Torsten Leuschner | Ghent University (original) (raw)

Papers by Torsten Leuschner

Peter Lang eBooks, 2014

English and other languages, particularly in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, have a nu... more English and other languages, particularly in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, have a number of German words in general usage which are associated with German history like Anschluss, Blitz(krieg), Endlosung and Drang nach Osten. The present paper focuses on Drang nach Osten 'push to the East', proposing a new, comparative approach which starts from the precepts of 'Schlagwortforschung' (i.e. slogan or keyword research) while integrating constructionalist, frame-semantic and discourse-analytic perspectives in a bid to investigate usage of Drang nach Osten in German and Polish media since 1990. While it emerges that Drang nach Osten is just as sensitive to shifts in foreign relations after 1990 as before, the main objective of the paper is programmatic, pointing out issues for cooperation between the methodologies as well as trends in the data that future research may find worth investigating.

Zeitschrift Fur Deutsche Philologie, 2017

De Gruyter eBooks, Mar 9, 2020

individual contrasts between German and English for potential generalisations, Hawkins suggested ... more individual contrasts between German and English for potential generalisations, Hawkins suggested that these two languages were located at opposite poles of "a typological continuum whereby languages vary according to the degree to which surface forms and semantic representations correspond" (ibid.: 123). According to this hypothesis, German grammar is semantically more transparent than English grammar in part because German inflectional morphology clarifies the functional roles of NPs in the clause (ibid.: 121-127, 215-217; cf. Fischer 2013 and Hawkins 2018 for recent discussion). Although a more mixed picture is now presented in König and Gast's survey Understanding German-English contrasts (König/Gast 2018, first published in 2007 and today in its fourth, repeatedly revised and expanded edition), Hawkins's approach was able to highlight two strengths of CL: its ability to serve as "small-scale typology" (König 2012: 25) or "pilot typology" (van der Auwera 2012), and its capacity to unify specific contrasts in a broader, potentially holistic perspective. This ensures the continuing relevance of CL, not only for language pedagogy and linguistic typology, but also for other disciplines with an intrinsic interest in contrastive comparison such as translation studies (Vandepitte/ De Sutter 2013) and psycholinguistics, given the role of crosslinguistic evidence in the language-and-cognition debate (cf. below). Besides these affiliated fields, a particularly close ally of CL is historical-comparative linguistics. A well-established line of research on the borderline between CL and historical-comparative linguistics is the sustained trilingual comparison of German and English with Dutch. First conceived by van Haeringen (1956) in his book Nederlands tussen Duits en Engels ('Dutch between German and English'), its aim is to profile Dutch through a comparison with German and English, a configuration aptly labelled the "Germanic Sandwich" (see inter alia Ruigendijk/ van de Velde/Vismans 2012). Van Haeringen's main observation is that Dutch holds the middle between German and English, systematically and for historical reasons, in domains of the linguistic system as diverse as the relationship of orthography to phonology, the amount of foreign influence on the lexicon, the richness of nominal and verbal morphology, the productivity of nominal compounding, and the flexibility of word order. The desire to test this hypothesis against new phenomena or data, and indeed to expand it to new combinations of languages as long as Dutch remains in focus, has spawned the now well-known Germanic Sandwich conference series which began in Berlin (2005) and then moved on to

German and Dutch in Contrast, 2020

evidence in the language-and-cognition debate (cf. below). Besides these affiliated fields, a par... more evidence in the language-and-cognition debate (cf. below). Besides these affiliated fields, a particularly close ally of CL is historical-comparative linguistics. A well-established line of research on the borderline between CL and historical-comparative linguistics is the sustained trilingual comparison of German and English with Dutch. First conceived by van Haeringen (1956) in his book Nederlands tussen Duits en Engels ('Dutch between German and English'), its aim is to profile Dutch through a comparison with German and English, a configuration aptly labelled the "Germanic Sandwich" (see inter alia Ruigendijk/ van de Velde/Vismans 2012). Van Haeringen's main observation is that Dutch holds the middle between German and English, systematically and for historical reasons, in domains of the linguistic system as diverse as the relationship of orthography to phonology, the amount of foreign influence on the lexicon, the richness of nominal and verbal morphology, the productivity of nominal compounding, and the flexibility of word order. The desire to test this hypothesis against new phenomena or data, and indeed to expand it to new combinations of languages as long as Dutch remains in focus, has spawned the now well-known Germanic Sandwich conference series which began in Berlin (2005) and then moved on to

Deutsche Sprache, 2012

Ausgehend von der im Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren, in der Deutschen Grammatik des IDS und a... more Ausgehend von der im Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren, in der Deutschen Grammatik des IDS und anderswo erwahnten auffallenden Ausdrucksbreite der zwar … aber-Verknupfung im Gegenwartsdeutschen setzt sich der vorliegende Beitrag zwei Ziele: wichtige Aspekte der Variation von zwar … aber zu dokumentieren sowie Fragestellungen im Hinblick auf einraumende Ausdrucke im Allgemeinen und zwar … aber im Besonderen zu formulie-ren, denen sich die zukunftige Forschung widmen sollte. Der Grundgedanke ist, dass die zwar … aber-Relation die Kernrealisierung eines funktional einheitlichen Prototyps ZWAR … ABER bildet, der andere Realisierungsformen (z.B. mit doch, jedoch, dennoch, trotzdem usw. an-stelle von aber, modalisierenden Adverbien anstelle von zwar usw.) als peripherere Varianten zugeordnet sind. Als erster Schritt dokumentiert der vorliegende Beitrag u.a. verschiedene statistische Korrelationen, die es erlauben, die zwar … aber-Relation als Kernrealisierung des Prototyps zu charakterisieren, und diskutiert sie aus Sicht der Grammatikalisierungstheorie. Datengrundlage ist ein reprasentatives Subkorpus des Deutschen Referenzkorpus (DeReKo) mit etwa 10.000 zwar-Belegen, die zusatzlich geparst wurden.

Category Change from a Constructional Perspective, 2018

The present article discusses the productivity of the verb-first (= V1) conditional construction ... more The present article discusses the productivity of the verb-first (= V1) conditional construction as a template for German proverbs in contrast with English Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI), which has no corresponding potential. Special attention is paid to the “proverbiality by association” (“scheinbare Sprichwortlichkeit”, W. Mieder) of certain commercial and political slogans, which relies, inter alia, on the function of V1 word order as a contextualisation cue in German. Borrowing Norrick’s notion of “p-grammar” (where “p” stands for “proverbial”), the concept of “p-constructicon” is introduced, and it is suggested that the p-constructica of different languages should be treated contrastively in future research under the theoretical framework of Social Construction Grammar.

Germanistische Mitteilungen, 2014

Am Beispiel des deutschen »Drang nach Osten« plädiert der vorliegende Beitrag für eine linguistis... more Am Beispiel des deutschen »Drang nach Osten« plädiert der vorliegende Beitrag für eine linguistische Fundierung der historischen Stereotypenforschung. Ausgehend von der Entstehung und Funktion dieses Stereotyps im Kontext der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts wird nacheinander die kognitiv-diskursive, die syntaktisch-semantische und die semiotische Perspektive eingenommen, um zwischen historischen und sprachlichen Aspekten des in »Drang nach Osten« enkodierten schematischen Alltagswissens zu vermitteln. Dabei erweisen sich u.a. die kategoriale Zuordnung zu den Nominationsstereotypen, die Unterschei-dung zwischen Ausdrucksmodell und semantischer Prägung sowie der framesemantische Be-schreibungsansatz als wertvolles methodologisches Handwerkszeug. Through the example of the German »Drang nach Osten« (›drive/push to the East‹), the present article proposes a linguistic foundation for the study of historical stereotyping. Starting from the rise and function of »D...

New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics

The present paper investigates the English irrelevance particle -ever and its functional equivale... more The present paper investigates the English irrelevance particle -ever and its functional equivalents immer/auch in German and (dan) ook in Dutch with regard to their distributional patterns and functional motivations, using data from the small-scale, multilingual, comparative ConverGENTiecorpus in conjunction with larger, non-comparable, monolingual corpora. An overview of the corpora, the search queries and the methods of analysis is provided first. The distributional and combinatorial patterns of irrelevance particles in two types of irrelevance constructions are presented, focusing on Dutch and German, and the present-day dynamics of irrelevance marking are discussed through the differences and similarities of the language-specific particles, including some peculiarities of the much less variable English WH-ever paradigm. A survey of the further grammaticalization of whatever and however and its German and Dutch equivalents is also provided. The results suggest that the synchronic state of the irrelevance-marking subsystems in English, German and Dutch represents snapshots of a long-term grammaticalization process. While this process is nearly complete in English, in German it is not only incomplete but appears to have lost its former directionality. Although signs of grammaticalization are weakest in Dutch W … ook, Dutch W dan ook shows the highest degree of specialization of all irrelevance-marking combinations in the set. English WH-ever is much less versatile, with two notable exceptions: the freestanding discourse marker whatever and the concessive/ contrastive conjunctional adverb and discourse marker however.

Formelhafte Sprache in Text und Diskurs, 2018

Ausgehend von disziplinuberschreitenden Fragestellungen der Phraseologie behandelt der vorliegend... more Ausgehend von disziplinuberschreitenden Fragestellungen der Phraseologie behandelt der vorliegende Beitrag V1-Konditionalgefuge als Sprichwortformel im Deutschen, und zwar nacheinander aus Sicht von Schematizitat (samt einem Vergleich mit dem Englischen) und Variabilitat. Im Zusammenhang mit Letzterer wird u.a. die „scheinbare Sprichwortlichkeit“ (W. Mieder) kommerzieller und politischer Slogans behandelt. Am Beispiel von Angela Merkels „Scheitert der Euro, dann scheitert Europa“ (2010) pladiert der Beitrag abschliesend fur eine wechselseitige Integration des phraseologischen und des politolinguistischen Interesses an satzformig-formelhafter Sprache auf der Grundlage einer soziokognitiv fundierten Konstruktionsgrammatik.

Vorliegende Arbeit ist die für den Druck leicht überarbeitete Fassung einer von RUDI KELLER betre... more Vorliegende Arbeit ist die für den Druck leicht überarbeitete Fassung einer von RUDI KELLER betreuten Dissertation, die 2011 an der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf angenommen wurde. Ihr Gegenstand sind Diskursmarker (hier: wobei, weil und ja), also ein Phänomen vor allem der gesprochenen Sprache, das sich gegen wichtige Annahmen der klassischen Grammatikalisierungstheorie sperrt. Letztere geht in ihrer von LEHMANN (1995) geprägten Form davon aus, dass Grammatikalisierung mit einer immer stärkeren Einbindung ehemaliger Lexeme in die Morphosyntax auf Satz-, Phrasen-oder Wortebene einhergeht. Diskursmarker dagegen üben eine diskursorganisierende Funktion außerhalb der Satzgrenzen aus, so dass sich bei