Hesitations and repair in German

The occurrence of pauses and hesitations in spontaneous speech has been shown to occur systematically, for example, "between sentences, after discourse markers and conjunctions and before accented content words." (Hansson [15]) This is certainly plausible in English, where pauses and hesitations can and often do occur before content words such as nominals, for example, "uh, there's a … man." (Chafe [8]) However, if hesitations are, in fact, evidence of "deciding what to talk about next," (Chafe [8]) then the complex grammatical system of German should render this pausing position precarious, since pre-modifiers must account for the gender of the nominals they modify.In this paper, I present data to test the hypothesis that pre-nominal hesitation patterns in German are dissimilar to those in English. Hesitations in German will be shown, in fact, to occur within noun phrase units. Nevertheless, native speakers most often succeed in supplying a nominal which conforms to the gender indicated by the determiner or pre-modifier. Corrections, or repairs, of infelicitous pre-modifiers indicate that the speaker was unable to supply a nominal of the same gender which the choice of pre-modifier had committed him/her to. The frequency of such repairs is shown to vary according to task, with fewest repairs occurring in elicited speech which allows for linguistic freedom and therefore is most like spontaneous speech. The data sets indicate that among German native speakers, hesitations occurring before noun phrase units (pre-NPU hesitations) indicate deliberation of what to say, while hesitations within or before the head of the noun phrase (pre-NPH hesitations) indicate deliberation of how to say what has already been decided (cf. Chafe [8]).

About Collaboration, Interaction, and the Negotiation of Meaning in Synchronous Written Chats in L2-German

Open Access

”Metcha suki ya nen” : A sociolinguistic attitude survey concerning the Kansai dialect

西日本にある関西弁はたくさん色々な形で標準語と異なる。関西弁は１９７０年代の後に、全国で人気を得た。この社会言語学の研究の目的は現在の関西弁に対する感情を調査することである。これは関西弁の話し手ではなくて日本語の母語話者に配ったアンケートで調査された。質的また量的な分析である。結果は一般的に関西弁に好意的であったが、人気がある理由もいろいろあり、それらをさぐるために歴史的なそして文化的な見方を通して議論する。

What do they expect? : A case study on the work expectations of the working German Generation Y

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the expectations of the workingGerman Generation Y regarding its current work and employer. As a result, the mainelements which could be considered by companies to retain the Generation Y inGermany will be pointed out and discussed.Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews were used in order toexplore the work expectations of this young generation within a German company. Anon-probability and purposive sample was used and six respondents part of theGeneration Y and working in the same company were interviewed. Furthermore, aseventh interview was conducted with the HMR of the company.Findings – Several findings are consistent with previous results of Gen Y from othernationalities than Germany such as the importance of varied tasks, opportunities forself-development, responsibilities and a pleasant working atmosphere. However,differences were found in particular regarding the importance of the work-life balanceand new expectations such as trust, autonomy and internationality have been broughtto light. Furthermore, several findings are also consistent with other studies aboutemployee retention, commitment and job satisfaction.Originality/value – This research extended previous studies of the expectations of theGeneration Y by providing firstly findings for Germany, a country where such studieshave not been conducted yet and secondly by focusing on the Generation Y who isalready working and therefore not studying anymore.