The series Studia Linguistica Germanica, founded in 1968 by Ludwig Erich Schmitt and Stefan Sonderegger, is one of the standard publication organs for German Linguistics. The series aims to cover the whole spectrum of the subject, while concentrating on questions relating to language history and the history of linguistic ideas. It includes works on the historical grammar and semantics of German, on the relationship of language and culture, on the history of language theory, on dialectology, on lexicology / lexicography, text linguisticsand on the location of German in the European linguistic context.

Provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: HS Understanding English-German Contrasts, language: English, abstract: Since pronouns are the main grammatical devices by which acts of speaking are tied to the persons who are engaged in the conversation, many linguists investigate how pronouns are employed as a means of coming to understand the ways that speech and society are related. The expression ‘central pronouns’ for personal , reflexive and possessive pronouns suggests that these subclasses have a number of features in common and that other, more peripheral pronominal subclasses can be characterized by properties not shared by all members. It appears that the class of pronouns is conceptualized by Quirk et al. and other authors as something like a ‘cluster’ or ‘radial category’ with a prototypical core represented by personal pronouns. With regard to their referential functions, those pronouns are traditionally described in terms of deixis and anaphora. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the pronominal systems of English, German and Russian and to compare them. The special focus of comparison is the reflexive pronouns due to their complexity and in some aspects controversy.

English self-forms and related words from other Germanic languages (e.g. Dutch zelf, Swedish själv, etc.) are used in two different functions: as ‘intensifiers’ (e.g. The president himself made the decision) and as markers of reflexivity (John criticized himself). On the basis of a comparative syntactic and semantic analysis, this book addresses the question of why two such apparently different functions can be expressed by the same word. This question is answered by showing that both intensifying and reflexive self-forms can be analysed as expressing the concept of ‘identity’. In the first part of The Grammar of Identity, the most central facts concerning the distribution of intensifiers in Germanic languages are surveyed and a detailed syntactic and semantic analysis is provided. It is shown that all instances of intensifiers can be analysed as expressions of an identity function. The second part of the book offers an analysis of reflexive self-forms which is based on recent theories of reflexivity, modifying these in some important respects. In particular, the distribution of reflexive self-forms is explained with reference to semantic properties of the sentential environment. In this way, it can be shown that reflexive self-forms – like intensifiers – can be analysed as expressions of an identity function. In addition to providing a thorough comparative description of the hitherto poorly described area of intensifiers in Germanic languages, this book offers an answer to a long standing question in descriptive and theoretical linguistics, namely why self-forms are used in two apparently different functions. By combining analytical methods from syntax, lexical semantics and sentence semantics the study moreover contributes to an understanding of the interaction between structure, meaning and context in a central area of lexico-grammar.