Korean German Language and Literature Society

Although there have been numerous investigations of biolinguistics within the Minimalist Program over the last ten years, many of which appeal to the importance of Turing's Thesis (that the structural design of systems must obey physical and mathematical laws), these studies have by and large ignored the question of the structural design of language. They have paid significant attention to identifying the components of language - settling on a lexicon, a computational system, a sensorimotor performance system and a conceptual-intentional performance system; however, they have not examined how these components must be inter-structured to meet thresholds of simplicity, generality, naturalness and beauty, as well as of biological and conceptual necessity. In this book, Stroik and Putnam take on Turing's challenge. They argue that the narrow syntax - the lexicon, the Numeration, and the computational system - must reside, for reasons of conceptual necessity, within the performance systems. As simple as this novel design is, it provides, as Stroik and Putnam demonstrate, radical new insights into what the human language faculty is, how language emerged in the species, and how language is acquired by children.

In this article we explore the concept of communicative memory of modern East Germans in contemporary hip-hop lyrics. Our study reveals that even after more than twenty years of existing in a reunified German Republic, former and contemporary East Germans (i.e. Ossis) are still longing for a sense of social and political identity in a new system foreign in most respects to their previous socialist existence.

The integration of loanwords into existing grammatical gender systems supplies evidence for productive patterns of gender assignment in the recipient language. Corbett (1991: 71) likens gender assignment of loanwords to continuously running experiment. In the case of Latin loanwords into early Germanic, the outcome of the experiment would seem to be very predictable. Latin vinum 'wine' is one of the earliest loanwords in Germanic. Jellinek (1926: 184-185) argues that the loan occurred no later than the first century CE since the Germanic forms reflect a phonetic glide for initial Latin. The gender of the different Germanic reflexes of the Latin loanword vinumis entirely consistent with the bird's-eye viewof gender assignment patterns in the history of German provided by Salmons (1993). Keywords: early Germanic; gender assignment; Jellinek; Latin loanwords; Latin vinum

The Russian-American novelist Gary Shteyngart has frequently been called a “Gogolian” writer, usually in an attempt to explain the pedigree of his grotesque humour. This article focuses on Shteyngart’s story “Shylock on the Neva” (2002), which is a modern-day rewriting of Gogol'’s tale “Portret” [“The Portrait”]. A close analysis of Shteyngart’s text and comparison to its Gogolian model reveals a complex relation that is not necessarily centered on Gogol'’s humour. In his rewriting of “The Portrait,” Shteyngart emphasizes the inherent venality and vulgarity of Gogol'’s characters, who turn into grotesque caricatures of their prototypes. In doing so, he seems to “Gogolize” Gogol'’s tale by adding some of the absurd humour that critics have found to be lacking in “The Portrait.” By making a painting the focus of their stories, both Gogol' and Shteyngart engage in a self-reflective comment about art and the role of the creative artist. Similar to the clichéd hack-paintings of Gogol'’s painter Chartkov, artistic creation has been reduced in “Shylock on the Neva” to the production of postmodern simulacra based on stereotypes and cultural myths.