This paper deals with autonomous uses of German subordinate wh-interrogatives as headlines, so-called wh-headlines (e.g. Was Kinder brauchen, ‘What children need’), which we approach from a discourse-pragmatic and diachronic perspective. We take our starting point in the QUD-based,… read more
The paper provides a pragmatic analysis of utterances containing the syllable triple bla, bla, bla in German. In uttering bla, bla, bla, speakers may convey a derogatory stance towards someone else’s utterance. The question is addressed how this pejorative meaning aspect should be modeled in terms… read more
In this paper, I investigate the German N hin, N her (‘N thither, N hither’) construction. I first provide a close description of its syntactic and semantic properties, arguing that N hin, N her is a grammatical construction. I then show that this construction is not entirely idiosyncratic, as… read more
In this contribution, I look at context from the view of idiomatic utterances. Thereby, I adopt the view that context is a dynamic construct actively created by discourse participants, where the utterance itself is an important contextual resource. Against this background, I develop the claim that… read more
Linguistic evaluation has become an important area of inquiry in recent years. In the traditions of, e.g., lexical semantics, phraseology, corpus linguistics, and interactional linguistics, a large inventory of linguistic means have been identified by which speakers can express evaluative meanings.… read more