Kasussynkretismus und Belebtheit in germanischen Pronominalparadigmen

In der Untersuchung der Personalparadigmen germanischer Variet\ue4ten zeigt sich, dass nicht alle theoretisch m\uf6glichen Kasussynkretismen tats\ue4chlich eintreten und dass der Anteil an synkretisierten Pronominalformen ("Synkretismus-Quote") vom Kontext der Werte der Kategorien Person (1, 2, 3), Numerus (Sg., Pl.) und Genus (M, F, N) abh\ue4ngt. So findet sich beispielsweise insgesamt eine h\uf6here Synkretismus-Quote im Neutrum als im Maskulinum. Daher zielt die Studie auf die Beantwortung der folgenden drei Fragen ab:1. Welche Kasussynkretismen treten in den Personalparadigmen der 47 untersuchten germanischen Variet\ue4ten ein?2. In welchen Kontexten treten diese Kasussynkretismen ein?3. Warum treten die Kasussynkretismus st\ue4rker in den einen als in den anderen Kontexten ein?Es l\ue4sst sich feststellen, dass sich die Synkretismus-Quoten f\ufcr die Werte der Kategorien Person, Numerus und Genus quantifizieren lassen und dass sich aus diesen Quantifizierungen "Synkretismus-Hierarchien" ableiten lassen. Diese Synkretismus-Hierarchien lassen sich in einen Zusammenhang mit dem Merkmal der Belebtheit bringen. Kurz gesagt: Je h\uf6her der Grad an Belebtheit, desto niedriger der Grad an Kasussynkretimus

Continuum linguistico e contatto fra variet\ue0 germaniche e romanze

Le aree dialettali sono spesso caratterizzate da differenze strutturali minime (microvariazione) che determinano un continuum linguistico dove variet\ue0 geograficamente adiacenti risultano abbastanza simili fra di loro e pi\uf9 diverse man mano che la distanza geografica aumenta. Quando una variet\ue0 si trova per\uf2 in una situazione di contatto linguistico (adiacenza geografica fra due aree linguistiche diverse), il continuum naturale che si crea all'interno di variet\ue0 appartenenti alla stessa famiglia linguistica (p.es. le lingue germaniche) potrebbe essere interrotto per l'influenza della lingua di contatto (p.es. una lingua romanza). In questo lavoro presentiamo degli esempi di continuum linguistico che emergono nelle variet\ue0 germaniche delle Alpi centro-meridionali. Il nostro approccio si distacca da un'impostazione caratterizzata da confini netti e isole linguistiche. Assumiamo al contrario che sia possibile, in linea di principio, non solo un continuum intralinguistico, all'interno delle variet\ue0 germaniche o romanze, ma anche un continuum interlinguistico che copre sia variet\ue0 germaniche che romanze. Descriveremo il continuum linguistico con le nozioni della tradizione dialettologica tedesca. Applichiamo la tipologia introdotta alla situazione linguistica lungo la linea del Brennero che comprende sia le variet\ue0 germaniche dei dialetti bavaresi del Tirolo, il m\uf2cheno e il cimbro, che le variet\ue0 romanze dei dialetti veneti e dei dialetti veneto-lombardi del Trentino

A Left-handed β Helix Revealed by the Crystal Structure of a Carbonic Anhydrase from the Archaeon Methanosarcina thermophila

A carbonic anhydrase from the thermophilic archaeon Methanosarcina thermophila that exhibits no significant sequence similarity to known carbonic anhydrases has recently been characterized. Here we present the structure of this enzyme, which adopts a left-handed parallel β-helix fold. This fold is of particular interest since it contains only left-handed crossover connections between the parallel β-strands, which so far have been observed very infrequently. The active form of the enzyme is a trimer with three zinc-containing active sites, each located at the interface between two monomers. While the arrangement of active site groups differs between this enzyme and the carbonic anhydrases from higher vertebrates, there are structural similarities in the zinc coordination environment, suggestive of convergent evolution dictated by the chemical requirements for catalysis of the same reaction. Based on sequence similarities, the structure of this enzyme is the prototype of a new class of carbonic anhydrases with representatives in all three phylogenetic domains of life

Verschriftungsprinzipien im geschriebenen Dialekt: WhatsApp-Nachrichten aus Südtirol

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

A Curated Database for Linguistic Research: The Test Case of Cimbrian Varieties

In this paper we present the definition of a conceptual approach for the information space entailed by a multidisciplinary and collaborative project, \u201cCimbrian as a test case for synchronic and diachronic language variation\u201d, which provides linguists with a test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. Aims of the project are to collect, digitize and tag linguistic data from the German variety of Cimbrian - spoken in three areas of northern Italy: Giazza (VR), Luserna (TN), and Roana (VI) - and to make available on-line a valuable and innovative linguistic resource for the in-depth study of Cimbrian. The task is addressed by a multidisciplinary team of linguists and computer scientists who, combining their competence, aim to make available new tools for linguistic analysis

Deutsche und italienische Kurzwörter im Vergleich

analisi contrastiva degli accorciamenti in tedesco e in italiano nel quadro teorico della morfologia prosodic

An Exploration of Truncation in Italian

Italian displays a rich variety of truncation patterns and therefore forms an ideal testing ground for constraint interaction determining truncation in general. This paper describes in detail the various truncation patterns of Italian: monosyllabic light syllable templates, bisyllabic templates and atemplatic patterns, both initially and stress anchored. Based on joint work with Sabine Arndt-Lappe, a set of anchoring and size restrictor constraints is proposed, which determines the typology of Italian truncation patterns and avoids generating systems which are not attested among the world's languages. Specifically, it is proposed that two Anchor constraints (Anchor-L and Anchor-R), defined as alignment constraints, are responsible for edge anchoring in truncation as well as for maximality effects. Anchor-stress, defined as a faithfulness constraint, is reponsible for stress anchoring. The size-restrictor constraint Coincide-s1 guarantees that monosyllabic templates emerge and, through its gradient evaluation, allows the generation of atemplatic truncation patterns. This set of constraints allows to preserve the architecture of Generalized Template Theory, where templates emerge as unmarked structures, but at the same time avoids unwanted predictions of other constraint sets proposed in the literature for truncation or reduplication.This paper has been published as: Alber, B. (2010), An Exploration of Truncation in Italian, in: Peter Staroverov, Daniel Altshuler, Aaron Braver, Carlos A. Fasola and Sarah Murray (eds.). Rutgers Working Papers in Linguistics vol. 3. Rutgers LinguisticsAlber, Birgit (2010), An Exploration of Truncation in Italian, in: Peter Staroverov, Daniel Altshuler, Aaron Braver, Carlos A. Fasola and Sarah Murray (eds.). Rutgers Working Papers in Linguistics vol. 3. Rutgers Linguistics