Norbert Dittmar

Developing Grammars: The Acquisition of German Syntax by Foreign Workers

I Variation in Language and Its Description.- 1 Fluctuating Linguistic Structures.- 2 Dimensions of Language Variability.- 2.1 Problems of Description vs Problems of Evaluation.- 2.2 Setting Up a Variety Space.- 2.2.1 The Dimension of Time.- 2.2.2 The Dimension of Place.- 2.2.3 The Dimension of the Speech Situation.- 2.2.4 The Dimension of Social Stratification.- 2.3 Developing an Overall Grammar.- 2.4 Restricting the Overall Grammar to Single Varieties.- 2.5 Summary.- 3 Probabilistic Grammars.- 3.1 Probabilistic Weightings.- 3.2 Context-Free Grammars.- 3.2.1 Preparatory Remarks.- 3.2.2 Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars, Suppes Type.- 3.2.3 Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars, Salomaa Type.- 3.2.4 Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars with Derivation Weighting (dw Grammars).- 3.3 Context-Sensitive Grammars.- 3.4 Transformational Grammars.- 4 The Empirical Study of Language Variation.- 4.1 Selection of Variety Space.- 4.2 Selection of Utterance Type.- 4.3 Data Collection.- 4.4 Corpus Analysis.- 4.5 Elaboration of an Overall Grammar.- 4.6 Rule Weighting.- II Developing Grammars in the Acquisition of German in Social Context.- 5 Foreign Language Acquisition in Social Context and Its Role for Foreign Language Teaching.- 5.1 LAS in FLAT Research: The State of the Art.- 5.2 The Process of LA and Its Description: Some Remarks on the State of the Art.- 5.2.1 The Exclusion of LAS.- 5.2.2 Efficiency and Inefficiency of Teaching Methods.- 5.2.3 Measuring Language Abilities.- 5.3 The Process of LA and Its Description II: The Heidelberg Approach.- 5.4 Intervening in the Process of LA.- 5.5 Description of Target Variety.- 6 Outline of the Project.- 6.1 Extralinguistic Factors on LAS by Foreign Workers.- 6.1.1 Bias Factors.- 6.1.2 Environmental Factors.- 6.2 Data Collection.- 6.2.1 The Role of Participant Observation and Interview.- 6.2.2 The Sample.- 6.3 The Interview.- 6.4 Transcription.- 6.5 The Dialect Speakers.- 6.6 Some Text Samples.- 7 The Acquisition of German Syntax.- 7.1 The Development of Syntactic Constituents.- 7.1.1 Materials and Methods.- The Overall Grammar.- The Corpus Analysis.- Ordering the Speakers.- 7.1.2 Results.- Preliminary Remarks.- Proposition.- Verbal Group.- Nominal Complex.- Adverbial Complex.- Subordinate Clauses.- 7.1.3 Text Samples for Groups I-IV.- 7.1.4 Summary.- 7.2 The Order of Syntactic Constituents in the Sentences.- 7.2.2 The Importance of Word Order in the Learning of German Syntax.- 7.2.2 Fields Studied and Processes of Description.- 7.2.3 Linguistic Conditions of the Interpretation of Quantitative Results.- 7.2.4 Results.- Position of the Finite Verb in the Main Clause.- The Place of the Grammatical Part of the Predicate (Impersonal Forms of the Verb) and/or the Separable Particle in the Main Clause.- The Position of the Verb in Subordinate Clauses.- 7.3 Complete Results for 48 Learners and a Group of Heidelberg Dialect Speakers.- 8 Determining Factors in the Foreign Language Acquisition of Foreign Workers.- 8.1 Selection of Factors.- 8.2 Implementation.- 8.3 Results.- 8.3.1 Contact with Germans in Leisure Time.- 8.3.2 Age.- 8.3.3 Contact with Germans at Working Place.- 8.3.4 Formal Professional Qualification.- 8.3.5 Attendance at School.- 8.3.6 Duration of Stay.- 8.3.7 Sex.- 8.3.8 Origin.- 8.3.9 Abode.- 8.4 Summary.- 8.5 Tables.- References.

On the verbal organization of L2 tense marking in an elicited translation task by Spanish immigrants in Germany

This article describes the undirected learning (learning without explicit teaching) of tense markers in German by Spanish migrant workers. It will be shown that the remarkable differences the informants displayed in expressing the concept of tense are a function of the daily communicative routines which they developed in order to meet their communicative needs and demands. By examining very simplified learner varieties, I will demonstrate that a traditional grammatical analysis of tense is not capable of accounting for the wide range of expressions for temporal relations which were produced in an elicited Spanish-German translation task.

Pragmatic, semantic and syntactic constraints and grammaticalization: A longitudinal perspective

This contribution will compare the acquisition of German of three adult Poles over a period of 3 years. As background to the acquisition of grammatical features in German (e. g., morphology, auxiliary and modal verbs, constituency structure, temporality), an acquisition profile of the informants will be constructed. With the help of computer-aided corpus descriptions, the sequences in acquisition will be specified.

Grammaticalization in Second Language Acquisition: Introduction.

Singular Nominative—Mein guter Freund, my good friend. Genitive—Meines guten Freundes, of my good friend. Dative—Meinem guten Freund, to my good friend. Accusative—Meinen guten Freund, my good friend. Plural Nominative—Meine guten Freunde, my good friends. Genitive—Meiner guten Freunde, of my good friends. Dative—Meinen guten Freunden, to my good friends. Accusative—Meine guten Freunde, my good friends. Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations, and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in Germany than to take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter. Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the example above suggested. Difficult? Troublesome? (Mark Twain, ‘The Awful German Language,’ in Twain, 1879, pp. 271–272)

Descriptive and Explanatory Power of Rules in Sociolinguistics

Important sociopolitical and programmatic statements in the late sixties and early seventies gave rise to the hope of intellectuals, academicians, and teachers that sociolinguistic analysis would help to solve crucial communicative problems concerning the social use of language codes and subcodes. Whether they were deceived by abstract (algebraic) linguistics or were participants in the worldwide students’ movement, they carried great expectations into the field of sociolinguistics.

Urbane Linguotope : am Puls der Polyphonie

SummaryThis article focuses on the evolution of mixed native and hybrid native/non-native varieties of German in Berlin after the fall of the wall in 1989.In the last 15 years, new languages and cultures have entered Berlin as the former/current capital of Germany with its own creative cultural and social dynamics. We came up with the idea of a sociolinguistic profile of the city and have attempted to give an initial insight into the complex sociolinguistic scenario of the city.Two local sociolinguistic settings are then described in detail: the differences between the eastern and the western part of the city with respect to the depth of urban vernacular and the emergence of ethnolectal varieties in four districts where immigrants and Germans live closely together.In the first case, it becomes evident that the conservative use of the urban dialect is associated with habits and social norms still going back to the values of the former GDR society. The ›non-simultaneity of the simultaneous‹ means that Berlin citizens live with contradictory norms of social life and language.The emergence of a new German ethnolect challenges sociolinguistics. There are multi-modal inputs for a variety which follows other phonetic, prosodical and grammatical regularities such as the Berlin vernacular. It is shown that this variety has a sociolinguistic impact even on young native German adolescents.

Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society (Project announcement)

In the course of the last 15 years, sociolinguistics (or the sociology of language) has established itself as an academic subject in many countries. The discipline promises to be of benefit in solving practical problems in such areas as language planning and standardization, language teaching and therapy, and language policy. Both research projects and publications and university teaching programmes in sociolinguistics now span such a wide field that it is hardly possible even for the experts to review the whole scope of the subject. A number of specialist periodicals and introductions and surveys of the subject exist, but to date there has been no comprehensive and internationally representative account of the subject. The handbook provides this account.

Fluctuating Linguistic Structures

When asked about the object of their discipline, most linguists would agree that linguistics deals with language. This statement is surely not wrong, but it is empty, as empty as the statement that “physics deals with nature”. The everyday notion of language is very vague; without further precisions, it is almost worthless. Numerous attempts have been made toward this end, and two of them have deeply affected the course of language studies in this century: Saussures’s trichotomy of “language”, “langue”, and “parole” and Chomsky’s dichotomy of “competence” and “performance”. The Saussurian conception and particularly his notion of langue as a system of structural relations was — in its original and many modified forms — basic to the various directions of structuralism. In the last two decades, this role was largely taken over by Chomsky’s distinction and by his notion of competence. Like most attempts to clarify everyday concepts, both langue and competence in their technical sense tend to neglect many properties of the original, vague concept. They are idealizations, and the value of such idealizations crucially depends on whether the properties they neglect are essential features of the concept to be clarified, whatever might be understood by an “essential feature”. In this chapter, I will put forward some features of natural languages that I think to be essential. Moreover, I think that most linguists would agree with me here. Nevertheless, these features are neglected or widely neglected by both the concept of langue and the concept of competence. This does not necessarily mean that their empirical investigation has been neglected as well. But the tendency to do so is quite strong, of course, and even if it is resisted, a certain gap arises between the empirical work on the one hand and the theoretical background on the other. Several strategies have been worked out to handle such a gap between apparent linguistic facts and a theoretical framework that as yet has been unable to account for them: 1) The first and simplest strategy is to ignore certain features of natural languages. For example, most existing semantic theories simply disregard the vagueness of word meanings, so that they necessarily fail to give an adequate account of word semantics. 2) A second well-known strategy may be called “abstracting away”, i.e., the existence of facts inconsistent with the theory is efficiently recognized, but they are excluded by an abstraction process. The classical notion of competence, for example, involves both an ideal speaker-listener and a totally homogenous linguistic community, even though it is quite apparent that real linguistic communities are quite heterogeneous. Few linguists working in that framework would deny this fact, but they exclude it by abstracting from heterooenity. 3) A third and more sophisticated strategy is that of cover terms; the linguistic phenomena in question are “covered” by a newly coined term or terminology, they are accounted for by an additional index in a formal representation, and so on. This attitude of “treating” problems by making them in some sense invisible might be called “terminological immunization”.

Foreign Language Acquisition in Social Context and Its Role for Foreign Language Teaching

The rapid economic development in Western Germany from the early Fifties onwards led to an increasing influx of foreign workers, most of them coming from the southern parts of Europe; although due to the worldwide economic crisis of the Seventies, adminstrative measures have been taken to restrain immigration, the population of foreign workers (including family members) is still about 4 million people. Approximately 25% of them come from Turkey, 20% from Yugoslavia, 16% from Italy, 10% from Greece, and 7% from Spain; the remainder includes a large number of other nationalities.

Determining Factors in the Foreign Language Aquisition of Foreign Workers

In this chapter, the influence of various factors determining the process of foreign language acquisition will be discussed. Not all factors that might be important could be studied. Section 8.1 discusses which ones could be taken into account and why just these. In Sect. 8.2, the technical implementation will be outlined, and in Sec. 8.3, the main results will be presented. Section 8.4 is a summary of this chapter, and Sect. 8.5 contains a table with the most important values on which the analysis is based.