Abstracts

Reutner, Ursula: Remotivierung und Assoziationen. Von fr. silhouette über it. campidoglio und pg. saudade bis hin zu sp. cementerio

Linguistic remotivation is not only an intellectual undertaking, but often also takes place unconsciously in the form of folk etymology. The human desire to convey meaning to expressions that have become opaque leads to the conscious or unconscious restructuring of language and thereby sometimes also to language change. The decisive factor for the type of meaning attributed is associations based on the content or the form of the remotivated expression. The article examines the impact of associations on remotivation in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish with the goal of delivering a concise and yet inclusive classification of folk etymologies. It first analyses the corpus and distinguishes changes that concern only the content from those in content and form. In both cases, it differentiates between lexicalized and purely associative semantic changes, and, if relevant, between native words and loan words as well as between general vocabulary and toponyms. It also subclassifies loan words according to their language of origin and native words into those affected by changes concerning both spelling and pronunciation and others altering only the spelling. In conclusion, this allows a classification of the phenomenon that, by systematically distinguishing between lexicalized and purely associative changes, rigorously takes into account the role of associations in the process of remotivation.

Heinrich, Kai Christof: Sprachphilosophische Aspekte des Französischen, Portugiesischen und Spanischen: Überlegungen zu den Volkssprachen in Grammatiken, Dialogen und Traktaten (1492–1627).

Cet article traite des aspects de la philosophie du langage qui se trouvent dans les textes métalinguistiques espagnols, français et portugais datant de la Renaissance. Dans cette analyse, il sera question d’examiner des grammaires, des dialogues, ainsi que des traités allant du XVe siècle au début du XVIIe siècle. Dans leurs discours, les érudits mettaient l’accent sur les langues vernaculaires (contrairement à la prédominance des langues anciennes au Moyen-Âge). Alors que le grec ancien et le latin reposaient sur une longue tradition, de nombreuses questions sur les langues romaines restaient sans réponse. L’article cherche à se concentrer sur quatre aspects: la désignation, les théories de l’origine, l’importance et les variétés des langues romanes. Malgré la longue période d’analyse et les différentes zones linguistiques, on parvient à observer une grande diversité de parallèles dans les textes analysés qui se manifestent dans cette perspective contrastive.

Koch, Florian: Die Abwertung des Anderen mittels Sprache. Einflussfaktoren bei der Bewertung alltäglicher verbaler Gewalt im Amateurfußball

The present study seeks to examine the underrepresented transnational phenomenon of everyday verbal abuse in amateur football. Based on 34 semi-structured interviews with German and French amateur referees, a contrastive sociolinguistic model was developed which allows to identify type-specific influencing factors on the evaluation of verbal abuse. Although individual referee related characteristics have similar values across different types, especially the high intrinsic motivation, active communication, the disturbing influence of third parties, and the identification of alleged perpetrator groups, the comparative analysis shows that personal ambition, knowledge of rules, observed lingual behaviour, and the hierarchisation of verbal abuse based on its motivation have a significant influence on the evaluation of verbal abuse by German and French referees in amateur football. Due to the explorative nature of the non-representative sample, the present study is only an initial contribution to a better understanding of the phenomenon observed throughout Europe. It is therefore desirable that this study is followed by quantitatively oriented studies. Key words: verbal abuse, verbal devaluation, amateur football referee, Germany, France.

Schreiber, Michael: Zur Wiedergabe von Partizipialkonstruktionen in Rechts- und Verwaltungstexten der Napoleonischen Zeit im Sprachenpaar Französisch-Italienisch.

Participle clauses are often seen as typical for the syntax of the Romance languages. It is not surprising that many constructions that include a participle or a gerund, are translated “literally” from one Romance language into another. This is particularly true for our bilingual French-Italian corpus of legal and administrative texts, dating from the Napoleonic period in Northern Italy. However, this paper focuses not only on the cases where such a construction is rendered “literally”, but also on the possible reasons for those cases where we find other equivalents, e.g. a relative clause or a prepositional phrase.

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Portrait: Claudia Schlaak.