Teaching and studying

The lecture provides an overview of the grammatical system of contemporary German. It deals with central categories and structures such as parts of speech, phrases and clauses. In addition, the usage and functioning of grammatical patterns in different contexts (e.g. texts and conversations) are discussed. The lecture also introduces basic grammar models such as valency and construction grammar.

The seminar offers an introduction to the morphology of German and its interfaces with neighboring subdisciplines. The word will be examined from various perspectives (morphological, syntactic, semantic-lexical, etc.). Both linguistic-systematic questions and language-use-related approaches to morphological patterns are considered, for example with regard to their functions in texts, conversations and discourses.

Construction grammar approaches emerged on the west coast of the USA in the 1980s and 1990s as an alternative to generative grammar. They are based on the assumption that a language can be described as a network of conventionalized form-meaning pairs, so-called constructions. This seminar focuses on usage-based and cognitive-linguistically motivated approaches to construction grammar. Students will not only become familiar with central concepts of construction grammar (e.g. coercion, entrenchment, lexicon grammar continuum), but will also gain an insight into the corpus linguistic analysis of grammatical constructions in contemporary German.

German is often described as the language of word formation par excellence. One of the reasons for this is the wide range of structural possibilities that are used to form new words(butter-weich,be-raten, [der] Abwasch, DFB, Wusiala). The seminar focuses on the use of word formation in written and oral communication. Students will learn how word formation is involved in the constitution of texts and conversations as well as the shaping of text and conversation types, which mental processes take place during the reception of word formations, to what extent word formation represents a resource in social interaction and what influence conditions of communicative proximity and distance have on the distribution and use of word formations.