Wilhelm Grießhaber
Die relationierende Prozedur
Zu Grammatik und Pragmatik lokaler Präpositionen und ihrer Verwendung durch türkische Deutschlerner
1999, Mehrsprachigkeit / Multilingualism, Band 5, 304 Seiten, E-Book (PDF), 26,90 €, ISBN 978-3-8309-5711-9
Summary
This book examines the way in which young Turkish children (4th graders) use German locative prepositions in written texts. With respect to the great typological distance between German and Turkish the first two chapters discuss and evaluate a wide range of syntactical and semantical approaches to the description of locative prepositions including traditional formats as well as UG or prototype theories. Special emphasis is laid on the relation between typological models of reality, perception of reality ('perception space') and the use of prepositions. The discussion leads to a new approach to the description of prepositions based on the works of Ehlich and Rehbein on Functional Pragmatics (cf. Ehlich & Rehbein 1977, 1986, Ehlich 1982, 1986a, 1986b, Rehbein 1977). The main argument is that prepositions are not directly linked to the perception space but to the verbalized propositional content. By using prepositions the speaker makes a classification of objects referred to. Classifying objects according to perceptional features of dimensionality leads to a parallel classification of objects in the imagination space. The model demonstrates its usability in the analysis of a small corpus of authentic texts. The model's application to the grammar of Turkish locative expressions (abstract suffixes instead of prepositions) shows that it functions well with Turkish locative expressions.
In part two of this book the analytical procedure is laid out. First a detailed description of the recording of the 58 analyzed texts and their transfer and adaptation for computer based analysis is given. Each step is illustrated with examples. The following analysis of the task the students were given and their typical verbalization strategies reveals that there is no way to directly link the presented pictures and the sentences produced by the learners. The discussion of the German variant of the LARSP profile analysis leads to É. The examination of the texts reveals that Turkish learners of German show a characteristic overrepresentation (e.g. zu), and underrepresentation (e.g. in) of prepositions.
The texts of the Turkish learners show the anticipated problems in classifying objects by using the proper preposition. Surprisingly, the Turkish learners correctly use German prefix verbs (e.g. ankommen) with the typologically different split of prefix and stem. A closer look reveals that their overuse of prefix verbs instead of expressions with verb and preposition correlates with basic syntactic principles of Turkish. This leads to the conclusion that the Turkish learners realize underlying Turkish syntactic patterns with German syntactic means.