Akzentuierung von Internationalismen Überlegungen zur empirischen Untersuchung bei fortgeschrittenen italophonen Deutsch lernenden

Internationalismen erleichtern zwar die Verständigung in einer fremden Sprache, bereiten aber auch Probleme, z.B. im Bereich der Wortakzentuierung, denn hier besteht die Gefahr eines direkten Transfers der entsprechenden L1-Akzentmuster. Welche Rolle bei fortgeschrittenen Lernern solche L1-Interferenzen, aber auch in der L2 erkannte prosodische Regularitäten spielen, ist für die Ausgangssprache Italienisch bisher nicht untersucht worden. Anknüpfend an Erkenntnisse aus Phonologie, Spracherwerbsforschung und Psycholinguistik beschreibt der Beitrag daher Einflussfaktoren der Akzentuierung (Morphophonologie, lexikalische Nachbarschaft, Wortfrequenz, Interferenz) und entwickelt auf dieser Grundlage empirisch überprüfbare Hypothesen. Interferenzen und andere Fehlleistungen werden bei (weniger geläufigen) Internationalismen insbesondere dann prognostiziert, wenn ihre Prosodie nicht dem „paradigmatischen Pänultima-Akzent“ gehorcht und/oder durch eine inkohärente lexikalische Nachbarschaft gekennzeichnet ist

Grzeszczakowska-Pawlikowska, Beata: Rhetorische Kompetenzen in der Fremdsprache Deutsch (DaF). Wirkung und Verständlichkeit polnischer Studentinnen in der interkulturellen Hochschulkommunikation. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2019 (Schriften zur Sprechwissenschaft und Phonetik, 19). – ISBN 978-3-7329-0543-0. 350 Seiten, € 49,80

Review of a habilitation thesis on rhetorical competences in German as a foreign language

Unbestimmte Subjekte: zur problematischen Äquivalenz von deutschem man und italienischem si

German sentences with man and Italian sentences with si impersonale or si passivante are often presented as equivalent in contrastive grammars. However, this functional equation proves to be problematic when Italian students refer with man to their own role as authors, such as in: “Darauf wird man aber im folgenden Kapitel eingehen”. Evidently, man cannot refer to the speaker role, while in the same context the Italian si is well suitable. Starting from this interference error, the paper examines the possible range of reference of the two pronouns. It turns out that the most common reading of man and si in both languages is the generic one, which can be paraphrased as “everyone”. Systematic divergences, on the other hand, occur in the particular reading, i. e. when referring to single unspecified subjects. While the German man characterizes the subject as anonymous and does never include listeners or speakers (e. g: Gestern hat man bei uns eingebrochen; man ≈ ‘jemand’, ‘somebody’), the Italian si, according to the verb class (transitive, unergative, unaccusative, etc.), can or must be read as speaker-exclusive (Mi si è raccontato che ...; si ≈ ‘qualcuno’, ‘someone’) or as speaker-inclusive (Ieri si è andati al ristorante; si ≈ ‘noi’, ‘we’). The speaker-inclusive reading also occurs when si is used in academic texts as a substitute for the established form of speaker (author) reference by means of the 1st person plural (noi, ‘we’). In addition to man and si, other forms of indeterminate subjects are examined, namely the non-anaphoric uses of German “sie (pl.)” (Sie haben schon wieder die Preise erhöht.) and of the Italian 3rd person plural null subject (Ti hanno cercato.) as well as the so-called impersonal passive form in German (Es wird gemurmelt.)

Korpora gesprochener Sprache von/für DaF-LernerInnen. Überblick über mutter- und lernersprachliche Korpora im Kontext von Deutsch als Fremdsprache

The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview (updated to April 2017) of the corpora of spoken German, which are relevant to the teaching of German as a foreign language and freely available on the Internet. These include, on the one hand, the L1 corpora, which are useful for designing syllabuses, developing authentic teaching materials and for direct application in the classroom, and on the other, L2 corpora for the study of second language acquisition. The following aspects are presented and discussed: scope and representativeness of the corpus; types of discourse, speakers and varieties; transcription, annotation and metadata; available query tools and download options; possible uses in the classroom; and publications. With respect to the L1 corpora, FOLK and the corpus "Gesprochene Sprache für die Auslandsgermanistik" provide a sufficient basis for research and teaching. However, it would be desirable to supplement the conversationanalytic approach with phonetically and prosodically annotated corpora. With regard to the web-based L2 corpora (GeWiss and BeMaTaC) the range of communication types (examination interview, student and expert presentation, map task dialogue) and L1 languages (English, Polish, partly Bulgarian and Italian) is quite limited. Here, it would be desirable to set up further corpora to comprehensively investigate the acquisition of German as a foreign or second language

Does pragmatics beat syntax? Evidence from focus accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech of Italian learners of German

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic marking of information structure by Italian L1 learners of German. We analyze two different contexts with non-final focus accents, i. e. narrow and broad focus contexts, mainly on sentence level while most studies discussing post-focal de-accentuation are restricted to noun phrases. For Italian learners, non-final placement of focus accents is likely to cause problems, given that in their L1, phonetic prominence is normally as-signed to the last constituent in the verbal phrase. Our initial hypothesis was that the hypothetical "cognitive universal" requiring de-accentuation of given elements might probably guide the learners in realizing the correct pitch contour in contexts with a non-final narrow focus (and pragmatic de-accentuation of the final given constituent). By contrast, the de-accentuation of phrase-final lexical verbs in broad focus contexts was expected to cause more problems given that this typologically marked syntactic structure does not exist in Italian. However, in a previous study based on read speech, de-accentuation of final given elements was managed by inter-mediate Italian learners of German L2 only slightly better than realizing a non-final focus accent in all new contexts on the argument in OV structures (success rate of 55% vs. 48%, with no statistically significant difference). In other words, both types of non-final focus accents seem to be balanced at this intermediate stage of acquisition. In this contribution, our goal is to discover whether in semi-spontaneous speech one can find the same distributional patterns of non-final focus accents in this learner variety of Italian learners of German. To this end, we analyzed recordings of oral exams from the same 10 Italian university students that had taken part in the previous study. The analysis shows that in semi-spontaneous speech production too, there is evidence for the hypothesis that pragmatics does not "beat" syntax in prosodic acquisition. Besides, when the two different data types were compared, a very high intra-speaker correlation emerged between read and semi-spontaneous speech

Non-Final Focus Accents in The Speech of Advanced Italian Learners of German

This study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in non-native German. Ten proficient learners of German with Italian L1 were recorded reading aloud 40 sentences containing mostly non-final focused constituents embedded in an adequate question context. Non-final focus accents in L2 German are difficult for Italian learners to produce, especially in broad focus contexts with de-accentuation of final verb forms (cf. Paschke/Vogt, in press), because their native language has a strong positional requirement of rightmostness. Given that both German and Italian use pitch accents for information structuring, i. e. to highlight important information, a correct placement of focus accents might, however, be favoured by narrow focus contexts in which prosodic prominence has to be assigned to one specific constituent. In addition to this main hypothesis, the study investigated whether additional clues (such as prosodic highlighting of the relevant constituent in the L2 question, a corresponding syntactic and prosodic structure between L1 and L2) might increase the success rate. The data shows that advanced Italian speakers of German L2 correctly realize non-final focus accents in more than half of the narrow focus contexts, but that their success rate is not significantly higher than in the broad focus condition and is not affected by the additional clues provided