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In diesem Beitrag wird zunächst das Konzept des digital storytelling mit dem Tablet im frühen Fremdsprachenunterricht methodisch-didaktisch gerahmt (Kapitel 1). Daran anschließend wird die Bedeutung lernunterstützender Maßnahmen in einem solchen digital gestützten und potenziell kreativitätsfördernden Unterrichtssetting erläutert (Kapitel 2). In Kapitel 3 folgt die Vorstellung der Unterrichtsreihe „It’s storytime – Let’s create our own digital fairy tale“. Im Verlauf dieser Unterrichtsreihe, die auch als Projektwoche angelegt werden kann, rezipieren die Schüler:innen zunächst eigenständig Märchen in englischer Sprache, die aus dem deutschen und angloamerikanischen Sprachraum bekannt sind. Die Märchen liegen für das Tablet multimedial aufbereitet vor. Anschließend entwickeln die Lernenden auf Grundlage des erarbeiteten gattungsspezifischen Wortschatzes ein eigenes multimediales Märchen. Alle für die Unterrichtsreihe benötigten digitalen und analogen Materialien stehen als Download zur Verfügung und können für den eigenen Unterricht genutzt und adaptiert werden.
The fastest growing regional crisis is happening in West Africa today, with over 8 million people considered persons of concern. A culmination of identity politics, climate-driven disasters, and extreme poverty has led to this humanitarian crisis in the region and is exacerbated by a lack of political will and misplaced media attention. The current state of the art does not present sufficient investigations of the thematic and spatial coverage of news media of this crisis in this region. This paper studies the spatial coverage of this crisis as reported in the media, and the themes associated with those locations, based on a curated dataset. For the time frame 12 March to 15 September 2021, 2017 news articles related to the refugee crisis in West Africa were examined and manually coded based on (1) the geographical locations mentioned in each article; (2) the themes found in the articles in reference to a location (e.g., Relocation of people in Abuja). The dataset introduces a thematic dimension, as never achieved before, to the conflict-ridden areas in West Africa. A comparative analysis with UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) data showed that 96.8% of refugee-related locations in West Africa were not covered by news during the considered time frame. Contrastingly, 80.4% of locations mentioned in the news do not appear in the UNHCR repository. Most news articles published during this time frame reported on Development aid or Political statements. Linear multiple regression analysis showed GDP per capita and political stability to be among the most influential determinants of news coverage.
High rates of land conversion due to urbanization are causing fragmented and dispersed spatial patterns in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) worldwide. The occurrence of anthropogenic fires in the WUI represents an important environmental and social issue, threatening not only vegetated areas but also periurban inhabitants, as is the case in many Latin American cities. However, research has not focused on the dynamics of the local climate in the WUI. This study analyzes whether wildfires contribute to the increase in land surface temperature (LST) in the WUI of the metropolitan area of the city of Guanajuato (MACG), a semi-arid Mexican city. We estimated the pre- and post-fire LST for 2018–2021. Spatial clusters of high LST were detected using hot spot analysis and examined using ANOVA and Tukey’s post-hoc statistical tests to assess whether LST is related to the spatial distribution of wildfires during our study period. Our results indicate that the areas where the wildfires occurred, and their surroundings, show higher LST. This has negative implications for the local ecosystem and human population, which lacks adequate infrastructure and services to cope with the effects of rising temperatures. This is the first study assessing the increase in LST caused by wildfires in a WUI zone in Mexico.
Die Zeitschrift promptus – Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik erscheint einmal jährlich und wird durch den gemeinnützigen Verein promptus e.V. herausgegeben.
Sie richtet sich an alle Nachwuchswissenschaftler im Bereich der romanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie der Fachdidaktik und bietet diesen die Möglichkeit, in einem frühen Stadium ihrer akademischen Laufbahn qualitativ hochwertige Arbeiten zu publizieren. Zudem versteht sich die Zeitschrift als Impulsgeber für junge romanistische Forschung, ohne sich dabei thematisch zu beschränken.
The aim of this article is to document the outcomes of language contact between Yucatecan Maya and Mexican Spanish. In order to do so, two theories are applied to newly assembled data, gathered during a field study in 2019 in YucaThe aim of this article is to document the outcomes of language contact between Yucatecan Maya and Mexican Spanish. In order to do so, two theories are applied to newly assembled data, gathered during a field study in 2019 in Yucatán: The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011) and Heine/Kuteva’s contact-induced grammaticalization (2003). The village Xocén in which the field study was conducted is characterized by monolingualism in Maya as well as bilingualism in Spanish and Maya. Data was collected to investigate the influence of Spanish on Mayan morphology, especially on the use of the subjunctive. I propose that the data can best be explained by combining the Interface Hypothesis with Heine/Kutevas’s (2003) approach.tán: The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011) and Heine/Kuteva’s cThe aim of this article is to document the outcomes of language contact between Yucatecan Maya and Mexican Spanish. In order to do so, two theories are applied to newly assembled data, gathered during a field study in 2019 in Yucatán: The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011) and Heine/Kuteva’s contact-induced grammaticalization (2003). The village Xocén in which the field study was conducted is characterized by monolingualism in Maya as well as bilingualism in Spanish and Maya. Data was collected to investigate the influence of Spanish on Mayan morphology, especially on the use of the subjunctive. I propose that the data can best be explained by combining the Interface Hypothesis with Heine/Kutevas’s (2003) approach.ontact-induced grammaticalization (2003). The village Xocén in which the field study was conducted is characterized by monolingualism in Maya as well as bilingualism in Spanish and Maya. Data was collected to investigate the influence of Spanish on Mayan morphology, especially on the use of the subjunctive. I propose that the data can best be explained by combining the Interface Hypothesis with Heine/Kutevas’s (2003) approach.
Insights;
(2023)
The cluster of texts assembled here were imagined, crafted, and brought together as a collaborative writing project that emerged from the seminar titled "Words Matter Worlds: Activist Scholarship and Literary Praxis," which convened over the course of the 2021/22 winter semester as an offering of the American Studies department of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Like the seminar that nurtured the considerations that evolve here, these contributions engage with how scholarly writing practices in general, and literary and cultural studies in particular, can remake the world.
Mittelalter erschließen
(2021)
Research communication has been gaining public attention in recent years. Therefore, medievalists also need to focus on the transfer of their research topics to the public both within and outside the university. Based on current political demands calling for a change in communication culture, the article first of all deals theoretically with two different concepts of research communication, by distinguishing between forms of translation and those of popularization. Numerous public events, exhibitions, and cooperative projects with cities, schools, adult education centres, museums, and other educational institutions show that knowledge about the Middle Ages has been trans-mitted to interested laypersons for a long time. The authors see a particular challenge in the alterity of medieval culture, which at the same time provides an excellent opportunity for transferring research findings into society. The fascination with medieval materiality facilitates the transfer of knowledge by those disciplines that work with concrete objects, addressing issues of visuality and aesthetic experience. The article pinpoints conditions, strategies, and perspectives of successful research communication in medieval studies, and when focussing on cur-rent topics, the authors refer to concrete occasions and regional examples, showing why medieval research is still relevant today.
Acknowledgements
(2023)
A New International
(2023)
Contributors
(2023)
Can cultural studies attend to the problems of our globalized world? Or is this project of “engaged scholarship” too deeply rooted in the parochial terrain of the national?
This collection of essays – the first volume in the new JMU Cultural Studies publication series – attends to this vital yet difficult question. Based on joint seminars bringing together emerging scholars from Germany and India, the contributions confront “classic texts” from US-American, British, and Indian cultural studies with the specific concerns and contemporary perspectives of the authors.
The collection thus tests the potentials of the tradition to speak to the transnational as well as the national environments of the very present. Emphasis is placed on Marxist and feminist legacies, which are then projected into the domains of contemporary disability, food, and film studies.
Die Zeitschrift promptus – Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik erscheint einmal jährlich und wird durch den gemeinnützigen Verein promptus e.V. herausgegeben.
Sie richtet sich an alle Nachwuchswissenschaftler im Bereich der romanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie der Fachdidaktik und bietet diesen die Möglichkeit, in einem frühen Stadium ihrer akademischen Laufbahn qualitativ hochwertige Arbeiten zu publizieren. Zudem versteht sich die Zeitschrift als Impulsgeber für junge romanistische Forschung, ohne sich dabei thematisch zu beschränken.
This paper intends to trace the introduction of an English-induced, COVID-related neologism, covidiota, into the Spanish language. The study is based on a corpus of tweets, starting in March 2020. It examines several specific features which mark the word as a new, unfamiliar item, such as different ways of graphical highlighting, for example. On the other hand, the paper aims to detect possible indicators of an integration of covidiota into the Spanish language use in the tweet corpus compiled for this case study.
Climate
Changes
Global Perspectives
brings together creative approaches to representing environmental crises in a globalized world, which originated in an eponymous symposium hosted virtually by the University of Würzburg in August of 2021. This volume, and the unruly texts that claim space here, are written not only to question and challenge standardized patterns of representation, but also to contribute to undisciplining the genres and practices of traditional academic writing by exploring alternative representational form(at)s.
Climate Changes Global Perspectives is the first publication in the Challenges of Modernity series, which seeks to collect and make available projects of engaged scholarship in the humanities.
The paper focuses on digital discourse. This is a speech-intellectual product of innovative information technologies, a phenomenon, which needs further interdisciplinary and linguistic interpretation. The English-language digital discourse shows how linguistic verbal communication is mediated by digits and to what extent these Signum and Verbum unity reigns over the world.
The paper analyzes the ways and methods of integrated and differential use of verbal and non-verbal sign systems in the English language as compared to programming languages, considering the types of synchronous changes in the socio-cultural dimension of the sign. This research describes the processes of signs transformation during their functioning in programming languages and in the English language, common and distinctive features in the arrangement of grammatical, lexical-semantic, and graphic means of (natural) English and (artificial) programming languages in their projection on different modes of communication in the system Human ↔ Machine.
Programming languages are constituted by verbal means of the English language with additional use of its own semiotic resources, which testifies to their integrative linguistic and mathematical nature. The specific representation of ElDD conveys its reciprocal nature when the English language using its own tools combines them with the elements of the programming languages thus creating an effective toolkit for self-process
Studies in Modern English
(2022)
The book "Studies in Modern English" interprets English-language communication in the humanitarian paradigm of knowledge within the linguistic and psycho-sociocultural study of speech activity prioritizing cognitive and communicative paradigms. Digital discourse as the formation of new semiotic phenomena has crowned the rapid scientific and technological progress. Researchers' scientific achievements represented in the book are systemic and valid in terms of evidence-based narratives, which reflect the transformational horizon of information theory, communication theory, and theory of linguodidactics in modern English verbal, creative and digital environments. The book represents an integrated approach to the study of modern English as an open synergetic system, which requires a description of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal notions in digital space. The book integrates such innovative perspectives as the interaction of natural English and programming languages, cyber aggression as a communicative pattern in English-language digital discourse, ethics, and democratization of modern English language, relevant developments in the field of English language as a Foreign Language, and other related issues. A complex focus of the book in the realm of modern English-language communication concerns verbal and nonverbal notions analyzed in the context of socio-cultural and digital communicative spaces.
To indicate emphasis, auxiliary do is used in affirmative contexts (do+) when no other auxiliary is present. It is thus rooted in the grammatical system of do‐support; however, do+ does not always bear stress and can fulfil various discourse‐marking functions (Nevalainen & Rissanen, 1986). Positioned at the intersection of grammar and discourse, do+ constitutes an interesting study for its use in ‘non‐native’ varieties of English since it can be assumed that the more salient grammatical functions are easier to master for learners. Focusing on Asian Englishes in contrast to Inner Circle varieties, this exploratory paper assesses the frequency and distribution of do+ in the spoken and written parts of eight ICE components.
TERRAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS emerges from an Indian-German-Swiss research collaboration. The book makes a case for a phenomenology of globalization that pays attention to locally situated socioeconomic terrains, everyday practices, and cultures of knowledge. This is exemplified in relation to three topics:
- the tension between ‘terrain’ and ‘territory’ in Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as a pioneering work of the globalist mentality (chapter 1)
- the relationship between established conceptions of feminism and the concrete struggles of women in India since the 19th century (chapter 2)
- the exploration of urban space and urban life in writings on India’s capital – from Ahmed Ali to Arundhati Roy (chapter 3).
This article examines so-called colonial discourses in Belgium on the former Sub-Saharan colony owned by the Belgian King, Leopold II., which today is known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) or the Congo-Kinshasa. After having introduced the colonial history of the DR Congo from the 15th century until 1910, an empirical analysis of the colonial discourses in Belgium from the 1890s until today will be illustrated in conjunction with Belgium’s linguistic-cultural division and the age-related divergence. Belgian colonial discourse is characterized by a historical misrepresentation by the political authorities while especially social forces have pled for a critical examination of their own colonial history in Belgium since the year 2000.
Die Zeitschrift promptus – Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik erscheint einmal jährlich und wird durch den gemeinnützigen Verein promptus e.V. herausgegeben.
Sie richtet sich an alle Nachwuchswissenschaftler im Bereich der romanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie der Fachdidaktik und bietet diesen die Möglichkeit, in einem frühen Stadium ihrer akademischen Laufbahn qualitativ hochwertige Arbeiten zu publizieren. Zudem versteht sich die Zeitschrift als Impulsgeber für junge romanistische Forschung, ohne sich dabei thematisch zu beschränken.
Phonetic and phonological variability in the L1 and L2 of late bilinguals: The case of /r/ and /l/
(2021)
A large body of research has shown that a late bilingual’s L1 and L2 phonetic categories influence each other, yielding deviations from monolingual norms in the phonetics of both languages. Existing models of L2 sound acquisition (e.g., the Speech Learning Model; Flege, 1995, 2007) predict unified phonetic spaces which accommodate both L1 and L2 sound categories. Such connections between an L1 and an L2 are believed to lead to persistent non-nativelikeness in the L2, but also to divergence from the monolingual norm in the L1, as shown in numerous studies (e.g., Bergmann et al., 2016). In this dissertation, I focus on the differences in the sound patterns of a bilingual’s languages which do not only emerge in the precise phonetic realizations of L1 sounds but also in language-specific distributional patterns that determine the realization of these sound categories in different phonetic contexts. Previous work in L1 attrition is limited to a small set of phonetic properties (especially VOT, e.g., Flege, 1987), variables beyond L2 transfer which are known to give rise to variable realizations have been neglected. Thus, little is known as to whether bilinguals’ realizations of an L1 sound category in different phonetic contexts (e.g., position within a syllable) are subject to change in L1 attrition, and whether such changes arise due to long-term exposure to different distributional patterns of an equivalent L2 category.
In this dissertation I address these gaps by exploring L1 attrition in the distributional and phonetic characteristics of liquids to shed light on the contribution of the L2 and the role of general phonetic and phonological variables to the processes that drive change in an L1. I investigate changes to phonetic properties and distributional patterns of rhoticity and /l/-allophony in the L1 of American-German late bilinguals, a language constellation which offers an instructive test case to investigate the causes of L1 attrition as well as the source from which changes due to L1 attrition emerge. Furthermore, changes to liquids can also shed light on the processes which drive sound change, gradience and variability due to various positional and phonetic factors (e.g., preceding vowel, syllable structure) in liquids across many native varieties of English. In particular, I explore the variable realization and distributional patterns of two sounds known to be subject to a considerable degree of gradience and variability, namely English /r/ and /l/, in American English-German late bilinguals.
To that end, I present the results of a production study of 12 L2-dominant American English-German late bilinguals as well as a monolingual control group for each language. The speakers performed a variety of production tasks which were aimed to elicit the realization of (non)-rhoticity and /l/-(non-)allophony in both languages of the late bilinguals, English and German which were analyzed auditorily (/r/ only) and acoustically (/r/ and /l/). Although L1 attrition of rhotics and laterals has been investigated previously (e.g., de Leeuw, 2008; Ulbrich & Ordin, 2014), the effect of contextual variables on L1 attrition and whether such variables also shape L1 attrition remains unexplored.
The results of the auditory analyses of postvocalic /r/ revealed that the late bilinguals showed non-convergence with monolingual (non-)rhoticity in both of their languages by vocalizing postvocalic /r/ more frequently in their L1 (English) and failing to entirely suppress rhoticity in their L2 (German) leading up to a higher degree of rhoticity in their L2. While the loss of rhoticity in the bilingual’s English was distributed along a spectrum of contextual constraints (e.g., type of pre-rhotic vowel and morpho-phonological environment) known to affect rhoticity in other English varieties, the non-targetlike productions of non-rhoticity (i.e., non-vocalized postvocalic /r/) in their L2, German, were not sensitive to the same contextual constraints. The acoustic analyses of the bilinguals’ rhotic productions in English and German differed from the monolinguals in the acoustic correlates of rhoticity in pre-rhotic vowels where they showed reduced anticipatory F3-lowering (i.e., less /r/-colored vowels).
I take my results to indicate that the bilinguals operate in two separate phonological grammars which approximate the respective L1 norm but show an increase of variability along constraints already present in each grammar. In contrast, the bilinguals’ phonetic system seem shared between the two grammars. This leads to persistent L1-L2-interactions as the two grammars operate within the same phonetic space. Thus, the changes in L1 attrition are induced but not governed by the L2: Change to the L1 reflects constraints underlying the L1 as well as more general laws of phonetics and universal trajectories of language change.
The lateral results revealed that just like in postvocalic /r/, the bilinguals showed non-convergence with the monolingual norm regarding the velarization of coda /l/ in both their languages. The changes to English laterals were sensitive to their positional context and more substantial for word-initial laterals than word-final laterals. Similarly, their German laterals were non-convergent with the monolinguals in two ways. Firstly, the bilinguals differed with regard to the acoustic specifications of their laterals, and secondly, the bilinguals failed to suppress the lateral allophony from their L1, leading to a non-targetlike allophonic pattern in their L2 laterals.
I interpret the lateral results to lack evidence that the L1 allophonic rule was affected by the presence of an L2; nevertheless, L1 change emerged in the phonetic specifications of laterals. Furthermore, the bilinguals did not establish a nativelike allophonic pattern in their L2, leading to non-convergence in the allophonic distribution as well as the phonetic realization of German laterals.
In this way, this dissertation provides evidence for L1 attrition in the distributional and the phonetic properties of liquids in the L1 of late bilinguals. In particular, the study presented in this dissertation provides evidence that L1 attrition is induced by the presence of a similar sound pattern in the L2. The pathway of attrition follows constraints not only underlyingly present in the L1 but also part of the universal laws of phonetics known to shape sound change. To explain these results, I draw from existing constraint grammars in phonological theory (such as Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar) to develop my Dynamic Constraints approach which allows the effects of external variables (e.g., L2 acquisition and its effect on the mind), and internal variables such as an increased likelihood of variability due to articulatory differences can be modeled using scaling factors which can interact with each other, the noise within the grammars, and the constraint weight itself. In this way, the model links previous findings on L1 attrition and its connections to diachronic and synchronic variability, offering insights into the links between the individual languages in a bilingual’s mind.
Einführung / Martha Kleinhans
„Io Caterina, scrivo a voi“: le lettere di un’instancabile comunicatrice di fine Trecento / Maria Chiara Levorato
Flammende Liebe und fragmentarischer Selbstentwurf: Maria Savorgnans Briefe an Pietro Bembo / Martha Kleinhans
Per una tipologia della scrittura epistolare femminile nel Rinascimento / Veronica Andreani
La lettera tra sincerità e simulazione: l’esempio di Le nozze di Figaro di Mozart e Da Ponte / Tanja Schwan
Sperimentazioni avanguardistiche tra desiderio, follia e delusione – le lettere d’amore di Grazia Deledda e Sibilla Aleramo / Eva-Tabea Meineke und Stephanie Neu-Wendel
La lettera informale come risorsa per l’insegnamento: alcune proposte / Marinella Vannini
Geschwister auf Distanz: transkulturelle und didaktische Perspektiven auf den E-Mail-Roman Caro Hamid, fratello lontano von Anna Russo / Julia Görtz
No abstract available.
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.
Die Zeitschrift promptus – Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik richtet sich an alle NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen im Bereich der romanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie der Fachdidaktik. Das Ziel der Zeitschrift ist die Förderung der romanistischen Forschung im Allgemeinen und des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses der Romanistik im Besonderen. Sie versteht sich damit als Impulsgeber für junge romanistische Forschung, ohne sich dabei thematisch zu beschränken.
This essay argues that Orwell’s representation of animals as companion species offers a strikingly new, as-yet largely neglected view of animal agency and interiority in his work. In “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”, the writer’s focus on the social reject is supplemented by a marked sense of community implying human tragedy yet framing it within precariously situated human-animal, colonial or urban-imperial transitions that visualise animals as agents of change and co-shaping species interdependent with the lives of the humans that utilize and domineer them. Animals are required whenever Orwell aspires to shift from isolation to communality, from the self-conscious outsider to the larger realm of ideas framing the world in which his characters strive to overstep the accepted lines of social performance and conformity. Read in and around disciplinary structures of rationalization, Orwell’s animals appear to secure themselves, quite paradoxically, a place within the normative anthropocentric framework excluding them. They extend beyond anthropomorphising or allegorical modes of description and open up bio-political perspectives within and across regimes of knowledge and empathy. Orwell’s writings thus present a challenge to the culturally accredited fantasy of human exceptionalism, collapsing any epistemic space between humans and animals and burying the idea of sustaining radical species distinction.
This paper deals with the interrelation between the concept of linguistic insecurity described by Labov (1966) and the irregular formation of Spanish superlatives based on Latin roots such as paupérrimo, celebérrimo etc. instead of the analogue formation pobrísimo or celebrísimo. After a brief overview on the frequency of these forms and their alleged regular equivalents in Spanish corpora, a closer look is taken on the speakers’ internal and external aspects of linguistic (in)security. Finally, it is shown by an acceptability test that there are forms on -érrim*, which are not exclusively restricted to the norma culta in Spanish.