Linguistische Berichte Heft 280

Compared to the logical operator of conjunction which conjoins two propositions symmetrically, the natural linguistic connective and has a wider scope of meaning aspects including the asymmetric ones, where the order of the conjuncts has an impact on the meaning of the coordinated sentence. The current theoretical debate mainly concerns the sources of the asymmetric meanings in regard to the interaction of semantics and pragmatics, as these extra meaning components present typical traits of a pragmatic inference, but they may also influence the truth-conditional meaning in embedded sentences. This article summarizes the most important approaches addressing this issue. The meaning-minimalist accounts assume that the semantics of the conjunctive coordinator is equal to the logical conjunction, and attribute further meaning components to pragmatic factors. The meaning-non-minimalists, on the other hand, assign a richer semantic content to the connective that restricts or favours certain semantic relations between the conjuncts. Although the current approaches confront challenges, they provide the basis for an integrated model for asymmetric conjunction that combines multifaceted factors.

The aim of this paper is to show that not all grammatical areas are equally influenced in lan-guage contact. Based on semi-spontaneous speech data collected from five Judeo-Spanish speakers from Bulgaria, we argue that narrow syntax is rather stable in contact settings. The changes that take place in this domain are subject to natural processes of language change. In order for a structure to be influenced by the contact language, or to converge on the contact language, it needs to be located at the interfaces. However, in contrast to current assumptions concerning the Interface Hypothesis, we argue that whether a structure converges or not depends on whether a similar structure can be identified in the contact language. To underpin our analysis, we investigate clitic placement, clitic climbing, possessives, and adjective placement.

This article provides the first empirical study on the spelling of the Volga German variety in Argentina, which is still one of the first graphemic language contact studies. On the basis of translation sentences from Spanish collected in the province of Buenos Aires among 36 Volga-German speakers, the grapheme-phoneme correspondences used by the writers in writing down their primary spoken variety are investigated and interpreted in the light of language contact. The results show a visible orientation towards the Spanish writing system in various aspects. Subsequently, two complementary approaches for analyzing the inter- as well as intraindividual spelling variation in the data are presented with initial findings. Overall, a considerable amount of variation is evident, but its controlling factors are still unclear. The present study also provides an empirical foundation for orthographical debates about Volga German in Argentina. This seems necessary because orthographic norms, if they are to have a chance of being applied, must not be detached from the actual writing intuition of the speakers.