Nanna Fuhrhop

Focusing on the acquisition of questions in child second language acquisition (child SLA) German and French, this study investigates the matter of AO and sensitive period effects in the L2 acquisition of syntax and morphology. As such, it may shed light on cross-linguistic differences and similarities in children acquiring a second language in preschool. Two different groups of child second language learners are investigated, consisting of children with different typological language backgrounds (viz. Turkish and German) who learn typologically different second languages (viz. German and French, respectively). Our conclusion is threefold: (i) irrespective of the first language, child SLA is highly similar to first language acquisition (FLA) in the grammatical domain investigated; (ii) children with an age of onset of three to four form a heterogeneous group in terms of grammar development but may be considered simultaneous rather than successive bilinguals; and (iii) the input situation affects the interpretation of developmental patterns in child SLA. These aspects are discussed with reference to different claims about the characteristics of child SLA (i.e.Meisel 2008, 2009; Schwartz 2003a, b) and their consequences for linguistic modelling. mehr

Our paper states our position on Rezec (2010). In his paper, he tries to deconstruct Primus' letter analysis (Primus 2004), portraying it as implausible on the whole. In Primus (2004), the author describes the form of lowercase letters and begins to establish a system that relates the letters' graphic features to the corresponding sounds' phonological features. In this paper, we fiercly reject Rezec's theses and give reasons why we agree with Primus' approach. We argue on the basis of the graphematic syllable and the length hierarchy, both presented in Fuhrhop/Buchmann (2009). Compared to Primus' system, we only had to make one major change (the implementation of skewness) in order to answer a question completely different from the one posed by Primus. We clearly regard this as a strength of Primus' system. mehr

Quotation marks are substantially used for direct speech and citations. For the ‘modalizing’ use, the Official Rules state that a “different understanding than usual” is indicated; they give very little information on the use of quotation marks beyond literal reference. It therefore seems all the more interesting to investigate the usage of modalizing quotation marks. In the present analysis, we studied the school-leaving examinations of an entire year. School-leaving examinations are texts by persons whose institutional acquisition of written language can be regarded as complete; they are texts written by skilled writers. The investigation takes into account both formal and functional observations. We recognized differences between school subjects that can be interpreted with regard to the concept of educational language. The writers described here showed a high sensitivity (conscious or unconscious) to the use of quotation marks, which we call the “struggle for educational language”. This may be related to the corpus investigated here. However, our study constitutes a solid basis for further corpus studies on quotation marks. mehr

Minuscules of the Latin alphabet can be divided into letters with length (for example ) and letters without length (for example ). This observation leads to the concept of a graphematic syllable. While plosives, which correspond to graphemes with length, occur at the syllable edge, vowels, corresponding to graphemes without length, occur in the syllable core. In this paper, we develop a (so-called) length hierarchy in analogy to the phonological sonority hierarchy. Since so far, the feature 'length' has been binary, we present a scalar feature of length required by the hierarchy. Every letter is divided into a head and a coda (s. Primus 2006), the form of the head representing the position in the hierarchy. Our length hierarchy operates with graphematic properties exclusively, thus avoiding phonological ones. Based on the length hierarchy, a graphematic principle of syllable structure can be formulated (analogous to a phonological principle of syllable structure, known as the sonority sequencing principle). Although this idea is developed for German, we show how we can deal with the problematic , which represents a potential syllable core with length in English. mehr