An inverted loanword dictionary of German loanwords in the languages of the South Pacific

The paper reports on a dictionary of German loanwords in the languages of the South Pacific that is compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. The loanwords described in this dictionary mainly result from language contact between 1884 and 1914, when the German empire was in possession of large areas of the South Pacific where overall more than 700 indigenous languages were spoken. The dictionary is designed as an electronic XML-based resource from which an internet dictionary and a printed dictionary can be derived. Its printed version is intended as an ‘inverted loanword dictionary’, that is, a dictionary that – in contrast to the usual praxis in loanword lexicography – lemmatizes the words of a source language that have been borrowed by other languages. Each of the loanwords will be described with respect to its form and meaning and the contact situation in which it was borrowed. Among the outer texts of the dictionary are (i) a list of all sources with bibliographic and archival information, (ii) a commentary on each source, (iii) a short history of the language contact with German for each target language, and perhaps (iv) facsimiles of source texts.The dictionary is supposed to (i) help to reconstruct the history of language contact of the source language, (ii) provide evidence for the cultural contact between the populations speaking the source and the target languages, (iii) enable linguistic theories about the systematic changes of the semantic, morphosyntactic, or phonological lexical properties of the source language when its words are borrowed into genetically and typologically different languages, and (iv) establish a thoroughly described case for testing typological theories of borrowing

Historische Sprachkontaktforschung zur deutschen Sprache im Südpazifik - Ansatz zu einer Quellen- und Dokumentenkunde der Deutschen Koloniallinguistik

Investigations of the relationship between language and German colonialism are mainly based on historical sources. The article aims to develop a systematic foundation of source studies as a methodological background for these investigations. This is exemplified by sources reflecting the particular situation of the former German colonies in the South Pacific. Firstly, the article addresses terminological problems, in particular the relation between "documents", "sources", and "data". Secondly, a detailed typology of historical sources is presented and related to object-, meta-, and extralinguistic aspects of language contact. Finally, the article informs about how and where to look for historical sources

Punctuality and Verb Semantics

Whether verbs have to be marked as punctual vs. durative has been a controversial issue from the very beginnings of research on aktionsarten in the last century right on up to modern theories of aspectual classes and aspect composition. Debates about the linguistic necessity of this distinction have often been accompanied by the question of what it means for a verb to be temporally punctual. In this paper I will, firstly, sketch the history of research on the punctual-durative distinction and present several linguistic arguments in its favor. Secondly, I will show how this distinction is captured in an eventstructure- based approach to lexical semantics. Thirdly, I will discuss the extent to which a precise definition of the notions used in lexical representations helps avoid circular argumentation in lexical semantics. Finally, I will demonstrate how this can be done for the notion of ‘punctuality’ by clarifying the logical type of this predicate and relating it to central cognitive time concepts

Lexicography of Language Contact: An Internet Dictionary of Words of German Origin in Tok Pisin

The paper presents an ongoing project in the domain of lexicography of language contact, namely, the “Internet Dictionary of Words of German Origin in Tok Pisin”. The German influence onto the lexicon of the main pidgin language of Papua New Guinea has its roots in the German colonial empire, where Tok Pisin played an important role as a lingua franca in the colony of German New Guinea. Tok Pisin also served as an intermediate language for many borrowing processes; that is, German loans entered many languages in the South Pacific via Tok Pisin. The Internet Dictionary of Words of German Origin in Tok Pisin is based on all available lexicographical sources from the early 20th century up to now. These sources are systematically evaluated within our project; the results will be documented in the dictionary. The microstructure of the dictionary will be presented with respect to its major features: documentation of sources, examples for word usage, audio files, and lexicographic comment

Elektronische Lexikografie zwischen Grammatik und Lexikon

Der Artikel stellt die Projekte vor, die sich im Rahmen der Projektmesse zur „Elektronischen Lexikografie“ präsentiert haben. Diese Messe wurde begleitend zur 46. Jahrestagung des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache veranstaltet. Es wird in diesem Beitrag auf der Basis der Messepräsentationen dargelegt, inwiefern Entwicklungen der Korpuslexikografie und der Internetlexikografie die lexikografische Erfassung syntagmatischer Aspekte des deutschen Wortschatzes befördern und welche lexikografischen Internetressourcen dazu verfügbar sind

Interaktionszentren des Sprachkontakts in Deutsch-Neuguinea

Colonial language contact is shaped by many extralinguistic factors that, in turn, lead to different linguistic outcomes. The project outlined here aims at documenting contact contexts that existed during the German colonial rule in the Pacific, with special emphasis on German New Guinea. Trading places, institutions (e.g. schools), plantations and other settings that involved (language) interaction between the colonizers and the colonized are charted on a historical map of the area to determine where contact intensity is likely to have been high, and what languages were involved and can be expected to show traces of such interaction (e.g. loanwords). It is intended to digitize this information in form of an interactive map, allowing to show and hide different types of information and thus being able to draw conclusions on historical language contact settings and their long-term linguistic results

Was es heißt, "in sechs Monaten zu promovieren"! Unergative Accomplishments in der Aspektkomposition

Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, unter welchen Bedingungen intransitive, unergative Verben in Accomplishments auftreten. Den Überlegungen liegt das im Anhang enthaltene Korpus von Beispielen zugrunde, das solche Sätze enthält wie sie frühstückte in fünf Minuten, er räumte in wenigen Minuten auf oder sie duschte in zehn Minuten. Solche unergativen Accomplishments sind meines Wissens in der Literatur zu aspektuellen Klassen und Aspektkomposition bisher nicht beschrieben oder erklärt worden. Die Verben gehören einer Vielfalt von lexikalischen Gruppen an, für deren aspektuelles Verhalten jeweils unterschiedliche Erklärungen erforderlich sind, die zum Teil noch sehr tentativen Charakter haben. Ausgangspunkt dieser Überlegungen ist KRIFKAs Theorie zur Aspektkomposition. Ich werde versuchen, KRIFKAs (1989a, 1989b) Grundideen der Aspektkomposition in etwas modifizierter Form zu bestätigen und die Erklärungen für den Accomplishment-Status der Unergativa in einer reichen Repräsentation lexikalisch-semantischer Eigenschaften von Verben zu suchen