German Narrative Research Articles

Paving the Way for Rights of Nature in Germany: Lessons Learnt from Legal Reform in New Zealand and Ecuador

AbstractThis article examines the concept of granting legal rights to nature as a strategy for more effective environmental protection in the era of the Anthropocene. Following decades of debate over the possibility and consequences of natural objects becoming legal rights holders, a number of countries have recently implemented rights of nature laws in their national legal systems. Comparing two of these examples – a constitutional amendment in Ecuador and recently transposed legislation in New Zealand – will help in understanding the potential for and challenges in the implementation of this concept. On the basis of the findings of this comparison the article further analyzes the possibility of legal reform in a European country, using Germany by way of example. This analysis demonstrates that the realization of rights of nature in Europe is faced with many obstacles as it contests institutional and legal frameworks that are deeply rooted in Western individual rights doctrines and neoliberal economic models. Nevertheless, the holistic approach of expanding the number of rights-bearing subjects beyond an anthropocentric framework can allow for more serious consideration of environmental interests, something that aligns with the German narrative of recognizing nature's intrinsic value in law and the need for effective environmental protection measures.

Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe ed. by Jason Crouthamel et al.

Reviewed by: Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe ed. by Jason Crouthamel et al. Judith Szapor Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, Julia Barbara Köhne, eds., Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe. New York: Berghahn, 2019. 407 pp. In November 2014, at the start of a long line of scholarly events commemorating the centennial of the First World War, the Center for Jewish History in New York City hosted a conference; the resulting volume, World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Oxford UP, 2017) was, as its editors, Jonathan Karp and Marsha L. Rozenblit stated, "one of the first academic works devoted expressly to the subject of World War I and the Jews." (17) Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion; Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe continues this exploration with a tighter scope but deeper reach. Three of the volume's four editors have contributed important monographs to the history of World War I in Germany, on topics ranging from the military, gender, and sexuality to memory and trauma, and the volume offers an even more wide-ranging survey of German Jewish war experiences. The four sections of the collection focus on Jews in the military, contested identities in the settings of front and home front, and two papers each on the representation of the war experience in film and literature and on postwar narratives, both in psychological discourse and nationalist war literature. Together, the articles offer an admirable range of disciplinary and methodological approaches with the aim of highlighting Jewish experiences and responses to anti-Semitism and introducing new sources that add nuance to Jewish and German narratives in an effort to inform but also reflect the subtle shifts in Jewish-German relationships. Any claim of a lack of studies centered on Jews and World War I should be understood in relative terms, in comparison to the still-growing scholarship on what came after—and what made most scholars see the First World [End Page 106] War as merely a prequel to—the Shoah. The significance of the war was never questioned by scholars or in popular memory; it was a paramount historical event that fundamentally affected the lives of European Jews and Jewish communities. Among the most significant of the often contradictory changes the war ushered in, it destroyed the empires the majority of Jews lived in but gave them, in the Balfour Declaration, the right to self-determination, at least in principle. Through military service and, for women, service on the home front, the war offered Jewish citizens the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the state and earn full acceptance; at the same time, by displacement on a massive scale and rising anti-Semitism, it brought their identity and belonging into question. Scholarship from the 1960s until quite recently tended to approach German Jewish experiences during the First World War and in the postwar period with this hindsight understanding, and it described Jewish-German relations in the binaries of assimilation/anti-Semitism, exclusion/inclusion. Scholars highlighted the role of the 1916 Judenzählung initiated by the Prussian War Ministry as the decisive moment in the breakdown of these relations, leading to toxic anti-Semitism, and, eventually, the Holocaust. A stellar lineup of recent studies by, among others, Marsha Rozenblit, Derek Penslar, Tim Grady, and David Fine, presented a more nuanced, fluid, and complicated view of identity and Jewish experiences as well as Jewish and non-Jewish responses to and during the war, offering major corrections to this long-reigning narrative. The volume takes a firm position on the revisionist side of this debate, and most of the chapters argue that anti-Semitism was not the decisive factor in the everyday front and home front experience of German Jews. Anchoring the volume, Jason Crouthamel's chapter on Jewish and non-Jewish front soldiers supports this view by presenting their experience as a shared one and argues for an interpretation of the trends of wartime Jewish– non-Jewish relations within its own context—and with more emphasis on the testimonies...

Сравнительный анализ актуализации личности автора в нарративе и критическом тексте

The given article is devoted to the problem of actualization of the author’s personality in the German narrative and critical text. The article touches upon the theoretical aspects of this issue in linguistics. Interpersonality and evaluation are considered as the main and crucial characteristics unifying narrative and critical texts. In the process of analyzing the author’s position is represented and pointed out. Systemizing the dominant linguistic means from the social roles of their authors stands in the focal point of the article.

Body Fluids and Fluid Bodies: Trans-Corporeal Connections in Contemporary German Narratives of Illness

Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to the ideal of the closed and clean organism without leakage of fluids. In contrast, psychoanalytical feminist body theory by Julia Kristeva (1982), Elisabeth Grosz (1989) and Margrit Shildrick (1999) has deconstructed the abject body and its fluids in Western culture and medicine. While postmodern feminism has often focused on discourses about bodies and illness to the neglect of their materiality, more recently, material feminism has drawn particular attention to lived material bodies with fluid boundaries and evolving corporeal practices (Alaimo and Hekman 2007). Stacy Alaimo has developed a model of the trans-corporeal body that is connected with the environment through fluid boundaries and exchanges (2010, 2012). Influenced by these trends in feminist body theory, illness narratives, often based on autobiographical experiences of female patients or their caregivers, have increased in recent decades in the West (Lorde 1980; Mairs 1996; Stefan 2007; Schmidt 2009; Hustvedt 2010). Such narratives often describe explicitly the material and affective aspects of intimate bodily experiences. In this article, I analyze two German quest narratives of illness: Charlotte Roche’s pop novel Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Detlev Buck’s German-Cambodian film Same Same But Different (2010) that is based on the memoir Wohin Du auch gehst by German journalist Benjamin Prüfer (2007). In both narratives, the protagonists and their partners struggle in their search for love and identity with illness or injury in relation to body fluids, including hemorrhoids and HIV. I argue that Feuchtgebiete and Same Same But Different not only critique medical and cultural discourses on body (fluids) and sexuality but also foreground a feminist trans-corporeal concept of the body and of body fluids that is open to fluid identities and material connections with the (global) environment. At the same time, the conventional and sentimental ending of these quest narratives undermines the possibilities of the trans-corporeal body and its fluid exchanges.

Reflectivity and the Novel. Thoughts on the English and German Narrative Traditions.

Aufsätze Astrid Köhler. Kulturen im Dialog. Vorwort Paul Hamilton. Managing Kant Crises Patricia Howe. Speaking Names and Empty Domains. Effi Briest and the ‘Awful Being’. Margit Dirscherl. „Das Alltägliche war plötzlich wieder Abenteuer geworden“. Britische und deutschsprachige Schriftsteller über das Leben jenseits des Ärmelkanals. Norbert Bachleitner. Abandoning Narratives of Music and Prose. Arnold Schönberg and James Joyce. Christine Ivanovic. Turning Herod’s Children into Jakob’s Children. Cross-generational perspectives in conceptualizing memory and history through the perspective of “being a child”. Berichte und Besprechungen Robert Gillett Rüdiger Görner, Georg Trakl. Dichter im Jahrzehnt der Extreme. Uwe Schütte Rüdiger Görner, Oskar Kokoschka. Jahrhundertkünstler. Joachim Fischer Rüdiger Görner, Brexismus oder: Verortungsversuche im Dazwischen. Mit einem Gespräch über das historische Exil von Rüdiger Görner mit Jeremy Adler und Michael Krüger, hrsg. und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Günter Blamberger. Lecture in honour of Rüdiger Görner: Martin Swales Reflectivity and the Novel. Thoughts on the English and German Narrative Traditions.

Discourse relations across genres and contexts

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of the linguistic realization of discourse relations across and within English and German discourse, comparing the genres of newspaper editorial and personal narrative. It concentrates on Continuation, Narration and Contrast, and Elaboration, Explanation and Comment. Particular attention is given to (1) their overt realization with textual themes and pragmatic word order, and (2) the (non)adjacent positioning of discourse units realizing the relations. The methodological framework is an integrated one, supplementing Systemic Functional Grammar with Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In the English and German narratives, there is a strong tendency to realize discourse relations overtly. The overall overt realization is significantly higher for narratives in both languages with editorials being significantly less overt. There are also significant differences in the overt realization of non-adjacently positioned units realizing discourse relations with significant distributions in all cases, although the distribution in the narratives is less significant.

Knowledge, Hybridity, and the King of the Crane-Heads

This article discusses the fabulous crane-heads as they appear in medieval German narrative and pictorial art. The comparative analysis focuses on their literary depiction in Herzog Ernst B and Herzog Ernst G, as well as the crane-head painted onto a wall of the so-called ‘Kaiserpfalz’ in Forchheim in Oberfranken. The aim of this essay is to illustrate that the hybrid monstrosity of these fabulous creatures serves as a discursive node at which a number of transcultural concerns come to the fore. Thus, it attempts to show knowledge in motion, both on the level of the migration of narrative material and motifs and on the level of depictions of Otherness.

German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century. By Linda Shortt. Oxford: Legenda, 2015. 133 pages. $99.00.

<b>German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century.</b> <i>By Linda Shortt. Oxford: Legenda, 2015. 133 pages. $99.00.</i>

German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century

German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century

The Ukraine crisis and European memory politics of the Second World War

ABSTRACTIn Europe, commemorations of the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War have reiterated the existence of different national narratives of the historical event. These narratives can be grouped into four distinct memory discourses. Each discourse is dominant in a particular European country or region: Russia, post-communist East-Central Europe, Germany and the Western European countries that fought against the Third Reich. On 8–9 May 2015, the four narratives found expression in distinct European commemorative locations: Moscow, Gdansk, Berlin and London/Paris. The paper argues that, while the four narratives have existed for several decades, the Russian narrative has recently been reformulated with a more nationalistic rhetoric and used as a conceptual framework to explain and interpret the crisis in Ukraine. Simultaneously, East-Central European narratives have been radicalised too, while nationalist discourses and highly controversial historical figures have been subsumed in a new post-Maidan official narrative in Ukraine. This further politicised the memory of the Second World War, leading to dissonance between the Russian and the German and Western European narratives and, most notably, to a radical discursive clash between the Russian and the East-Central European memory discourses.

Shortt, Linda.German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century.

Shortt, Linda.<i>German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century</i>.

The Lithuanian Legends of the Wild Hunt: Regarding Origins of the Image

In the end of the 19th century, five Lithuanian folklore pieces describing the so-called Wild Hunt were recorded. In these narratives, the images of the hunt and the sounds made by the ranging souls are described. These texts, having been recorded in the territory inhabited by the so-called lietuvininkai (the Lithuania Minor) are truly unique. This land belonged to the Eastern Prussia at the time and having been for the long period separated from the major Lithuania and experiencing considerable German cultural influence, it acquired singular features.So far the Lithuanian folklorists tended to interpret the legends in question as results of the German cultural influence. Yet the available folklore data only partly supports such opinion. The Lithuanian legends of the Wild Hunt are analyzed in the article by using the contextual information from the Baltic mythology, folklore, history and archeology. The motifs of the Wild Hunt are popular in the oral tradition of the European peoples, comprising specific imagery depicting a ghostlike hunting party ranging across the sky. Connections of this image with the cult of the deceased and the visions of the afterlife have been repeatedly established by the researchers.The current analysis reveals that Lithuanian legends of the Wild Hunt are related to the German narratives of the Wilde Jagd not only in the name of this phenomenon. The Germanic influence can also be traced in the fact that the Wild Hunt is observed on high, since similar images are hard to find in the Lithuanian material. Other aspects of the phenomenon in question have parallels in the traditional Lithuanian worldview and can be deciphered on the grounds of the local folklore. Yet the origins of this image should perhaps be sought in the earlier layers of the Baltic culture.The territory of the Lithuania Minor has for a long time been the native land of the western Baltic tribes – Prussians. Because of the assimilation processes and in result of a large number of the local population perishing in the plague, the ancient Prussian language became extinct as early as the beginning of the 18th century. Still the persistence of the Wild Hunt image in the worldview of the local Lithuanians of the 19th century can well be related to this cultural layer.In striking correlation with the historical cultural facts recorded in the chronicles, the Prussian archeological data allows for assuming that local inhabitants used to imagine the afterlife journey of the deceased as a ride on a horseback, while endowed with all the military attributes. Yet this is valid only for the society members of the highest rank or the militants. Nevertheless in case of the Prussians, who used to live under the circumstances of almost ceaseless military campaigns, quite a number of mythical images could have incorporated the military thematic, thus forming distinct manifestations of the warriors’ mythology: the journey of the deceased to the afterworld on a horseback and with military equipment, the ghostlike army seen in the sky as an omen of the imminent war, etc. In L ithuanian mythology, such manifestations of the military worldview used to be best discerned in the 13th–14th centuries, when tensions caused by the threats to the safety and integrity of the land were most acutely experienced and the retaliatory military raids were frequently organized. This was also revealed in the contemporary pattern of the state gods, which reflected the ideology of the military layer of the society, while considerably lacking in representation of the lower rank of the deities (e. g. those in charge of the economic sphere). Such reflections of the military mythology could have well survived among the Lithuanian-speaking inhabitants of in the Lithuania Minor in the 19th century, when folklore collector Vilius Kalvaitis recorded the five legends in question there. It is reasonable to assume that such images used to become more prominent whenever fear and foreboding of the imminent war were felt, while persistence of such imagery was likewise supported by the existing similar Germanic notion of the Wilde Jagd.

The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone

and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone. Making Sense of History series. New York, Berghahn Books, 2012. xii, 323 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). As editor Dan Stone notes in his introduction to this useful collection of compact, largely theoretical essays, the as historical subject confronts longstanding tenets of best historical practice, including impartiality, objectivity, progress, clarity of meaning, and scholarly rigor. Although the field of history shares epistemological challenges common to all historical subjects, Stone maintains difficulties present themselves with especial clarity in the case of the Holocaust (p. 4). Stone's ambitious book considers its subject broadly and deeply, and engages directly with complex, jargon-prone theoretical questions. On the one hand the book focuses on historical theory, historical method, and the practice of historical methodology. But it also probes closely how theoretical questions have defined studies and, in turn, how the has defined theory. Stone notes correctly while scholars of film, literature, museum studies, and the visual arts have engaged actively with representation, historians have been slower to grasp the challenges and opportunities presented by new understandings of the Holocaust. His book encourages historians to view the subject through the varied lens of comparative genocide studies, culture, ecology, memory, and testimony. fourteen contributors to and Historical Methodology confront these challenges head on. They treat four broad subjects: memory and culture in the Third Reich; testimony and commemoration; the meaning of Saul Friedlander's classic text, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (1992); and the in history. essayists investigate not only the varied meanings emerge from the historical record on the Holocaust, but how historical method and methodology on the topic pose serious challenges to those who study it. In Part I Alon Confino reconceptualizes the as an imagined, future-oriented project by the Nazis to create a without Jewish people. Their emnity against and extermination of the Jews was part of a Nazi universe of racial enemies and exterminations (p. 38). Following in vein, Stone emphasizes the importance of comprehending the in cultural terms--assuming that the Nazis meant what they said, they created reality to fit in with their belief system and not-vice-versa--as the outcome or a German narrative through which the perpetrators made sense of the world (p. 56). The Nazis attempted to influence and control contemporary and later images of their crimes and their writes Dirk Rupnow. The perpetrators tried to establish their own structure of memory and representation which would have determined our contemporary attitude toward the crimes ... (p. 67). Amos Goldberg urges researchers to utilize social psychology, ethnography, and anthropological history to understand the cultural history of Nazi victims, not the perpetrators. He faults previous investigators for sanctifying victims at the expense of understanding the transformation of their helplessness. Boaz Neumann frames the Holocaust, not ideologically, politically, or racially, but in eco-logical terms--removing Jews from the and their ability to be-in-the world (p. 119). Samuel Moyn begins Part II by examining the theological origins of witnessing, especially its use by historians as a moral paradigm. …

Housebound: selfhood and domestic space in contemporary German fiction

In life and in fiction, houses are compelling objects that shape an impressive range of personal and public affairs. A house embodies experiences often intensely emotional, and it also represents both a major financial investment and a material reality embedded in architectural, aesthetic, and social traditions. The house, the place where we try to be at home, can be regarded - as theorists from Gaston Bachelard to Edward S. Casey have argued - as the key space for our constructions of selfhood and belonging. A host of contemporary German narratives featuring houses highlight this relationship between selfhood and domestic space. Beginning with a historical and theoretical overview of the house in German literature, 'Housebound' analyzes the shelters - often highly ambivalent spaces - that writers such as Katharina Hacker, Arno Geiger, Walter Kappacher, Monika Maron, Jenny Erpenbeck, Judith Hermann, Barbara Honigmann, and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar build in their texts and what these reveal about contemporary selfhood in Germany and its relationship to the social world. The concluding comparative analysis of Katharina Hacker's 'Die Habenichtse' and the English novelist Ian McEwan's 'Saturday' reveals these developments in another national literature and makes a case for the global appeal of the domestic as a major site of identity politics. Monika Shafi is the Elias Ahuja Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware.

Discourse or grammar? VS patterns in spoken Hebrew and spoken German narratives

The realm of this study is the tension between syntax and pragmatics. We explore two structurally very different languages, unrelated genetically – Hebrew and German – which both employ the same marked syntactic pattern of VS word order for similar pragmatic functions in spoken narrative discourse. The question is whether there is some universal functional motivation which can be held responsible for this convergence. The results provide some evidence that, once analyzed in their ‘natural habitat’ of interactional exchanges, languages are more similar than they are in their written, highly monitored form, and that the reason for this may be found in universal discourse motivations. However, the study supports a cautious view: what seems to look like an obvious, functionally-motivated parallel between the syntax of two languages turns out to be much harder to evaluate once the whole spectrum of usages is taken into consideration. We show that there are at least three different discourse motivations for the VS word order, and that the ways these motivations interact among each other differ between Hebrew and German, resulting in different overall patterns in each of the two languages.

The negotiation of collective identities in German cinema after unification

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the negotiation of German identities in two films of the ‘newer German cinema’: Sonnenallee/Sun Alley and Schultze Gets the Blues. It argues that the former represents a defiant stance towards a dominant West German narrative that devalorizes the lived experiences of former GDR citizens. As a consequence, East and West are consolidated as relevant categories of identification. In contrast, the article argues that Schultze Gets the Blues represents a post-national tendency in newer German cinema, which dissolves the East-West axis and instead foregrounds regional and post-national identities.

The construction of emotional involvement in everyday German narratives – interactive uses of ‘dense constructions’

This paper investigates ways in which participants in everyday German narratives construct emotions as social phenomena; i.e. in particular, how they organize and communicate emotional involvement. I will argue that contextualizing emotions and affects permeates various levels of linguistic and interactional structures – even grammar: Participants in everyday German storytelling use specific syntactic patterns as resources for indexing affective stances and making past events interpretable and emotionally accessible to their co-participants. The analysis concentrates on particular syntactic resources (such as averbal constructions, infinite constructions, minimal syntactic phrases etc.) used to contextualize affect and emotion. Instead of treating these ‘dense constructions’ (e.g. averbal constructions “I:CH (.) mit meinen sachen rAuf, […] ICH (-) wieder rUnter,”;‘me (.) with my stuff upstairs, […] me (-) down again,’) as elliptic structures and conceptualizing them as incomplete or reduced sentence patterns, this study explores the specific forms and functions of ‘dense constructions’ in interactive usage. I will argue that ‘dense constructions’ – even though they do not follow the rules of the grammar of Standard German – represent conventionalized patterns participants use to fulfil various communicative tasks in specific communicative genres. In producing such ‘fragmentary gestalts’, conversationalists index sudden, reflex-like actions, and thus, stage dramatic, emotionally loaded events for their co-participants to “re-experience” (Goffman 1974/1986: 506).

Economics of Virtue in Dietrich von der Glezze’s der borte: A Wife Errant and a Husband Caught

This article is a Gender Theory-informed reading of a thirteenth-century German narrative entitled der borte. Der borte (1270–1290) was written by the little known, Dietrich von der Glezze and it deals with familial transgressions, perversions of knightly virtues, as well as same-sex physical encounters. Previous research maintains that this short verse narrative has not received much scholarly attention due to its queerness. However, I suggest that what has not received much attention is not the small measure of homoeroticism that is featured in it but rather the concept of desire quantification and how it justifies convention transgression. I claim the accepted view of der borte is week and prejudicial to an obviously heterosexual text. The core intent of the text has been missed by current scholarship, where the concept of desire quantification and how it is used to justify transgressions of social and religious conventions is the focus of Dietrich’s narrative.

Journeys of Remembrance: Memories of the Second World War in French and German Literature, 1960-1980

In the introduction to this stimulating monograph, Kathryn N. Jones explains her interest in experiential and vicarious accounts of the war years published prior to the ‘boom’ in memory studies that occurred in the 1980s, narratives potentially untrammelled by or at least innocent of, the later discourses on memory. Which is not to say that, in this study, contemporary debates over national and personal memories are glossed; rather, the work of theorists and historians such as Pierre Nora, Dan Diner and Henri Rousso serves to illuminate paths trodden by the preceding generation. In contrast to the stillness of monuments, museums and iconic photographs, the texts explored by the author convey movement. Borrowing from theories of travel writing, Jones argues that the notion of the journey in space as well as in time, whether of deportation to the death camp in Charlotte Delbo's memoirs Auschwitz et après (1965, 1970, 1971) or sea voyage to a mysterious island in Perec's novel W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975), widens the compass of memory. In Delbo's case, the narrator draws in the perspectives of those not personally affected by the Holocaust, whereas Perec's reader is distanced by textual form, obliged continually to criss-cross the no-man's land between fictional allegory and historical referent. From the opening page, where the author marks a striking contrast in the French and German monuments unveiled in 2005 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, comparisons between the cultural discourses of memory in each country animate the analysis. One advantage of the comparative approach is that it allows specialists and students working in the one field access to the other, thus providing for a richer understanding of related but also very different topoi. In Chapter 1 the author chronicles the varying ways in which the war years were remembered in France, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic during the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequent chapters offer rigorous analyses of specific narratives in the context of these national memories. The Nazi death camps are the fulcrum of each one, but the writers selected by Jones offer multi-facetted perspectives on the Holocaust. Thus, French narratives of deportation are juxtaposed with a ‘memorial site literature’, represented by four German-language writers who all wrote accounts of post-war visits to the camps. It transpires that many retrospective German narratives of the war, such as Bernward Vesper's Die Reise (1977), Evelyne Le Garrec's La Rive allemande de ma mémoire (1980) and Marian Sell's Mourir d'absence (1978), are coloured by generational conflict, at the level both of the personal and of the collective. Jones departs unequivocally from Adorno's dictat on the incompatibility of art and atrocity and, through her deft presentation of a succession of more or less metaphorical journeys, she makes a good case. This valuable book for all scholars of post-war French and German culture will enhance the reader's understanding of what Paul Ricoeur once termed ‘l’événement fondateur négatif' of the last century.

Anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian and German narratives: bilingual and monolingual settings

Abstract The study compares the rate and type of the anaphoric pronominalisation in narratives produced by adults, by monolingual and by consecutive and simultaneous bilingual five-year-old children. In particular, it addresses the question which types of pronouns children use to refer to previously introduced antecedents and which syntactic role these antecedent NPs exhibit. Results show that consecutive bilinguals show a lower pronominalisation rate as compared to the narratives of monolingual German-speaking children and to their own Russian narratives. These findings are discussed within the construction-based model of language acquisition (Tomasello 2003). Language-specific organisation of the pronominal systems as well as the language-specific structural features are argued to have an impact on the pronominalisation rate in discourse.