Communicative Function of Contracted Prepositional Forms in German

Abstract

ALL LANGUAGE LEARNING HAS TWO MAJOR components: the acquisition of an inventory of linguistic elements and the acquisition of rules of usage for them. Successful language learning does not take place if one of these components is neglected. Foreign language instructors and textbooks usually make sure that students acquire an appropriate and sufficient inventory of linguistic forms but they sometimes neglect to deal adequately with the rules of usage. One of the important reasons for such neglect is that textbooks and FL instructors usually restrict themselves to the sentence level for their explanations of usage since the sentence level is the traditional domain of descriptive as well as pedagogical grammars. Recent research has shown, however, that we can understand the communicative function of certain syntactic structures only if we go beyond the sentence level. Thus, Kramsch shows that word order in German has a very specific function in topic construction and that for a native speaker the choice of a given word order is not arbitrary but rather guided by the communicative intent. She states (p. 18): Syntactic choices are made by the speaker/writer according to the perceived needs of the communication. No linguistic feature should be taught outside the context of the communication which gives it its meaning in discourse. In the following pages I discuss another syntactic phenomenon of German, namely the occurrence or non-occurrence of the contrac-