Linguistische Berichte Heft 281

Demonstrative pronouns have been shown to direct the attention to an entity that is currently not the most prominent entity in discourse. German poses an interesting puzzle because two of its demonstrative pronouns have very similar interpretive preferences. Patil et al. (2023) suggest that the der-demonstrative (DPro) considers the perspectival anchor as the most prominent entity, while the dieser-demonstrative (DemPro) is insensitive to the perspective holder, rendering distinct interpretive biases, whereas Patil et al. (2020) showed that DemPro prefers the formal language register, and further suggested that DPros avoid the written modality. Here we test a long-held explanation for the availability of two demonstrative pronouns, namely that the DPro is preferably used in the spoken modality, while the DemPro favours the written modality. In two sets of experiments, we directly compare the acceptability of the two demonstratives between spoken and written modalities. The experiments showed mixed results. While Experiment 1 registered no effect of modality, Experiment 2 revealed higher ratings for the DPro in the spoken over the written modality. We argue that the findings can be reconciled by considering register differences in the two studies, where items from Experiment 1 point to a more formal register than the items in Experiment 2. Overall, we suggest that register might be a stronger licensor for the choice of demonstrative pronouns than modality.

Easy-to-read German (Leichte Sprache) is a linguistic variety used to improve the comprehensibility of texts for a target group with specific needs. Guidelines for the use of easy-to-read German advise, among other things, the avoidance of the genitive and recommend substituting it with a datival phrase with von. This is debatable for two reasons: First, this strategy cannot be applied to all types of the genitive constructions and, second, its usefulness has not been empirically substantiated. Previous empirical studies on this subject suffered from methodical flaws and a lack of statistical power. By applying a reading comprehension test, the present study seeks to find out whether the use of a von-phrase instead of the genitive really holds advantages for reading comprehension. Thirty-seven adults with intellectual disabilities were asked to read 32 focus sentences, 16 containing a possessive genitive and the other 16 containing an analogous von-phrase. Participants’ comprehension regarding ownership or belonging as indicated in the sentences was examined through single-choice questions. The analysis of the responses showed that there were no significant differences in the understanding of the genitive and the von-phrase. This was independent from the salience of morphological case marking and from the length of the sentence. Furthermore, there was no evidence for an influence of individual reading abilities for words and pseudowords or individual reading frequency. These results question the need of a general rule to avoid genitives in Easy-to-read German.

As with many languages, the Germanic languages have intensifiers to mark reflexive structures. In standard German, this is usually done with the particle selbst or with a “stilistic variant” (Siemund 2000: 10) selber. The coexistence of both forms is regarded as a free variation in which selbst is the form preferred by the standard (e. g. Gast 2006: 70; Hole 2002: FN 1). However, it turns out that selber is already established in higher registers and that there seems to be an apparently free variation of the two forms selbst/selber in contemporary German. This article examines to what extent this case of a semantic-syntactic overabundance actually represents free variation or to what extent systemic and functional differentiations of both forms can be recognized. As will be shown, there are indeed individual speakers who exhibit a functional differentiation of both forms. Another key issue of this paper is the methodological question of how ambiguous structures can be recorded in text corpora or speaker surveys.

Lexical variables such as iconicity or age of acquisition are known to be important sources of variance in psycholinguistic experiments. To control for their influence, researchers working on German Sign Language (DGS) need to use stimuli rated for these variables (e. g., iconicity) by an independent group of participants before implementing their actual experiment. Up to now, several research groups have made such rating data publicly available, but a central resource is currently still lacking. Against this background, this short paper provides a roadmap for the collaborative creation of a so-called “DGS-LEX”, a lexical database for psycholinguistic research on DGS, similar to ASL-LEX. By integrating relevant data from different published and forthcoming studies, this joint effort aims to establish a new database for lexical variables in DGS primarily based upon subjective ratings. (Note: This paper is bilingual. The contents of the English and German versions are identical. The German version can be retrieved from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28282907. A summary in DGS is available from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28282898.)