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Literary imitations of the testament form have a European tradition going back to classical times and constitute a neglected part of English literature. Although examples appear from the 14th century onwards, no thorough study of last wills and testaments as a specific form of English literature has been undertaken. This neglect may be because, within the broad field of the literary idea of 'legacy', parodies of the testament form ('mock testaments') and serious imitations ('lovers' testaments' etc.) appear in nearly every genre as either single texts or parts of larger ones, themselves crossing the genre boundaries. Then too, a large number of literary testaments come under the heading of 'minor literature' , such as shortlived pamphlets and broadsides. Yet the use which major authors like Shakespeare and Donne made of the literary testament shows that it had become an established form in the 16th century. The texts under examination here would normally be referred to as courtly love poems, political pamphlets, jests, cook-books, nursery rhymes, epic poems, autobiographical verse (Chatterton's Will), modern poems (yeats, Auden and McNeice) or as parts of masques, plays or novels. The aim is to show that one can legitimately speak of all these texts as belonging to a single literary category. In addition to adescription of the history of the literary testament in England, the central problem of this study was one of generic form. The attempt has been made to apply recent ideas of genre theory, i.e., the structuralist generative approach, to texts imitating a non-literary or utility document. This non-literary model is narrowly defined by criteria set by the Church and the Law. Thus it becomes possible to proceed as if the model were the generic norm of a corpus of greatly varying literary texts, thereby avoiding the problems of defming and re-defming selective principles (and of the need to assume a hypothetical 'first form') for the gathering of texts. The testament is a private re cord especially weil suited for studies of this kind because of its traditional fixed form and wide popularization from the Middle Ages onwards. In its complexity, the testament allows for more variation of style, content and purpose than does the letter, but is more disciplined in its form. In categorizing the testaments as such, it is necessary to study contemporary connotations and to defme the basic structure of the model. A selection of genuine, nonficticious testaments drawn up by members of the University of Cambridge in the 16th century has been examined for this purpose. (The 16th and 17th centuries can be taken as the most productive of literary testament writing.) There seems to exist a dichotomy in the testament itself; on the one hand there are mundane considerations (bequeathing of property) and on the other thoughts directed towards the life to come. Ihis dichotomy is observable not only on the content level, but also on the formal level and the semantic level. Ihe relation between the two testamentary elements, which is characterized by polarization, can be postulated as the basic structure of the testament and as the genre norm of the literary texts examined here. Taking into account the fact that the testament has been of varying importance in various ages, a wide selection of literary imitations of the testament from Chaucer to Yeats and after is studied in detail. A distinction may be drawn between mock testaments and serious imitations, with the former representing rebellion against the exalted authorities behind the testament. When the theoretical rebellion coincides with the practical function of satire or attack in a particular case, then the mock testament is raised to a true literary form. The serious imitation, on the other hand, makes use of the metaphysical element of the testament, and is directed to a worldly being or to the 'human condition' (as in examples drawn from the modern poets). Its problems and aim assign this study to the wider fjeld of genre research, particularly research into the relationship between genuine documents (utility texts) and their literary imitations.
Kommentierte Bibliographie englischer literarischer Testamente vom 14. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert
(1982)
No abstract available
Interkomprehension im gegenwärtigen Westeuropa : Internationalismen im romanischen Grundwortschatz
(2013)
Die Arbeit untersucht 2500 Wörter des italienischen Grundwortschatzes in einem fünfsprachigen Vergleich. Sie ergänzt damit die an gleicher Stelle erschienene Magisterarbeit „Internationalismen im Grundwortschatz: Untersuchungen zur romanistischen Mehrsprachigkeitsdidaktik” von Anja Büttner (2012). Hier werden nun die Ergebnisse beider Untersuchungen zusammengefasst. Dabei werden erstmalig konkrete Zahlen zur Beantwortung der Frage vorgestellt, wie viele Wörter z.B. ein deutscher Muttersprachler, der Französisch gelernt hat und nun italienische Texte lesen will, tatsächlich lernen muss, um die 5000 häufigsten Wörter erkennen und damit durchschnittliche Texte nahezu vollständig verstehen zu können.
In demokratischen Regierungssystemen sind die Minister als Agenten der exekutiven Staatsgewalt gegenüber dem Parlament für ihre Handlungen verantwortlich. Die ministerielle Fragestunde ist hierbei ein gewichtiges Kontollinstrument und Gegenstand der vorliegenden kontrastiven Metaphernanalyse unter spezieller Berücksichtigung von pragmatischen und kulturellen Gesichtspunkten. Neben einer Diskussion und Kontextualisierung kognitiver Metapherntheorien wird vor allem im Rahmen einer Korpusanalyse festgestellt, welche Quelldomänen in diesem Diskursgenre quantitativ am häufigsten und qualitativ am bedeutsamsten für das zum Zeitpunkt der globalen Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise relevante Makrotopik der Wirtschaftsrezession auftreten; außerdem welche interkulturellen Variationen und Konventionaliäten in den konzeptuellen Metaphern bestehen.
The present paper is concerned with the use of English cognitive verbs like think, mean and guess as well as with fixed expressions that contain these verbs like guess what (?) or think about it in Portuguese online discourses. In the qualitative analysis of examples retrieved from the Corpus do Português (Web/Dialects) I mainly focus on the syntactic behavior of the expressions under survey, also comparing their use and function in the English language. In the final part of the paper I reflect about possible reasons of the employment of English elements in Portuguese conversation.
Within the relatively new area of research on Third Language (L3) Acquisition, the subfield of phonology is growing, but still relatively understudied. Testing the current L3 models adopted from research on L3 syntax (see Rothman 2010, Bardel & Falk 2012, Flynn et al. 2004), the studies conducted in the area have mostly focused on the source and directionality of language transfer – both into the L3 and into the respective background languages – with some recent excursions into the role of extra-linguistic factors for multilingual learners (e.g., Wrembel 2015). The findings so far (mostly on production, with perception lagging behind) have been very diverse and, depending on the concrete study, can often be taken to give evidence for any of the prevalent models. This can be attributed to the wide range of different speaker and learner biographies as well as their language combinations and state of acquisition, but crucially the dilemma seems to be inherent in the (phonological) system in and of itself since viewing phonological interlanguage transfer as a one-dimensional and immediately transparent process based on direct correspondences between language systems does not seem to capture the complex nature of the phenomenon.
In this doctoral thesis I investigate the acquisition of an additional phonological system by child and adult German heritage speakers of Turkish. Specifically, I explore how the learners deal with diverse phonological contrasts that promote positive contra negative transfer from their HL (Turkish) and their L2 (German), and how their perception and production is modulated by cognitive and affective variables. Moreover, I test contrasts that can be found neither in the HL nor in the L2 phonological system.
The studies will shed light both on the question of how a new language is shaped and affected by different existing systems and on how two or more phonological grammars co-exist and/or interact in a speaker’s mind. I will argue that, rather than being regarded as simple full projection of language-specific property sets onto the target language, phonological transfer in multilinguals needs to be considered as a process of complex interactions and layers that are established on the level of individual phonological properties and abstract (typological) associations.