Following the rationale that corpora have an important part to play in fostering language awareness, this monograph investigates the use of spoken corpora in the teaching of German as a foreign language. Corpus-based research has had an increasing influence on language teaching pedagogy, with regard to linguistic content as well as to teaching methodology. While the majority of studies reporting on corpus-based teaching approaches refer to English, only a small number of studies have discussed such an approach for German. In this study, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching materials which facilitate the comprehension of German modal particles, which pose numerous problems for learners of German as a foreign language. The approach is twofold: first, the frequency of those word forms which may function as modal particles is established. Secondly, concordance data of the more frequently occurring particles are analysed qualitatively. Teaching materials based on these analyses are developed referring to patterns of use which can be relayed to language learners in order to provide them with tools for the decoding of particle meaning.

This volume depicts the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influences in the specific context of multilingual language acquisition. It consists of articles on various issues relating to the syntactic and lexical development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such as Russian, Croatian, Greek and Portuguese. Individual chapters highlight different areas expected to be especially transfer-prone at the level of grammatical and lexical transfer in particular contexts of language contact.

This volume, composed mainly of papers given at the 1999 conferences of the Forum for German Language Studies (FGLS) at Kent and the Conference of University Teachers of German (CUTG) at Keele, is devoted to differential yet synergetic treatments of the German language. It includes corpus-lexicographical, computational, rigorously phonological, historical/dialectal, comparative, semiotic, acquisitional and pedagogical contributions. In all, a variety of approaches from the rigorously 'pure' and formal to the applied, often feeding off each other to focus on various aspects of the German language.

Discourse markers and modal particles are fuzzy linguistic categories that are difficult to describe. The contributions in this volume go beyond this statement. They discuss the intersection between modal particles and discourse markers and examine whether or not it is possible to draw a line between these two types of linguistic expressions. On the basis of new synchronic and diachronic data, from speech and writing, from European and Asian languages or cross-linguistically, the authors answer the question whether discourse markers and modal particles are distinct categories, whether they form a cline, or whether modal particles are a subcategory of discourse markers. This common question shows up throughout all chapters, which makes the book to a coherent whole. By disentangling the complexity of categorizing multifunctional expressions, this book also sheds new light on the processes of meaning extension. The traditional discourse and modal functions are complemented by interactional and textual ones. A must read for functional linguists.

Corpus Applications in Language Teaching and Research: The Case of Data-Driven Learning of German provides a historical overview of corpus applications in language teaching with a focus on German. The book identifies challenges in using corpus applications and data-driven learning (DDL) research for Languages Other Than English (LOTEs) and addresses these challenges through various approaches. Overall, this book: surveys corpus applications for teaching and learning German, highlighting the growth of the L2 German DDL field and identifying trends in integrating DDL into pedagogical practice; presents empirical research on the effectiveness of DDL applications for teaching and learning German in comparison with research on English and other LOTEs, emphasizing the need for expanding the scope of DDL research to include more languages, skills, and study types; compares teaching interventions for L2 collocations in the fields of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) and DDL, highlighting methodological differences between the two paradigms and proposing a combined ISLA/DDL framework to bridge the disconnect; showcases a successful DDL intervention that resulted in significant learning gains in German collocation knowledge, filling a gap in DDL research; proposes an Open Educational Resource (OER) for teaching and learning German, incorporating open access corpora, learner-fit criteria, new tools and technology, and usage-based learning principles; examines the current difficulties encountered by the DDL field and highlights potential directions for future research and pedagogical approaches. This book offers insights and resources for researchers, language teaching practitioners, and students interested in corpus-based learning and teaching methods. While the focus is on teaching German to English-speaking students, the book's findings have broader applicability to language teaching and learning in different contexts.

This study investigates the properties of a set of Italian adverbs (among others: pure ‘also’, solo ‘only’, un po’ ‘a bit’) that, in specific contexts of use, modify the speech acts in which they appear. On the one hand, these elements specify the way in which a speech act should be interpreted with reference to the specific interactional context, modifying its illocutionary force. On the other hand, they index presupposed/inferred meanings active in the common ground of the interaction, integrating the speech act in the common ground. These functions closely resemble those of the elements that, especially in the German linguistic tradition, are called modal particles. Drawing on original data from Italian – both from the standard language and regional varieties – the goal of the study is to describe the synchronic features of these elements and to explain the emergence of the modal uses. For this purpose, it jointly employs theoretical notions of pragmatics (speech act theory, inferences in interaction), models of language change (reanalysis and conventionalization) and the descriptive tools of sociolinguistic approaches. Through the presentation of four case studies, integrating corpus and questionnaire data, the present work gives a thorough analysis of the modal functions and the contexts of use of the adverbs under investigation: it explores their role at the semantics/pragmatics interface, it discusses their place in a layered model of grammar and it examines their distribution across different language varieties.

Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

In recent years, corpora have found their way into language instruction, albeit often indirectly, through their role in syllabus and course design and in the production of teaching materials and other resources. An alternative and more innovative use is for teachers and students alike to explore corpus data directly as part of the learning process. This volume addresses this latter application of corpora by providing research insights firmly based in the classroom context and reporting on several state-of-the-art projects around the world where learners have direct access to corpus resources and tools and utilize them to improve their control of the language systems and skills or their professional expertise as translators. Its aim is to present recent advances in data-driven learning, addressing issues involving different types of corpora, for different learner profiles, in different ways for different purposes, and using a variety of different research methodologies and perspectives.

Long trusted as the most comprehensive, up-to-date and user-friendly grammar available, HAMMER'S GERMAN GRAMMAR AND USAGE provides you with a complete guide to German as it is written and spoken today. This new edition includes: -concise descriptions of the main grammatical phenomena of German and their use -examples of grammar taken from contemporary German, helping you to understand the underlying grammatical principles more quickly -invaluable guidance on pronuciation and the German accent -discussion of new words from English roots such as 'zertweeten' ('to tweet'), helping you to communicate in German as used by Germans today -clarification on the spelling reform and current spellings of German, thus increasing your confidence while writing and reading in German. Praised for its clear layout and lucid explanations, this new edition distinguishes the most common forms of usage, both formal and informal, and offers you a combination of reference grammar and manual of current usage that you will find invaluable, whether a student or a teacher, at intermediate or advanced level.