Quality criteria and evaluation: a measuring instrument for the German language area

The University Network on Social Responsibility is a network of more than 40 universities in Germany and Austria established in 2009 that want to realise and expand their social responsibility by systematically promoting the civil society engagement of students, teachers, and other members of higher education, linking this with their educational mission and thus actively influencing society and contributing to the mutual transfer of knowledge. This can be done through the teaching-learning format of service learning (SL). In 2018, a workshop initiated a discussion between representatives of academia and civil society. The focus was the aspect of quality of SL. The group came up with ten different criteria which provide a frame of reference for the different manifestations of SL in the community. Based on these criteria, suitable procedures and instruments were developed to provide SL actors with orientation and suggestions for the implementation and evaluation of SL projects.

Akadémiai etika és integritás – gondolatok egy új egyetemi tantárgy margójára

Academic Ethics and Integrity – Thoughts on a New University Course. The study discusses the origin and the necessity for the subject Academic Ethics and Integrity by presenting the highlights of professional discourses of the Hungarian and Romanian language area. The cited literature shows that in the last decades’ research ethics and integrity have been breached in many ways. The crisis management strategy involves the enactment of a law that introduces Academic Ethics and Integrity as a compulsory university subject. The present study delineates the topics related to the subject (e.g. questions regarding the integrity of researcher/teacher and publishing activity; legal documents, presentation of the organizations), but the most important scope was to adjust the topics of the subject to the particular situation of the faculties of theology. Thus, the new compulsory subject offers freedom to raise awareness about the meaning of theology and its role in society and academic setting. Lastly, it is argued that the subject gives excellent space for debating and construing questions of intellectuality in the 21st century. Keywords: academic ethics, integrity, intellectuality, research ethics in theology, ALLEA code

De verbeelding van moeras en veen

The Representation of Marsh and Bog: Figurations of the Marshy Soil as a Topos of Community in Contemporary German-Language Belgian Literature Literature from border regions is often characterised by a specific transcultural poetics that reflects the liminal as discourse and experience. In contemporary German-language prose from East Belgium (‘Ostbelgien’), the topological representation of swamp and moor occupies an important place. We will show how swamp and moor express the complex definition of national and regional identity of the German-language area in Belgium and become relevant topoi in regard to cultural memory. Literature can be seen as a privileged medium of criticism for expressing the pressures of the unspoken and the closed and for initiating intra-community public discussions. Through a cultural-historical analysis of the various figurations of bog and moor, we will examine how the relationship between landscape and community is represented and conceived in contemporary Germanophone Belgian literature.

A synchronic and diachronic computer corpus of Makarska littoral dialects (Croatia)

This paper presents a synchronic and diachronic computer corpus of Makarska littoral dialects. This corpus was created as part of the project to explore the ikavian neoštokavian dialects of the narrow coastal area in Croatian region of Dalmatia around the town of Makarska. The dialectological characteristics of the dialects studied are briefly presented first, followed by presentation of the digital system. The system is logically organized in first part as a corpus of literary texts created from 1729 to 1803 and digitally processed, and in the second part from the materials collected through dialectological questionnaires prepared and methodologically adapted as part of the creation of the Croatian Linguistic Atlas. Methods of collecting linguistic data, method of input into the digital form and methods and possibilities of data processing will be explained. Based on the input and search strategies within the system, the examples will prove the origin of the dialects of the Makarska littoral to be that of the ikavian neoštokavian dialect described in the dialectological literature. This computer-based principle of work is a novelty in Croatian dialectology which has not been digitally processed so far and offers a basis for future dialectological research. This platform can be used in order to shorten the time of data processing and to analyse them more systematically and more efficiently. So far, there has been no such digital repository for any Croatian speech. This project represents a thorough synchronic and diachronic study of one rounded language area.

Mastering Prepositions in English: Explicit versus Implicit Instruction

Prepositions form a hurdle for several EFL learners, Arabs in particular. One major catalyst is that the preposition systems in English and Arabic rarely correspond to one another. Most scholars who researched this area concentrated on the problem itself, rather than finding a successful remedy that can empower these students to masterfully handle such a thorny area. This study is novel inasmuch as it concerns itself with finding means of facilitating this language area for Arab learners. It reveals the effectiveness of using translation to teach English prepositions to these learners. The research question of this study is: do students who have received explicit tuition and adequate practice on the use of English prepositions in translated texts naturally perform better using such grammatical items in subsequently translated texts than those who have not been instructed on such exemplars in similar language contexts? Sixty students at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait participated in the field experiment. The study paradigm had a pre-test/post-test protocol. While the pre-test included four fill-in-the-gap exercises, the post-test contained three Arabic passages which participants were required to translate into English. The findings showed that teaching prepositions explicitly in translated texts is a viable technique for EFL learners’ mastery of such grammatical items. This has implications for EFL specialists and syllabus designers.

Identität und Sprache des Migranten in der Fremde im Werk von Franco Biondi

Seen from the point of view of literary-sociological studies, Franco Biondi’s works are part of the migrant and foreign literatures which emerged in Germany in the wake of the recruitment of foreign labour starting in the 1950s. This literature – written by authors who are not Germans in the sense of the old German nationality and citizenship legislation, but who live in Germany and have their works published in the German language area – was formerly called ‘guest-worker literature’. Then, in the 1980s, it was referred to as a literature of ‘shock and stunned silence’, and in the 1990s as ‘migrant literature’ or ‘literature of foreign parts’. The theme in Biondi ’s works is the break with origin and the process of ‘coming-to-language’ of the identity that is forming through the medium of language in the encounter with the foreign. Immigration for Biondi becomes immigration into a new language.

Ein Austriazismus auf Erfolgskurs – geben als Basisverb der ziel-orientierten Objektsbewegung

The article focuses on the German verb geben (lit. ‘to give’) functioning as a put verb, i. e. a basic verb of goal-oriented placement. While German has been classified as a put-less language in previous research, initial studies on the German language in Austria show that geben seems to be spreading increasingly as a basic put verb, starting from the language area of Vienna. The research desiderata of this thus far overlooked phenomenon include empirically substantiated findings on its areal-horizontal and vertical-social distribution in contemporary German. In order to close this research gap, the article draws on data from a survey throughout Austria. Therein, two different registers of the dialect/standardaxis of each participant were accessed in order to assess intra-individual variation on the lexical level.

Cross-linguistic constraints and lineage-specific developments in the semantics of cutting and breaking in Japonic and Germanic

Semantic variation in the cutting and breaking domain has been shown to be constrained across languages in a previous typological study, but it was unclear whether Japanese was an outlier in this domain. Here we revisit cutting and breaking in the Japonic language area by collecting new naming data for 40 videoclips depicting cutting and breaking events in Standard Japanese, the highly divergent Tohoku dialects, as well as four related Ryukyuan languages (Amami, Okinawa, Miyako and Yaeyama). We find that the Japonic languages recapitulate the same semantic dimensions attested in the previous typological study, confirming that semantic variation in the domain of cutting and breaking is indeed cross-linguistically constrained. We then compare our new Japonic data to previously collected Germanic data and find that, in general, related languages resemble each other more than unrelated languages, and that the Japonic languages resemble each other more than the Germanic languages do. Nevertheless, English resembles all of the Japonic languages more than it resembles Swedish. Together, these findings show that the rate and extent of semantic change can differ between language families, indicating the existence of lineage-specific developments on top of universal cross-linguistic constraints.

On the Concept of an Anatolian-Greek Language Area

This paper aims at presenting some thoughts on the hypothesis of an Anatolian-Greek language area in the second millennium bc comparing different approaches both in the theoretical frames and in the analysis of the linguistic facts. For this purpose, it is necessary to introduce some terminological premises, followed by a selection of methodological issues, which will help explore the putative features that characterize the Anatolian-Greek area (morphological traits such as actionality markers, particles, verbal prefixes as well as special morphological forms; morphosyntactic traits, such as modal particles, sentence particles, absolute participial constructions; lexical units and phonetic features).