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Over the past few decades, a multitude of scientific research has been published on the topic of discourse markers, intending to define this linguistic phenomenon. Despite this increase of interest in discourse markers, fundamental questions pivotal to a clear definition remain unanswered. On basis of an empirical analysis of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan discussions, this essay sets out to demonstrate that combining of the two prevailing research approaches (formal-syntactical vs. functional-pragmatic) has advantageous effects on the definition of discourse markers.

The present study focuses on Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s self-representation on social media. Despite her youth, the niece of the party’s chairwoman and granddaughter of its founder is a distinguished member of the French radical right-wing populist and nationalist party Front National. The corpus-based analysis of her digital presence on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook on which this paper is based shows a specific use of linguistic and multimodal resources as a means of strategic framing of political content. In particular, an analysis of Maréchal-Le Pen’s use of searchable hashtags and @mentions referring to different political and non-political actors reveals it as a strategy of polarization between a constructed us and a negatively connoted them.

The two articles of «Langage» and «Langue», published in 1765 in the 9th volume of the great French Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert, treat some essential philosophical questions on the human ability of communication with linguistic signs. Nevertheless, as the two authors Jaucourt and Beauzée did not share completely identic points of view, the comparative lecture of both articles reveals a complementary perspective, particularly relating to the origin of language as a divine gift or humans’ creation for communicative needs. A further aspect of divergence concerns the textual composition of the article « Langage » as a structured informative text, and the article « Langue » as a long and freely composed writing including personal remarks by the author. The following article deals with the potential of approaches to the Encyclopédie in modern linguistics, concretely demonstrated in the comparative analysis of these two articles.

Frank-Rutger Hausmann war Professor für Romanische Philologie (Schwerpunkt französische und italienische Literatur) in Freiburg, Aachen und wiederum Freiburg. Hausmann hat sich zudem intensiv mit der Fachgeschichte der deutschen Romanistik und der Geisteswissenschaften allgemein beschäftigt. Für die zweite Ausgabe der promptus-Interviewreihe durften wir ihn nach seiner Perspektive auf die historische und aktuelle Situation der Romanistik befragen. Er arbeitet momentan u.a. an einem Romanistenlexikon, das online veröffentlicht wird, und hat das Romanistenarchiv in Augsburg gegründet.

This paper investigates the linguistic properties of prepositional phrases containing de in the French language by means of a comprehensive compilation of possible formal realizations, for which examples are provided out of a chosen sample text. Special attention will be paid to the most frequently-cited formal realization, namely the combination of a preposition and a noun phrase. The corresponding forms will be divided into two classes, one with nominal phrases containing a phonetically realized or at least an underlying determiner, and one with nominal phrases in which no determiner is assumed to occur. This distinction will shed light on some of the difficulties that can arise in the assignment of the elements to either category due to the special interaction between the preposition de and the French system of determiners.