Dieser Artikel gibt einen Überblick über Analysen und Ergebnisse zur Satzprosodie des Deutschen aus der Sicht des Autors. Dabei stehen die zumeist diskutierten Deklarativsätze im Zentrum der Diskussion. In Abschnitt 1 werden zunächst unterschiedliche Analysen verglichen und es wird eine angenommen, welche u.a. einen Baustein aus den Arbeiten des Autors verwendet. Abschnitt 2 thematisiert die Interaktion mit unterschiedlichen bekannten Faktoren wie kontextuelle Gegebenheit, W-Bewegung, V-nach-C-Bewegung, Topiks und Scrambling. Abschnitt 3 stellt die Analyse des Deutschen kurz in den Kontext einer Analyse des Englischen. Abschnitt 4 bettet die Analyse in die Theorie der Prosodischen Phonologie ein. Andere neuere Vorschläge werden in Abschnitt 5 diskutiert. Abschnitt 6 umfasst abschließende Bemerkungen und eine Zusammenfassung.

The German language confronts users with a lot of normative and binding orthographic conventions (Amtliche Regeln). These rules have significant value in the language community both in official contexts and in everyday speech. Our subject in the present article is the actual use of the rules, especially with regard to indefinite questions and aspects (,Zweifelsfälle‘), and how far they are firmly established in the user’s language awareness. Therefore, in the present study teacher trainees (subject: German) have been asked to answer 16 multiple choice questions that referred as examples to several orthographical aspects that allow only one or two or rather more spelling suggestions. In the context of our analysis it was investigated whether the students’ choices were equivalent to the current official regulations. In addition to that the students have been asked to name the references, e.g. dictionaries (digital and print) they use in the case of spelling questions and ambiguous orthographic conventions. Deviating from the official regulations (Amtliche Regeln) the suggestions of the Duden have considerable influence on the user’s behavior about uncertainty in spelling questions.

This paper investigates what speakers of Texas German, a critically endangered dialect spoken for more than 150 years, think about their dialect and how this influences their linguistic choices. Based on data collected by the Texas German Dialect Project (www.tgdp.org), we discuss the attitudes that Texas German speakers have towards their dialect, their identity, and the on-going changes in their speech community. We show that almost all Texas German speakers are proud of their history, culture, and dialect, but that even though they identify as Texas Germans, they are in the process of switching to English as a result of socio-political and economic developments. Our results demonstrate that the survival of heritage languages is problematic even in cases in which the overwhelming majority of speakers have a positive image of their language.

Uhl, Benjamin (2015): Tempus – Narration – Medialität. Eine Studie über die Entwicklung schriftlicher Erzählfähigkeit an der Schnittstelle zwischen Grammatik und Schreiben. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren.