representing an overtly prescribed point of grammar bears all of the social meaning found in non-obsolescent varieties. Despite the sociolinguistic situation of language shift, the French language shows a degree of grammatical conservatism in both Southbridge and Woonsocket which may render this variety remarkably resistant to those qualitative changes which would otherwise add to the stigma of Franco-American French.

The sixteen chapters comprising this book on the Bay Area German Linguistic Fieldwork Project offer over twenty-five years of research into the changing language of native speakers and first-generation American-German speakers residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1984 the principal project investigator, Irmengard Rauch, together with students of Germanic linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has elicited and analyzed an array of linguistic phenomena that include politically correct (PC) German, the German language of vulgarity and civility, and the grammar of e-mailing and texting German as well as that of snail-mail German. Comparison data were also gathered from Berlin in the case of the PC German and from Bonn in the case of the vulgarity/civility project. In recording the sounds of spoken German in the Bay Area, the BAG fieldworkers interviewed not only German-speaking adults but also first-generation German-speaking children (yielding a «Kinderlect») to compare with the spoken English of both of these groups. Still other studies focus on the interplay among gesture, emotion, and language; canine-human communication; the architecture of the lie; and the architecture of the apology. Chapter one details the modus operandi of the BAG research project.This book is useful for the study of the sociolinguistics of German, English-German bilingualism, general linguistics, and the methods of linguistic fieldwork.

Why were runes invented? What did the Germanic peoples of southern Scandinavia speak during the first centuries CE? Can the earliest runic inscriptions be used to learn something about their dialects, and can we extract other information from their study as a corpus? The Early Runic Inscriptions: Their Western Features gives answers to these questions through an analysis of the earliest runic inscriptions found mainly in Denmark, and later in England and on the continent up to the seventh century. This analysis offers a novel tracing of the initial appearance and later establishment of West Germanic dialectal features in an area and time usually referred to as having a more Northern linguistic identity.The earliest runic inscriptions are an invaluable source of information about the state of the Germanic dialects during the first seven centuries of our era. They also provide insights about some of the social customs of different Germanic groups during this period, such as the development of the purposes of runic writing or personal-name formation. Using a comparative and comprehensive methodology, this book combines linguistics with other disciplines to cast as much light as possible on these oftentimes single-worded inscriptions.

Selected Writings of Irmengard Rauch represents that portion of Irmengard Rauch’s articles which center on contemporary and historical Germanic linguistic phenomena. They thus speak to the principal North, East, and West Germanic dialects. Her authored books The Old High German Diphthongization: A Description of a Phonemic Change (1967); The Old Saxon Language: Grammar, Epic Narrative, Linguistic Interference (1992); Semiotic Insights: The Data Do the Talking (1998); The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings (2003, 2011); The Phonology/Paraphonology Interface and the Sounds of German Across Time (2008) stand on their own. Her contributions to linguistic fieldwork are documented in BAG—Bay Area German Linguistic Fieldwork Project (2015).Rauch’s writings spanning half a century, from the early sixties to the present, encompass an array of subjects from the state of the art, to multiple language components, that is, segmental and prosodic phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic topics informing Germanic languages, as well as to literature and to nonverbal communication. Linguistic and interdisciplinary methods imbue all of her writings. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where Generative Grammar made early inroads, she was trained as an American structuralist, reaping the benefits of the functionalist Prague School, preceded by Saussure, the Neogrammarians, Darwin, Rask, Grimm (all 19th-century instigators of linguistics as a science), and of the founding of the LSA. Since the early seventies she opened her methods of analysis to the semiotic approach of Locke, Saussure, and Peirce. Consequently, Rauch’s writings exploit the combined approaches of linguistics and semiotics. These are the inextricable work-horses, which in combination, enhance her arguments detailing given linguistic problems that define the field of General and Germanic Linguistics and thus feed the multi-disciplinary research interests of both seasoned researchers and neophytes.

Is English a threat to language diversity in Europe? This question has been hotly debated in language policy and planning in Germany and the EU, particularly in institutional and business contexts. However, the effects of English on non-official minority speech communities, such as speakers of immigrant languages and multiethnolects, are rarely addressed in this context. This book presents two case studies involving speakers of multiethnolects and refugee youth in Germany which show that these populations, stereotyped as non-proficient English speakers, are using English in creative and innovative ways. For these communities, speaking English is not a choice, but a matter of the ability to survive, to cross borders, and to create new identities in a foreign country. Drawing on corpus linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork data, this book sheds light on how validating these (standard and non-standard) Englishes represents an important act of empowerment and social justice for these communities. Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, this book is of broad appeal to linguists, language educators, language policy makers, and to the German Studies community at large.

The lectures in this book are immensely Chomskyan in spirit, recursive-syntactic in nature, and tethered to a framework which takes as the null hypothesis the notion that language is an innate, pre-determined biological system—a system which by definition is multi-complex, human-specific, and analogous to a philosophy highly commensurate of Descartes’ great proverbial adage which announces the calling for a ‘ghost-in-the-machine’. The book begins with a gradual assessment of the kinds of complex constructs students of syntax need to work-up. Leading to the classic ‘Four-Sentences’—each of which bears as a kind of post-mark its own decade of Chomskyan analysis—we trace the origins of generative grammar from the fields of child language acquisition (of the 1960s), to psycholinguistics (of the 1970s), to where we stand today within the Minimalist Program. Various spin-off proposals have been spawned by envisioned analyses which treat syntactic movement as the quintessential human processing—a processing which would give rise to human language. Such spin-offs include ‘Proto-language’ and a new treatment of the so-called morpho-syntactic ‘Dual Mechanism Model’.

This work addresses the issue of magical communication found in the Elder Futhark runic inscriptions. It examines the Kragehul Spear Shaft (DR 196), Björketorp runestone (DR 360), the Horn(s) of Gallehus (DR 12), Gummarp runestone (DR 358), Lindholm amulet (DR 261), Straum whetstone (KJ 50), Ribe skull fragment (DR EM85; 151B), the Noleby runestone (KJ 67), and the Eggja runestone (N KJ 101). It seeks magical communication which may putatively be encompassed by the law of magical semiosis.By setting objective parameters for measuring this law of magical communication, it can be determined whether or not a particular inscription should be understood as magical or non-magical specific to the Umwelt and Weltanschauung of the Runemaster. Essentially, this work is meant to challenge runologists in postulating falsifiable criteria so that magical communication in the world of the Runemaster can be discussed in an academic setting.The work begins by discussing how Charles Sanders Peirce can help provide a basic framework regarding the sign. His phenomenological framework is applied to the world of the Runemaster. The next section then addresses the problem with the word "magic," which goes far beyond the concept of "if it does not make sense, it must be magical." It then leads to a discussion of runes and numinous qualities and finally to a corpus chapter which applies the theories and methods the author has adopted.

This collection of articles by Irmengard Rauch, a widely known and respected scholar of semiotics and linguistics, provides a lucid narrative on the nature of both subjects, revealing their symbiotic relationship through concrete, data-based application.Rauch shows, with many practical examples, how to conduct semiotic analyses of language, narrative, texts, and discourse. In Part One, Semiotic Insights, she introduces the reader to the fundamental tenets and metatheory of the fields of linguistics and semiotics. She explores the multifaceted cooperation and tension between them, their shared threads and subthemes, the role of language in both, the tools of each discipline, and their relationship to other disciplines, especially biology and medicine. In Part Two, The Data Do the Talking, hard linguistic data are exposed and analysed within the semiotic paradigm. Using well-proven linguistic tools, Rauch's semiotic method lends insight into the dynamics of how language changes and grows.

No detailed description available for "Semiotics around the World: Synthesis in Diversity".

No detailed description available for "On Germanic Linguistics".

No detailed description available for "Methodology in Transition".

No detailed description available for "Classic and Contemporary".

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No detailed description available for "The old high German diphthongization".

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No detailed description available for "Linguistic Method".

Literary Nationalism in German and Japanese Germanistik traces the convergence of German and Japanese metaphors for national literary spirit through the academic study of the German language and literature in Germanistik. Early notions of a spiritual link to the national literary tradition allowed speakers of German to imagine their unity before the existence of the modern German state, but the concept for spirit also gained various nuances in the works of such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Hermann Hesse. Moreover, throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, scholars and thinkers increasingly equated literary spirit with the psychology of the German nation. Against the background of these developments, the slogans of university students who burned books of so-called un-German spirit in 1933 gained a particularly ominous meaning. Interestingly, for Japanese contemplating German literature in the late nineteenth century, the native idea of national literary spirit was one of many concepts that differed from their German counterparts. However, skilled writers and translators like Mori Ōgai invested old words with new meanings, and by the 1930s Japanese scholars of Germanistik had not only documented the discourse on German national literary spirit but also deemed it synonymous with the spirit of Japan’s own tradition.