Normen, Varianten und Normvarianten

Sprache ist nie homogen, sie weist Varianz auf. Es gibt viele Gründe für diese Vielfalt, und die meisten sind schon sehr gut beschrieben worden (und sollen daher im vorliegenden Beitrag nicht im Vordergrund stehen). Gegenspieler der Varianz sind die mehr oder weniger expliziten Normen - sie sollen dafür sorgen, dass die Varianz ein gewisses Maß nicht überschreitet. Wobei sich natürlich sofort die Frage stellt, wie (und von wem) das „Maß“ definiert wird. Bei der Beurteilung dieser Fragen spielen nicht nur soziolinguistische, sondern auch strukturelle Aspekte eine Rolle, und Letzterem wird der vorliegende Beitrag nachgehen, und zwar anhand von Beispielen aus der Morphophonologie, der Morphosyntax und der Orthografie

Extra argumentality - affectees, landmarks, and voice

This article investigates sentences with additional core arguments of a special type in three languages, viz. German, English, and Mandarin. These additional arguments, called extra arguments in the article, form a crosslinguistically homogeneous class by virtue of their structural and semantic similarities, with so-called "raised possessors" forming just a sub-group among them. Structurally, extra arguments may not be the most deeply embedded arguments in a sentence. Semantically, their referents are felt to stand in a specific relation to the referent of the/a more deeply embedded argument. There are two major thematic relations that are instantiated by extra arguments, viz. affectees and landmarks. These thematic role notions are justified in the context of and partly in contrast to, Dowty's (1991) proto-role approach. An affectee combines proto-agent with proto-patient properties in eventualities that are construed as involving causation. A landmark is a ground with respect to some spatial configuration denoted by the predication at hand, but a figure at the highest level of gestalt partitioning that is relevant in a clause. Thereby, both affectees and landmarks are inherently hybrid categories. The account of extra argumentality is couched in a neo-Davidsonian event semantics in the spirit of Kratzer (1996, 2003), and voice heads are assumed to introduce affectee arguments and landmark arguments right above VP

Country Report on Organic Farming Research in Switzerland

The report presents the current (2005) status of organic farming resarch in Switzerland. Switzerland has a long history of organic farming research, which in its beginnings has been carried out by organic farming pioneers and by private institutions like the Goetheanum, Möschberg Centre and the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL). It was in the 1990s, when Swiss Federal Agricultural Research Stations (Agroscope) became also involved in organic research topics. It can be estimated that currently approximately € 7.5 million per annum are allocated very specifically to organic farming research from public budgets. The National Research Programme is organised according to a four-year research concept of the Swiss Federal Office of Agriculture (FOAG). Within this concept, organic farming is considered as an important issue of Swiss agricultural research, and research for organic farming is carried out as a continuous process. The Research Institute of Organic Farming (FiBL) is doing research exclusively for organic farming, whereas at the Federal Agricultural Research Stations research for integrated and organic farming is carried out in parallel. Together with the activities of FiBL, all relevant agricultural topics such as plant production, animal health and husbandry, food quality and socioeconomics are covered and carried out in the context of organic farming. Research is organised as a) A mandate of € 3.5 Mio annually to FiBL (the so-called “Leistungsauftrag” by the Swiss Federal Office of Agriculture (FOAG) and the Swiss Federal Veterinary Office (SFVO) and b) As a priority setting within the three Federal Agroscope Centres

Sugar concentration influences decision making in<em> Apis mellifera</em> L. workers during early-stage honey storage behaviour

Decision making in honeybees is based on in- formation which is acquired and processed in order to make choices between two or more al- ternatives. These choices lead to the expression of optimal behaviour strategies such as floral constancy. Optimal foraging strategies such as floral constancy improve a colony’s chances of survival, however to our knowledge, there has been no research on decision making based on optimal storage strategies. Here we show, using diagnostic radioentomology, that decision mak- ing in storer bees is influenced by nectar sugar concentrations and that, within 48 hours of col- lection, honeybees workers store carbohydrates in groups of cells with similar sugar concentra- tions in a nonrandom way. This behaviour, as evidenced by patchy spatial cell distributions, would help to hasten the ripening process by reducing the distance between cells of similar sugar concentrations. Thus, colonies which ex- hibit optimal storage strategies such as these would have an evolutionary advantage and im- prove colony survival expectations over less efficient colonies and it should be plausible to select colonies that exhibit these preferred traits