Search

With concepts like the consumer revolution or the industrious revolution, the changing behaviour of private households in the 18th and early 19th centuries has become of great interest. The article suggests a new way to observe intentions and decisions, by utilizing a database of 850,000 classified ads from the Basel Avisblatt over a span of 116 years. Changes in food prices constantly altered the discretionary income of households, which forced budget-related decisions. By cross-correlating indicators of discretionary income with the changing number of different types of ads, patterns of utilizing the Avisblatt can be identified, and strategies to stabilize discretionary income deduced.

The article contains a list of contact persons of the DMV (German Mathematical Society) at various German universities and colleges. It also mentions some dissertation topics and their supervisors. Furthermore, scientific papers and research projects by mathematicians at various universities are listed. Information about the DMV, its board and presidency, as well as contact details and membership fees, are also provided. However, no further information is given about the content of the papers or research projects. [Extracted from the article]

Linguistic variation is a feature that characterizes every natural language. In this paper, I focus on linguistic variation and its importance and its role in language change (LC). To determine its importance and role, one must distinguish between emergence and diffusion of variants because both dimensions provide different contributions to LC. The emergence and further development of new variants is a process that often (though not always) displays the form of a cycle, whereas the diffusion within a speech community often follows an S-curve form. Both dimensions are important for LC, but they relate to very different aspects. In this paper, I will treat variation with respect to its role in LC. Variation, in general, is a crucial factor in LC in two respects: First, it is the result of LC and second, it can trigger LC.

This paper investigates the sources of information and their quality as accessible to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany when trying to assess the situation of company funded pensions between 1949 and 1985 for the Company Pension Act of 1974. By taking a closer look at multiple government surveys as well as official statistics, the paper shows that the government only had very little access to verifiable and detailed information on the matter and relied largely on estimates. There were no coherent sources of information, and none were set up after the Act came into effect. The trend of a growing distribution and extent of corporate retirement plans from the late 1940s to the 1980s as seen in the government surveys is congruent with our findings. Furthermore, the Company Pension Act strengthened this already growing trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research on the long-term influence of ordoliberal and neoliberal ideas is hampered by an overly static and generalised picture of the Freiburg School. To address this gap, the paper analyses all articles published in ORDO, the flagship journal of the Freiburg School, between 1948 and 2014. This makes it possible to distinguish three phases of post-war ordoliberalism, to identify personal continuities and breaks, and to summarise thematic, methodological, and conceptual developments. Since the analysis utilises text mining methods, such as keyword identification and Topic Modeling, and validates the results of distant reading with close reading and external data, the paper also highlights some general methodological insights for using Digital Humanities in the historical sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ellsberg Paradox, discovered by Daniel Ellsberg, is an important paradox in economic theory that raises the question of how people estimate probabilities. It refers to the decision between red and black balls in an urn and shows that people who answer "red" to the first question and "black or yellow" to the second question contradict themselves. Daniel Ellsberg became known for the publication of the Pentagon Papers and was charged with espionage and treason, but the trial was declared flawed due to misconduct by the prosecution and the government. Ellsberg also showed that people violate the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives and that subjective probabilities cannot be added. The author of the article, George Szpiro, is a Swiss-Israeli journalist and author. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Issue 32(1)" in the Communications of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) covers various topics such as the DMV Student Conference 2024 in Ilmenau, the significance of mathematics in museums, job opportunities for mathematics graduates, and the name of the DMV. The president of the DMV emphasizes the need to attract more and younger members and to make greater efforts towards women and diversity. It also reports on the discussion about renaming the DMV, for which suggestions from members are being collected. The 2023 PISA study shows that the average mathematical and reading competencies of adolescents in many OECD countries have declined compared to the previous study in 2018. Scientific competence has also decreased. In Germany, the performance losses in all three areas are above average. The reasons for the deterioration are mainly attributed to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as language difficulties, interest, and motivation. The exhibition "From Newton to Einstein - a journey through space and time" was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam and is now on display in Tübingen. The award winner Carla Cederbaum has also developed other projects, such as a book on mathematical magic tricks and the publication series "Oberwolfach-Snapshots of Modern Mathematics". Mathematicians Carolin Mehlmann and Thomas Richter from the University of Magdeburg participated in an expedition of the Polarstern to the Arctic Ocean to calibrate a new hybrid sea ice model. The hybrid sea ice model combines particle and continuum methods to better resolve the different sea ice regimes on different local scales. The text deals with the deformation theorem in differential geometry. It is shown that a manifold with boundary possesses a metric with certain properties if the double of the manifold carries such a metric. The question of whether the converse of this statement holds is also raised. The text deals with hypothesis testing and the problem of multiple error probability. Various methods for solving this problem are presented, including the Bonferroni correction and the development of better methods taking into account the dependency structure of the tests. It also addresses pseudoline arrangements, which have connections to combinatorics, geometry, and computer science. The text deals with various mathematical topics, including sorting networks, pseudoline arrangements, Rubik's cube, the PISA study, calculating machines, student studies, Felix Klein, and international cooperation in mathematics. Various concepts and applications are explained, such as the creation of sorting networks from pseudoline arrangements, the use of Markov chains to generate random pseudoline arrangements, and the development of calculation aids and calculating machines. The importance of student studies and international cooperation in mathematics is also emphasized. The text provides an insight into various mathematical topics and their applications. The article reports on Renate Tobies, a visiting scientist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She studied chemistry and mathematics and obtained her habilitation in the history of mathematics and natural sciences. Tobies has taught in various German cities and in Austria and was the managing editor of NTM History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology, and Medicine. The article deals with a position paper by the professional societies DMV. [Extracted from the article]

The paper is an overview of the musicological research project „Towards a global history of music", which was carried out between 2013 and 2017 on the basis of a Balzan Prize for Musicology (2012), with the assistance of international music research institutes and their specialists. A main outcome of the project are three collective volumes of papers, published in 2018, 2019 and 2021, respectively. The project has viewed the variety of musical experiences around the world as a historical unfolding, to be explored via a „long path" through both geography and history. It has queried the enlightenment idea of a fundamental unity of all music (universalism), and the often fragile status of musical-cultural identities on the regional or national levels. It has sought to join methodologies of ethnomusicology and historical research, and has observed that the concepts of music and historiography themselves are less than universal. To the discourses of globalisation and modernisation, the project has added the alternative of transculturality, allowing for more neutral or participatory interpretations of cultural encounter. Summarising this research, tensions between nation and migration, regionalism and adaptation, ‚radial' and ‚imposed' globality are shown. The paper proposes to expand such studies into non-scientific practice and to find new institutional bases, which would benefit further global understanding and sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops out of a specific event. In 2020, the town of Münsingen in the Swabian Alps commissioned its authors to write a historical report on the Italian Fascist Monterosa Division, focusing on its function and role in the German occupation of Italy from 1944 to 1945. The issue to be clarified was the extent to which the division was involved in war crimes during this period. The background to the request was a monument erected in 1986 in the Ehrenhain, Münsingen's „grove of honour", by the division's veterans' association (Associazione degli appartenenti alla divisione Monterosa). This monument has since led to repeated controversy and heated debate over its Fascist symbolism and the division's involvement in anti-partisan warfare in Italy. Our paper focuses on the experience of officers in the Fascist regime, the division's operations against partisans and at the front, its crimes, and the attempts of the veterans' association in the post-war period to gain official recognition in both Germany and Italy. The Monterosa Mountain Division was created in 1943/1944 by Benito Mussolini's Repubblica sociale italiana (RSI) as one of four military divisions to join front-line combat with the German Army in Italy. Largely composed of young conscripts from Northern Italy, its older non-commissioned officers had extensive war experience from the Italian occupation of Greece and the Balkans, and from the Eastern Front. Its commander, General Mario Carloni, was a hardliner, an energetic, ruthless, and politicised Fascist officer who after the collapse of the Italian state in 1943 chose to continue fighting for Mussolini's side and to support the German occupation of Italy. German instructors trained the Monterosa Division in Münsingen. In late August 1944, it was sent to Italy and assigned to coastal defense duties on the east coast of Liguria, an area almost completely controlled by partisans. The division thus became involved in anti-partisan actions and began to take hostages, shoot civilians and prisoners of war, and destroy village houses. In 1951, a division association was founded, with former General Carloni as its honorary president. Until 2001, it tried in vain to gain recognition from the Associazione Nazionale Alpini (ANA), the most important veterans' and reservists' association of Italian mountain troops. In Germany, on the other hand, the former Monterosa soldiers found faster access to veterans' associations. The first visit by former division members to Münsingen took place as early as 1952. In the 1970s, these visits became increasingly regular and were given official sanction. During the 1980s, the division association's connections further expanded and ultimately resulted in the erection of a memorial to the fallen. In Germany, of all places, the RSI veterans received the recognition that was so difficult for them to obtain in their home country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a description and analysis of the clausal doubling construction, and contrasts it with predicate doubling based on their formal and verum-related properties. The study shows that the behavior of both patterns can be captured by extending the analysis of predicate doubling by Muñoz Pérez and Verdecchia (2022. Predicate doubling in Spanish: On how discourse may mimic syntactic movement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 40(4). 1159–1200). Basically, both doubling constructions have the same structure, with a contrastive topic in the left periphery; they differ, however, in the nature of the constituents carrying this function. The proposal derives from this single factor all formal and interpretative differences between the constructions. Moreover, the paper provides evidence to distinguish these phenomena from other verum-marking strategies in Spanish.

The Peace of Venice (1177), which ended the nearly twenty-year-long schism between Pope Alexander III and his opponents supported by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, has long been the subject of controversy among scholars, who focused initially on the concrete provisions of the treaty and more recently on the symbolic acts that affirmed it. This paper uses Alexandrian sources to concentrate on peace itself as the pope's most important political goal: the biography of Alexander written by his cardinal Boso, the frescoes in the Lateran Palace painted after the victory, and other statements made by the pope himself and his supporters reveal his primary goal to be the restoration of unity and peace. This thinking may have been rooted in the Christian ethic of peace as well as in the enduring ideal of cooperation between pope and emperor. It offers an explanation for the pope's willingness to compromise in Venice, often viewed with astonishment today, expressed through the choice of location, the staging, as well as personnel and material decisions. Alexander did not aim to supercede the emperor, nor to achieve victory on specific issues in detail; instead, his goal throughout the schism seems to have been a return to peace and cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wealth of source material produced by Roman notaries has long been neglected. Only in recent decades has it been systematically evaluated by researchers. Given the fragmentary source situation in general, these atti notarili add considerable detail to our knowledge of everyday life. They provide insights not only into the Rome of the popes, which has received considerable attention, but above all into the Rome of the Roman people, much less studied. This paper focuses not on another notary, but on the question of the potential contribution of this genre of sources to the history of late medieval Rome. We see how clients belonging to different social groups approach different notaries. We understand the typical concerns and problems of Roman society, ranging from the debtor imprisoned in a dungeon to the Colonna family in their palazzo. We find confident Florentines with their business dealings, German bakers and their partnership contracts, impoverished monasteries with their growing debts. We see the building boom of the Renaissance and how Piazza Navona is transformed from a campus into a platea, as well as rural Rome within the walls and its countless vineyards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys cover versions of Italian hits in Spanish and German. Using autoethnographic methods, it offers a retrospective examination of the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America and Germany, reflecting on the influence of Italian artists on the Latin American and German Schlager music scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper describes the developmental phases of the digital TestDaF and shows how the new task types and the digital test administration strengthen the relationship to the context of higher education institutions in Germany and to the CEFR. The contribution deals extensively with the test construct, the test format, and the different types of tasks used in the reading, listening, writing, and speaking sections. Innovative approaches and methods of performance assessment and scoring are discussed as much as their practical implementation. Finally, the paper presents some perspectives of future studies on the digital TestDaF and elaborates on relations to contemporary language testing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantics of zero-derivation/conversion has attracted renewed interest both as a subject of description and as a means towards refined descriptions of the process. This paper takes the latter stance and compares which semantic categories occur in zero-derivation/conversion and in overt affixation in two languages with a different morphological model: English and Spanish. For attestation and distribution of the semantic categories, the paper relies on a stratified sample of denominal verbs collected from two comparable corpora: the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. The sample consists in sets of ca. 50 denominal verb-forming resources, one per affixation process, namely affixation by -ate, -(i)fy, -ize/-ise, -en, en- in English, a-…-ar, en-…-ar, -ear, -ecer, -(i)ficar, -izar in Spanish, and zero-derivation/conversion in both languages. The results are contrasted within and across affixes/processes, within each language and across the two languages for the adequacy of a description as zero-derivation or as conversion. Statistical analysis shows that the process/affixes form a cline with overlaps and closer associations between specific affixes/processes and semantic categories, but no clear divide between zero-derivation/conversion and the rest of processes as far as the semantic categories are concerned.

New digital methods are currently enhancing the historian’s toolbox fundamentally. This thematic issue is a collection of papers discussing case studies in the fields of digitization, optical character recognition, distant reading, text mining, network analysis, and historical geographical information systems. The papers discuss opportunities and limitations in the application of digital methods in historical studies and point out fields of future applications.

The article "President's Greeting" reports on the position paper on equal opportunities and diversity of the German Mathematical Society (DMV). The DMV presidency emphasizes the importance of a diverse, respectful, and inclusive community. It is mentioned that the discussion about a possible renaming of the DMV has resurfaced, but no name change has taken place so far. The presidency has established a specialist group for gender, diversity, and sustainability in mathematics and proposes a participatory process to shape the discussion about the name of the DMV. Furthermore, reference is made to a paper adopted by various mathematical and scientific societies, condemning antidemocratic and nationalist approaches in Germany. It is emphasized that science requires openness, international cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. [Extracted from the article]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a disruptive technology is not only changing our everyday life and the business world, but also the way we learn and generate new knowledge. Such breakthrough disruptions by new technologies are also taking place in the fields of foreign language learning. The focus of this paper is on AI-based applications that have an impact on the writing skill. This paper is structured to guide from general concepts to concrete ones. In the first section, a short overview of the possible applications of artificial intelligence in foreign language teaching is given. The second section focuses on writing with the help of AI-based applications for text generation. In the third section didactical-methodical considerations are formulated for the use of AI-based applications for text generation in GFL teaching. The paper finishes with a reflection which outlines conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The announcements of the German Mathematical Association (DMV) publish various articles on mathematical topics in their first issue of the year 2023. It reports on the beauty of mathematical chalkboard images, for which photographer Jessica Wynne has photographed chalkboards of mathematicians worldwide. In addition, contributions to the Tilings Encyclopedia, the use of ChatGPT in higher education and school teaching, as well as mathematical science communication in the digital society are presented. The issue concludes with a joint position paper on combating the shortage of mathematics teachers. The text contains information about various events and awards in the field of mathematics. It points to a general meeting in Ilmenau, where there are opportunities for exchange. The Gauss Lectures and the StuKon, a student conference, are also recommended. The importance of annual conferences for the DMV and the shortage of mathematics teachers in school mathematics education are also discussed. In addition, the winners of the Breakthrough Prize and the New Horizons Prize, as well as the awarding of the Hector Science Prize and funding by the European Research Council, are mentioned. Valentin Blomer receives an ERC Advanced Grant of two million euros for his research on number-theoretical objects and automorphic forms. The project aims to achieve progress and solutions for three unsolved mathematical conjectures. Georg Oberdieck examines in his project "Correspondences in enumerative geometry: Hilbert schemes, K3 surfaces and modular forms" the enumerative geometry of algebraic surfaces, especially K3 surfaces. The project is supported by an ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros. The Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation celebrates its 10th anniversary with various events, including the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September. A group of mathematicians of Ukrainian origin is founding the International Center for Mathematics in Ukraine to promote top-level mathematics in the country. The competition "Jugend forscht" has begun, in which young researchers present their projects. A team of young researchers has developed a new warning device for lathes that indicates when a workpiece has been clamped incorrectly. This is one of many examples of the diversity of research projects in "Jugend forscht" and "Schüler experimentieren". The winners of the regional competitions qualify for the state competitions, which begin in March 2023. The national final of Jugend forscht will take place in Bremen in May 2023. The Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach invites doctoral students and postdocs to apply for seminars in 2023. These seminars are organized by leading experts in the respective field and are aimed at promising young scientists from all over the world. Lena Lattwein, a talented football player, also has exceptional mathematical abilities. She has completed her bachelor's degree in mathematical economics and is now focusing on her career as a professional football player. The entry in the Tilings Encyclopedia deals with the kite and dart Penrose tiling. These tilings are non-periodic but exhibit a high degree of global order. By suitable markings, the stones can generate exclusively non-periodic tilings. The tiling can be generated by projecting points of the five-dimensional lattice Z5 onto the plane. The Penrose tilings are connected to the discovery of quasicrystals and have led to a wave of research in the field. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Logbook Mathematics" deals with mathematical jokes and April Fools' jokes. It is mentioned that Martin Gardner made some April Fools' jokes in April 1975, such as the claim that the theory of relativity had been disproven. The number eπ√163 is now referred to as the Ramanujan constant. Robert J. Scherrer discusses in a paper the possibility that the values of π, e, γ, φ, and whole numbers could change over time. Other mathematical April Fools' jokes are also mentioned, such as a decomposition of the sphere into hexagons. There is a reference to an April Fools' joke about Fermat's conjecture, in which a well-known mathematician announced a counterproof. Another mathematician spread an April Fools' joke about the Riemann hypothesis through a mailing list. There is also a report about a fake article from Der Postillon, which claimed that German elementary school students do not master infinitesimal calculus. The Titanic and the NachDenkSeiten also published satirical articles about mathematical concepts and the Ukraine crisis. [Extracted from the article]

This paper focuses on the specifics of the general and business language training in the modern business services industry in Poland. The primary research objective is to determine the relevant characteristics of the outsourcing branch in the internal, general and professional training. These are relevant in terms of adapting, updating or modifying German as a foreign language-oriented teacher training in German Philology studies in Poland. Thus innovative, contemporary tailor-made didactic solutions, methods, means and techniques can be implemented, and graduates can be provided with more efficient professional language training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines the basics of data collection, analysis and visualization under the frame-based approach to lexical typology and illustrates its methodology using the data of cross-linguistic research on verbs of falling. The framework reveals several challenges to semantic map modelling that usually escape researchers’ attention. These are: (1) principles of establishing lexical comparative concepts; (2) the effective ways of visualization for the opposition between direct and figurative meanings of lexical items; (3) the problem of the borderlines between semantic fields, which seem to be very subtle. These problems are discussed in detail in the paper, as well as possible theoretical decisions and semantic modelling techniques that could overcome these bottlenecks.

Recent research in economic history has found that mortgage debt in relation to GDP has taken off in the historical long run (“great mortgaging”), as growing banking assets have been redirected into mortgage credit. This paper maps the parallel long-run investment history of private (life) insurance as the much overlooked second pillar of the financial system. Drawing on in-depth studies of the US and Germany, it finds that a “great de-mortgaging” took place in insurers’ portfolios, with mortgages falling from up to 90 percent in the 19th century to below 5 percent today in favor of fixed-income securities. A parallel shift to secondary mortgage bonds has hardly offset this decline, while direct real estate remained largely a residual investment class. Banks’ great mortgaging is thus partly an institutional substitution effect. The paper sees insurers’ asset shift itself as mainly driven by long-run changes in capital demand and competition with banks and pension funds. It extends these findings to other long-term institutional investors and other OECD countries in the historical long run.

Starting from the role of listening comprehension in foreign language teaching, this paper illustrates the importance of phonological competence in general and prosody in particular in facilitating the auditory decoding process. Subsequently, the new phonological control scale in the companion volume of the CEFR is presented, which, in contrast to the previous scale, also emphasises the suprasegmental aspects of language. These are crucial in the receptive phase to break down the flow of language into smaller units of meaning, which are easier to process in short-term memory and thus support the decoding process. Finally, micro listening exercises are shown, created with authentic material and designed to promote receptive prosodic competence in German as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is devoted to the influence of Italian culture on the Antitrinitarian movements that spread through Europe during the early modern period. One of the objectives is to go back to the period preceding the activities of Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, and to consider the influences of various trends in the Italian thought of the 15th and 16th centuries that made a crucial contribution to shaping Antitrinitarian ideas about Biblical exegesis, spirituality, baptism and the Trinity. Some papers also cover the phase following the international establishment of Socinianism. While for the first half of the sixteenth century there is a tendency to underestimate the Italian contribution to European Antitrinitarianism, the exact opposite is true for the period between the end of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The perception of Antitrinitarianism changes completely and, following the international affirmation of the Sozzini, is often mistakenly identified with Socinianism, taking the part for the whole (as is still often the case today on a historiographical level). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the research literature on the economic aspects of the "Sino-Soviet Alliance", which lasted from the end of the Chinese Civil war until the Sino-Soviet split (1949-1960/63). The Soviet and Eastern European contribution to China's industrialization, called the "largest technology transfer in human history" by some, still awaits detailed examination. This article aims to structure the field as well as inspire future research. The included studies range from on-the-ground microstudies of engineers at specific industrial construction projects to macro-perspectives on economic exchange, trade and governmental negotiations. In contrast to classical Cold War perspectives, which assume a primacy of (geo-)politics, the paper builds on more recent studies, arguing that economic rationales mattered in both the split and the forging of the alliance. The literature review suggests that the room for manoeuvre of actors beyond the Kremlin and party leaderships has to be measured anew, and that the impact of the alliance on Eastern Europe awaits further research. Finally, the influence of the West with its technologies and world markets becomes visible when these apparently exclusive East-East relations are examined more closely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing migration and mobility, German at the workplace has become an important topic in the field of German as a foreign Language/German as a second language. Vocational language skills can be measured with the help of various tests for the profession. The Goethe-Test PRO: German for professionals (GTP) is one of those tests that provides evidence of vocational language skills. This article first deals with the vocational orientation, the test format and the adaptive test procedure of the GTP. The second part of this paper is devoted to the description of its psychometric quality. Finally, the results are discussed with regard to the relevance of vocational tests for German as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of the societal differentiation of literacy, the paper investigates spelling variation in digital written communication beyond the binary paradigm of standard and nonstandard. To this end, the paper proposes a formal classification of digital spelling variants and then focuses on the socio-communicative functions of these variants in usage. Theoretically grounded in the notions of register and social indexicality, the paper discusses how spelling variants are metapragmatically ordered by social actors and deployed in text-messaging interactions in order to indicate interpretive context. To investigate these phenomena holistically, the paper furthermore presents a tripartite research framework that addresses digital writing regarding its I) structural variants, II) communicative practice, and III) reflexive awareness. Afterwards, this methodological approach is applied empirically. This is done based on a data set that includes samples of everyday literacy by 23 German adolescents: informal WhatsApp texting, on the one hand, formal school essays on the other. The exemplary analyses focus on phonostylistic spellings (e. g. elisions such as instead of ) and graphostylistic spellings (e. g. graphemic substitutions such as instead of ) in these WhatsApp interactions, reconstructing the metapragmatic status of standard orthography in digital writing. By combining structure-oriented, interactional, and ethnographic perspectives, the paper seeks a disciplinary dialogue by relating concepts of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology not only to research fields of media linguistics but also to research on writing systems.

This paper presents a method which we are developing to explore graphemic variation in large historical corpora of German. Historical corpora provide an amount of data at the level of graphemics which cannot be handled exhaustively using common methods of manual evaluation. To deal with this challenge, we apply methods from computational linguistics to pave the way for a broad-coverage graph(em)ic analysis of large historical corpora. In this paper, we show how our approach can be applied to the Reference Corpus of Middle High German. Illustrating our method and linguistic analysis, we present findings from our investigations into diatopic and/or diachronic variation as documented in 13th and 14th century charters (Urkunden) from the corpus.

In essence, typologies of writing systems seek to classify the world’s diverse writing systems in principled ways. However, against backdrops of early, misguided assumptions (Gelb 1969 [1952]) and stubborn term confusions, most proposals have focused primarily on the dominant levels of representational mapping (i. e., morphemic, syllabic, or phonemic), despite their shortcomings as idealizations (Joyce 2016, forthcoming; Joyce and Borgwaldt 2011; Meletis 2018). In advocating for exploring a more diverse range of criteria, either as alternatives or complementary factors, this paper outlines a promising framework for organizing typology criteria (Meletis 2018; 2020), which consists of three broad categories; namely, (a) linguistic fit, (b) processing fit and (c) sociocultural fit. Linguistic fit concerns the match between a language and its writing system and, thus, relates closely to the traditional criterion of representational mapping. Processing fit pertains to the physiological and cognitive aspects of a writing system, such as word spacing. Finally, sociocultural fit addresses the communicative and social functions of writing systems, such as implementing orthographic reforms. In singling out a particular parameter from each category, the paper illustrates its potential application as a typology criterion with cross-linguistic observations from the German (GWS) and the Japanese writing systems (JWS).

This paper will show that agreement cannot be considered a purely narrow-syntactic phenomenon, i.e., a phenomenon which cannot be given a functional-semantic explanation. It will show that person-number-gender (PNG-)affixes on verbs and adjectives are semantically interpretable even in languages such as English and Swedish, where they at first sight seem to be completely redundant. Several instances of so-called semantic agreement will reveal that these PNG-affixes convey important meanings not overtly marked by their co-referential DPs. In some cases, this even holds for the opposite case, i.e., that the PNG-affixes displaying grammatical agreement with their co-referential DPs also contribute with meanings not conveyed by the latter. Attempts to explain away semantic agreement by assuming there to be phonologically null determiners that give the DPs the same PNG-values as the agreement affixes will be refuted by data that show that the nouns often cannot be modified by such elements. Instead of being uninterpretable features that must be deleted before the derivation is sent to the semantic component, it will be shown that PNG-affixes on verbs and adjectives function like pronominal affixes, i.e., that they are arguments of the verbs and adjectives. They can either be anaphoric, in which case they can display semantic agreement, agreeing with the lexical semantics of the referent rather than with the PNG-values of the co-referential DP, or cataphoric, in which case they behave like formal-subject pronouns, signifying the PNG-value of the following logical DP subject.

This paper combines experimental, theoretical and quantitative approaches to syntactic microvariation. The empirical goal is to clarify the situation with respect to wh-doubling (also: wh-copying) in varieties of German and Dutch. With a large-scale survey in the German and Dutch language areas we sought to establish which speakers allow wh-doubling, which speakers allow right-complexity, i.e., configurations in which the lower copy of the wh-dependency is more complex that the higher one, and which speakers allow left-complexity, i.e., the reverse, with a more complex higher copy. We also wanted to know whether there are associations between these properties, to identify groups of speakers and dialects. We found three types of grammars: (i) a grammar that allows both wh-doubling and right- and left-complexity, (ii) a grammar that allows wh-doubling and has a strong preference for right-complexity over left-complexity, and (iii) a grammar that does not allow any wh-doubling configuration. This shows that there is a clear limit to variation in this domain. Grammars with a preference for left-complexity do not exist. We then point out the consequences of these findings for the copy theory of movement, and for analyses that enrich this theory with the option of partial deletion.

This paper aims to explain recent empirical findings on subjunctive II formation in the Bavarian dialects of Austria from both functional and formal perspectives. For this purpose, the explanatory power of the functional principles of natural morphology (NM) is compared with the formal framework of constructional morphology (CxM). It is argued that the two approaches complement each other. Thus, it is shown that the key concepts of NM (constructional iconicity, uniformity and transparency) can easily be adapted in terms of CxM. These adjustments are needed to explain the ongoing changes in subjunctive II formation in the Bavarian dialects of Austria. This is due to the well-documented shift towards the use of periphrastic constructions (with the täte- and würde-auxiliary) that are located at the interface between morphology and syntax.

By examining the horizontal and vertical, international knowledge and technology transfer of specific industrial water-treatment-technologies, this paper reflects on their interaction with beer production. Against the background of the discrepancy between the importance of narratives on naturalness and originality in relation to brewing water and the industrial mass production in its historicity, an insight into a largely invisible but nevertheless fundamentally important technology will be given.

The paper presents a study in which analytical and holistic ratings of participants' performances in the writing section of the digital TestDaF were investigated. It was investigated what influence the rating procedure has on the participants' results and to what extent the results of two different procedures are comparable. In the first study phase, performances were rated analytically by experienced raters, on each of six criteria using a 6-level grading scale. In the next phase, nine raters from the first (analytical) phase of the study applied the new (holistic) scale in assessing the same performances. In both (analytic and holistic) phases of assessment, differences in the quality of the ratings were examined according to both rating methods, and both inter-rater and intra-rater reliability were calculated separately for both rating methods. The analyses showed no significant differences between the rating methods in terms of rater behavior. However, the use of the holistic method tended to result in lower ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a competency- and needs-based approach to exam preparation. The influence of test objectives, format and task types on the creation of teaching materials is shown on the basis of the digital TestDaF. For this purpose, learning materials are described that are geared towards the development and training of communicative competencies. The aim is to go beyond pure format training in exam preparation and thus achieve positive washback effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real estate markets have been all but neglected by historical research. Following a workshop held in Bielefeld in September 2019, this volume seeks to contribute to a better understanding of their characteristics. The introduction starts out with a definition of some key concepts. It then summarizes the state of historical research and argues for a focus on the social and institutional embeddedness of real estate markets. The introduction also gives an outline of the individual papers and a brief summary of some overall findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The announcements of the German Mathematical Association (DMV) report on various topics, including the support of mathematicians from Ukraine. In collaboration with Mathematics Münster, the DMV is planning a long-term project to support mathematicians from Ukraine. Mathematical institutions and scientists in Germany are called upon to register on the website go.wwu.de/math-for-ukraine to provide scholarships and temporary positions. Mathematicians from Ukraine can submit their applications on the same website. The journal also contains articles on various mathematical topics and events. The text mentions various positions and elections in the DMV (German Mathematical Association). There are positions such as president, vice president, and secretary, which are elected by the board for 2 years, as well as two additional seats on the board, one of which is responsible for the DMV's website and is elected by all DMV members for 4 years. It is emphasized that all DMV members can make election proposals and that the board is obliged to nominate at least one candidate for each vacant position on the board. In addition, a call for nominations for the Hermann Minkowski Medal 2022 is made, which is awarded to mathematicians whose careers are still ahead of them. It is noted that the doctorate should not be more than twelve years old and that nominations can be submitted until May 1, 2022. Finally, a discussion contribution discusses the vision of contemporary mathematics education on the path to the Abitur (German high school diploma) and emphasizes that mathematics education should create more conceptual understanding. The Science Council has adopted recommendations for the transformation of scientific publishing towards open access. It is demanded that scientific publications be made immediately, permanently, at the original place of publication, and freely available under an open license. An information paper by the German Research Foundation describes possibilities for the digital tracking of scientific activities. Photographer Jessica Wynne has photographed blackboards of mathematicians from around the world who have developed ideas and solved problems. The images are to be published by a German publisher. The Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach calls for applications for workshops with networking and mentoring activities. The Student Conference (StuKon) will take place for the first time independent of the DMV Annual Meeting and is aimed at students and graduates of all mathematical degree programs. The calculator "HP-35" could celebrate its 50th anniversary this year. Criticism is expressed of the third-party funding system. The Young Academy has developed an online tool that compares the time required, success rate, and funding amounts. The digital math advent calendars from "Math in Life" and the Berlin Excellence Cluster MATH+ were very popular in December 2021 and had almost 200,000 participants, including over 175,000 students. The DMV 2021 Media Prize went to science journalist Thomas de Padova for his outstanding portrayal of mathematics in his publications. The journalist prize was awarded to Manon Bischoff and Aeneas Rooch. The article describes the book "Alles wird Zahl" by Thomas de Padova, which embeds scientific developments in their cultural and historical context. The book deals with the progress of mathematics in the 15th century. [Extracted from the article]

Mathematics professor Camillo De Lellis is awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani Prize in Mathematics for his contributions to solving the Euler equations and the regularity theory of minimal surfaces. The Science Council has adopted recommendations for the transformation of scientific publishing towards open access. An information paper describes possibilities for digitally tracking scientific activities. Photographer Jessica Wynne has photographed blackboards of mathematicians from around the world, which will be published as a book in a German publishing house in the fall. The MFO calls for applications for workshops with networking and mentoring activities to promote equal opportunities and diversity in mathematics. Various mathematical events and dates are mentioned, including lectures, conferences, and anniversaries. Additionally, the digital math advent calendars from "Math in Life" and the Berlin Excellence Cluster MATH+ are mentioned. [Extracted from the article]

Learning a musical instrument such as the flute requires the mastery of certain acquisitional steps. The same applies to the acquisition of German as a foreign or second language as widely demonstrated by second language acquisition research. The paper argues that it is inacceptable that the didactics of German as a foreign or second language has been consistently ignoring these findings in a way that also contradicts the CEFR the German translation of which, as shown, leaves much to be desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of video and audio recordings of spontaneous daily routines in early childhood education exemplifies and confirms already known strategies of pedagogical professionals in dealing with children's multilingualism. The strategies are evaluated from the perspective of linguistics and pedagogy. The documented interactions were transcribed, translated and analyzed in German and Turkish, whereby the paper breaks open the often stated black box kindergarten, at least linguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyzes recordings of lessons that had to be digitised at short notice due to the pandemic. The data is taken from German lessons at the B1+ level for refugees interested in studying, which took place with the help of the web conferencing tool Cisco Webex. The evaluation of the data focuses on the different views of the lessons on the participants' screens and the resulting didactic consequences, on the transition from silent to cooperative work and on how teachers react to learners' questions and mistakes. The analysis of a longer sequence also shows how the transition from working on a form-focused exercise to free discussions of topics relevant to the learners' proceeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verum focus has long been analysed as part of information structure, being accounted for within a theory of focus as generation of alternatives on a polarity value. Recently, however, this view has been challenged, with some authors arguing for a separation between verum and focus. The empirical debate focuses on two types of strategies: either verum is marked identically to focus (e.g., pitch accent in German, English) or through a dedicated strategy (e.g., dedicated markers in Gitksan, Bura, South Marghi). On the basis of the second type, it has been argued that the link between focus and verum is only superficial, with verum instead arising from a lexical operator VERUM. In this paper, we provide evidence in support of the traditional link between truth marking and focus, using original field data on the morphosyntactic expression of information structure in 11 Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages. By working from function to form, we show that these languages use a variety of grammatical strategies for truth expression, strategies that are used elsewhere in the information structural system for backgrounding. In this way, verum is not directly marked by focal accent but marked indirectly via backgrounding, which we formulate as the Backgrounding and Underspecification Thesis (BUT). On the basis of this Bantu evidence, we add a third type of strategy to the typology, where verum is marked indirectly via backgrounding. We use this updated typology to argue in favour of maintaining a conceptual link between verum, polarity focus, and predicated-centred focus more broadly.

Two types of analyses of verum can be distinguished: either it is decomposed into focus and a focused verum element or it is a single, non-decomposable specialized lexical element which operates on discourse conditions. This paper argues for the former by investigating adverbs like tatsächlich, echt, wirklich in German that overtly realize a truth related predicate by illustrating the parallel between verb-verum and these adverbs for which their lexical contribution and the contribution of focus can be distinguished. It is shown, however, that this predicate does not encode polarity but factuality, which is analyzed in terms of a modal object. The syntactic location is determined to be between polarity and speaker-oriented categories. Other effects regarding commitment and evidentiality come as a by-product of highlighting factuality.

In this paper we investigate how verum is realized in Xhosa and Zulu, two Southern Bantu languages belonging to the Nguni group. The data for our study were collected through interviews with native speakers who were prompted to produce sentences in discourse contexts that typically license utterances with verum. We found that the main grammatical strategy for the expression of verum in Xhosa and Zulu involves the removal of phrasal constituents from the focus domain (the VP). This leaves the verb as the sole remaining focus host, and allows auxiliary features of the verb, such as polarity, to be marked as focus. Consequently, we analyse verum in Xhosa and Zulu as polarity focus, which is expressed indirectly, via the backgrounding of potentially focusable phrasal material. We also examined the prosodic properties of verum utterances in Xhosa. Based on findings from previous studies on Nguni intonation, we expected to observe lengthening of the penultimate vowels of phrase-final verbs and utterance-final words in our data. However, contrary to expectation, we did not find evidence of penultimate vowel lengthening in Xhosa sentences with verum, a (preliminary) result which suggests that the expression of verum may have an effect on prosody in Nguni languages.

For most Quechuan languages, the discourse enclitic =mi has been described as a (contrastive) focus marker and/or as a marker of direct evidentiality. In this paper, I argue that these claims do not seem to apply to Conchucos Quechua (Ancash, Peru). To challenge the association between =mi and focus, I offer a quantitative analysis that strongly suggests that this connection is not categorical in nature. To contest the association between =mi and direct evidentiality, I offer a qualitative analysis based on a question-under-discussion (QUD) model of discourse structure, using naturalistic data. I will argue that this enclitic is better characterised as an assertion operator, whose function is to bring closure to the current QUD (be it explicit or implicit). In this sense, the use of =mi is reminiscent of what has been called verum in the literature, and I thus explore how this characterisation fits within this discussion.