The aim of this study is to analyse the intonation patterns of Italian wh-questions in relation to epistemic orientation, topic shift and turn organisation. The research conducted so far has shown that wh-questions have both falling and rising final contours. Linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic factors are recognised to affect intonation patterns. Nevertheless, the influence of conversational elements on intonation contours remains unclear and requires further research. This study analyses a corpus of unplanned conversations to evaluate how the retention/change of topic and the maintenance/transfer of dialogic turn affect the intonation of questions. The research revealed two significant findings. Firstly, wh-question categorisation shows that the degree of epistemic certainty has a profound impact on topic shift and floor passing. Secondly, the results suggest that conversational aspects do not significantly affect the final intonation patterns. However, they do have a relevant effect on the initial pitch level of the questions, leading to an increase in the onset and overall pitch range.

This article presents the results of a research on toponyms of cities in the state of Tocantins, Brazil, in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Signs were collected from observation and interviews with deaf people. The state of Tocantins consists of 139 municipalities and, so far, we have surveyed 61 toponyms. Signs were categorized into (1) native, (2) initialized and (3) fingerspelled (exclusive categories). Regarding motivation, toponyms categorized as iconic motivation, covering (1) material and (2) cultural and Portuguese language motivation, covering (3) calque and (4) writing. The spelling motivation is the most prevalent in the toponyms of the cities of Tocantins, also combining with other types of motivation, such as (5) material and spelling, (6) cultural and writing, and (7) calque and spelling. We bring further considerations on these categories and suggest forearm as a productive point of articulation for toponymic signs in the context of Tocantins.

Autonomous verbs in Irish are special verb forms incompatible with the surface realization of a subject. Previous studies have suggested to postulate empty categories such as pro, PRO or expletive pro to fill the subject position (cf. Stenson 1989; McCloskey 2007; Bondaruk/ Charzyńska-Wóicjk 2003), thus rejecting the idea that these verbs might be classified as completely subjectless. A series of syntactic tests bear out the hypothesis that, at least for Irish, these verbs behave as actually lacking a subject. I first suggest correlating this state of affairs to the fact that, with autonomous verbs, no argument role to be promoted to subject position is selected at the valency level, although it is “implied” in the unfolding of the event. Secondly, I argue that both valency reduction and syntactic non-realization of an argument role is driven by information structural constraints; notably, the focal nature of autonomous verbs (as advocated elsewhere, cf. Nolan 2012) causes the subject (together with the argument role it is associated with) to be informationally downgraded, thereby leading to its suppression in the sentence. The position held in this paper is that autonomous verbs of the Irish type epitomize an interesting phenomenon of semantic-pragmatic interface, with the pragmatic level of the utterance “mediating” between the semantic and the syntactic level; in such a perspective, the pragmatic (information structural) level of an utterance would determine either the number and type of argument roles a verb can take in a particular discourse context (cf. DuBois 1987; Goldberg 2006) and their syntactic encoding.

Mass incarceration and high rates of recidivism in the United States have long been discussed in the scientific literature. A punitive culture has fostered harsh punishments and incarceration without considerable effects on recidivism rates. At the same time, research has indicated that rehabilitative measures and treatment programs for offenders have positive effects on their reintegration into society and help to reduce recidivism rates. In the present study, the discourse surrounding recidivism in the New York Times and the New York Post is investigated with a corpus of 666,290 words. The analyses indicate that the New York Times encourages a discussion of rehabilitative measures and adopts a view of recidivism that highlights recidivists’ potential for change. The New York Post, on the other hand, takes a more conservative approach and adopts a more dire view of recidivists, considering recidivism as a character trait rather than an indicator for the relative success of rehabilitation programs.

Although the orthographic norm of the standard language has dominated most written registers of German, social media and other non-standardized digital contexts have recently given rise to the written use of dialects and vernaculars in informal communication. The written use of non-standard dialects is especially wide-spread in the south of the German-speaking area, e. g. in Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria and South Tyrol, where various studies have reported the use of dialectal forms in digital contexts such as Chatrooms, WhatsApp or Facebook (cf. Christen 2004; Glaznieks/Frey 2018). Using a corpus of South Tyrolean WhatsApp chats with corresponding audio recordings of the chat authors retelling the chat contents, we analyze four phonetic-phonological phenomena of Tyrolean dialects, characteristic of the southern German-speaking area: pre-consonantal s-retraction, the neutralization of the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in word-initial position, vowels undergoing umlaut or unrounding and the realisation of r in the coda of unstressed syllables. In particular, we analyze if and how these phenomena of the dialect are represented in the written form. The results show that Standard German graphematic conventions form the basis for most dialect spellings in WhatsApp chats. However, they are sometimes abandoned for the benefit of spellings that explicitly represent dialectal pronunciations. Interestingly, in some cases these dialectal spellings do not correspond to the pronunciation of the writers who, instead, opt for a pronunciation closer to that of the standard language.

This paper aims to present observations on the pragmaticalized use as well as the concomitant functions of the demonstrative este in Mexican Spanish. Este seems to serve an additional range of functions in Mexican Spanish in particular, but also in other Hispanic American varieties, as it has turned into a quite productive discourse marker that can be considered, among other things, as a hesitation element, an outline signal, and probably also as an evidentiality marker. The specific functional domains (especially with regard to possible evidential functions) will be illustrated in more detail in the paper using oral language data from the speaker community of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca de Juárez. The study also includes a sociolinguistically oriented quantitative analysis, the results of which will also be discussed in the context of language ideological attitudes towards este.

This article presents new findings in the use of copulas nôo ‘be’ and ti ‘be’ in non-verbal predications in Zarma (Songhay; Niger, Nigeria). Based on some exclusive contexts of use and some morphosyntactic criteria, the article distinguishes a basic type of predication with one term “NP + nôo” used in deictic identification (e. g.: Abdù nôo ‘it’s Abdu’) and a type of predication with two terms “NP1 + NP2 + nôo” used in nominal predications and equative sentences (e. g.: wodìn Abdù nôo ‘that is Abdu’). The article shows that copula ti replaces copula nôo in negation but also in non-verbal focus constructions where it is generally preceded by the subordinating conjunction kà/gà and very likely marks the presupposed part of the sentence (e. g.: [Muusà nôo] kà ti càwkŏo ‘[it’s Musa] who is a student’). Finally, the article shows that in Zarma, it is the one-term predication “NP + nôo” that is recruited to mark focus-fronted constituents of verbal and non-verbal predications, thus confirming an observation already made about other languages.

The present work aims at showing the didactic potential of the novel Zweinhalb Störche: Roman einer Kindheit in Siebenbürgen, written in 2008 by the German-Romanian author Claudiu M. Florian, for multilingual learning in GFL classes. The paper focuses on the possible use of corpus-based learning tasks and consists of two parts: the first will introduce the main features of multilingual didactics and multilingual competence and the possible teaching approaches of inter- and transcultural literature through the use of corpora; the second will focus on the use of the novel to promote multilingual competence within the GFL classroom. In particular, specific tasks will be suggested to achieve a didactic surplus through the use of corpus compilation and analysis tools such as Sketch Engine.

The paper deals with the role of lexicographic resources in the South Tyrolean (i. e. the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy) educational context against the backdrop of legal provisions (Das neue Autonomiestatut 2019/1972) and the relevance of language education on the part of educational institutions (Rahmenrichtlinien DE, Rahmenrichtlinien IT), taking into account both normative requirements and their application in practice. The focus is on two questions that have been little researched so far, not only in the specific context but also internationally (cf. Abel 2022; Nied Curcio 2022): To what extent are lexicographic resources represented in the school framework guidelines? How are they actually used in schools? For the case study presented here, the South Tyrolean framework guidelines provided by the German and the Italian school boards at all levels of education for German and Italian as first (L1) and second (L2) languages, as well as for English as a foreign language (L3) were examined by means of a document analysis. In a second step, a questionnaire survey with language teachers at all school levels (German and Italian as L1/L2, English as L3; number of survey respondents: 644) determined the actual use of lexicographic resources.