In this dissertation, I take a look at Middle Low German nominal phrases as evidenced in the Lubecker Ratsurteile, a collection of court proceedings published by Wilhelm Ebel in 1955, which cover the years 1421-1550. By digitizing the corpus, I was able to perform a corpus analysis on noun phrases, where I concentrated on determiner use and form,…

This article investigates whether and how L2 sentence processing is affected by memory constraints that force serial parsing. Monitoring eye movements, we test effects of working memory on L2 relative-clause attachment preferences in a sample of 75 late-adult German learners of English and 25 native English controls. Mixed linear regression…

This study investigates intergroup homogeneity within high intermediate and advanced L2 writers of English from Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish first language backgrounds. A variety of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion were used to compare texts written by L1 speakers of English to L2…

Using the self-paced reading paradigm, the present study examines whether highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German (English first language) use case-marking information during the on-line comprehension of unambiguous "wh"-extractions, even when task demands do not draw explicit attention to this morphosyntactic feature in German.…

In this study, we apply MOSAIC (model of syntax acquisition in children) to the simulation of the developmental patterning of children's optional infinitive (OI) errors in 4 languages: English, Dutch, German, and Spanish. MOSAIC, which has already simulated this phenomenon in Dutch and English, now implements a learning mechanism that better…

This article is a contrastive study of the devices Russian and German dispose of in order to designate a receptacle with content and without it. The German opposition "Wodkaflasche-Flasche Wodka" is represented in Russian by four constructions: relational adjective, genitive, and prepositional forms ("s" and "iz-pod"). (SW)

Gives an elementary description of German syntax which is coherent and provides students with finite, countable categories: (1) the predicate, (2) its nominal complements, and (3) modifiers. Analyzes each category and gives examples with teaching suggestions. (EKN)

Paper prepared for a conference on Creole Languages and Education, University of the West Indies, July 24-28, 1972. (DD)

Verbality'' refers to the extent to which a grammatical construction may have ascribed to it the properties and functions of a verb. (RS)

Weak forms belong to the realm of sentence phonetics. Syntactic and phonetic conditions for the various appearances of weak forms are discussed. Two examples show how much of a role weak forms have played in FL teaching. Comparisons with English are made. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)