Pierre-Yves Modicom - Böcker

Zentrales Thema des Sammelbandes ist der Begriff der Verfestigung bzw. der formalen Stabilität im Deutschen und im Sprachvergleich, der die Aktualität der neueren lexikographischen und phraseologischen Forschung besonders prägt. Die hier versammelten 23 Beiträge reihen sich thematisch in diese Aktualität ein und behandeln diskursive Aspekte der Verfestigungs- bzw. Stabilitätsproblematik im Diskurs. Arbeiten und Forschungsergebnisse ausgewiesener internationaler Experten werden hier zusammengeführt, die sich der Schnittstelle zwischen Pragmatik und Morphologie/Syntax widmen und vor allem das Deutsche oder den Sprachvergleich betreffende Fragestellungen im Zusammenhang mit Grammatikalisierungs-, Lexikalisierungs- und/oder Phraseologisierungsphänomenen diskutieren. Hiermit verbunden wird u.a. der Frage nachgegangen, wie verfestigte Strukturen zu Argumentationszwecken im Diskurs eingesetzt werden. Der vier thematische Bereiche umfassende Band zeigt damit, wie facettenreich der Verfestigungsbegriff im Diskurs sein kann und bietet zugleich Impulse für die künftige Forschung in diesem Bereich.

Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.

This monograph is devoted to the cross-linguistic profile of subjects in Early Modern Germanic languages. The typologically complex question of subject criteria is addressed in a functional framework relying on recent developments in Construction Grammar. The set of data is extracted from a parallel corpus made up of the 1587 German chapbook about the life of Dr. Faustus and its English, Dutch and Danish translations, all of which had been published by 1592. At that time, the syntactic features of English subjects were still comparable to Continental languages like Danish, facilitating the inclusion of English in a cross-Germanic analysis. The analysis makes use of two comparative concepts of subjecthood; argumental subjecthood, centred on the argument-structural characteristics of subjects, and informational subjecthood, which corresponds to the syntacticization of information-structural properties. Subjecthood is defined as a labile multi-level configuration of argumental and informational parameters. This approach sheds new light on notorious tricks of Germanic syntax such as oblique subjects, expletives, scrambling and subjectless passives.

Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.

German-Americans represent the largest self-declared ancestry group in the United States of America. The period from the 200th anniversary celebration of Germantown's founding in 1883 to the end of the First World War was an age of intense turmoil within the ranks of German-American communities. These decades were marked by a massive political and cultural realignment as well as major contributions to the (self-)definition of German-Americanness. Historians and sociolinguists with backgrounds in German or American studies offer a fresh look at a critical period in the history of German-American communities.