It has long been taken for granted that the use of sentence internal capitalization in German is bound to a certain part of speech: Nouns are graphematically marked with an initial capital letter. As opposed to this lexical approach, recent linguistic analyses of sentence internal capitalization argue for a syntactic approach: The main function of capitalization consists of marking a certain position in syntax, namely the head of the NP. In this paper we argue that a simple Optimality Theoretic implementation of the syntactic approach does not only cover the core cases of capitalization in German, but also more peripheral examples. We show that even for peripheral cases only modest modifications are necessary since the syntactic input provides all information relevant for sentence internal capitalization. In addition, we discuss (i) extensions of our theory to account for other cases of capitalization in German, (ii) the interfaces between our analysis and other modules of the graphematic system, (iii) the concept of graphematic grammaticalization, and (iv) a didactic implementation of our syntactic analysis.

The present study investigates the acceptance of diverse person denotations in legal language. Several groups of recipients were tested with an original official text: 1. law professionals (N = 49), 2. people of age 60+ years (N = 46) and 3. people without academic educational degrees (N = 53). In an online study participants were presented with a cloze task. They were asked to fill in the gaps by selecting person denotations from a list of alternatives provided in pull down menues. These alternatives were generic masculine forms (e. g. der Wähler, i. e. the voter), gender neutral forms (e. g. die Wahlberechtigten, i. e. persons entitled to vote) and forms that comprised both masculine and feminine (e. g. der Wähler bzw. die Wählerin, i. e. the male or female voter). Afterwards, participants rated the text they had created for comprehensibility and gender-fairness. Results suggest a wide acceptance of gender-neutral role nouns across all samples. These forms also meet the criteria of comprehensibility and gender-fairness for official language. Options for creative, that is flexible and context dependent use of diverse denotations are discussed based on the present findings.

Recent linguistic research suggests that reliable acoustic cues underlie the rhythmic classification: stress versus syllable timing. We utilized the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) to examine the rhythmic patterns of six monolingual (3 German; 3 Spanish) and six bilingual German-Spanish children (3 growing up in Germany; 3 growing up in Spain), aged 3;0 years. Our aim was to determine whether the rhythmic patterns (stress- vs syllable-timing) of German and Spanish could be distinguished in the speech of three-year-old children, and whether bilingual children differed from monolingual children in this respect. Results indicated that the PVIs of monolingual German and Spanish children were significantly different from each other; however, bilingual children displayed similar rhythmic patterns in both languages, tending towards less vocalic variability in German and greater consonantal variability in Spanish than the monolinguals. These findings show that child production reflects the prosody—here rhythm— of their target language at a very early age, and are consistent with “phonetic compromise” in the bilingual development of the acoustic patterns that underlie rhythm.