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This article compares the form of TV news reporting in the American “CBS Evening News” and the Swiss “Tagesschau” from their beginning until today. It draws particular attention to the ‘culturality’ of text types — a term that will be introduced in the first part. The analysis focuses on local, temporal and emotional closeness in news packages and illustrates how the two shows stage closeness in different and changing ways. Although a partial homogenization can be observed, the notion of a continuous americanization is rejected. The results will be analysed in the perspective of the TV news shows considering factors such as the text repertoire and overall format of the show. Discussing the results I will argue that the concept of ‘journalistic culture’ is helpful to conceptualize and understand the form of news. While the analysis cannot decide to what degree single influencing factors are at work, it further develops some common assumptions (like national characteristics of text types or the influence of commercialization).

The nominative and infinitive (or NCI) is a syntactic pattern that has so far not been given its due in the linguistics of languages that possess structures that could go by that name. In English and Dutch these were probably introduced (or at the very least revived) into the grammar as loans from Latin. To the extent that they have received attention, the linguistics of these three languages traditionally treats them as mere passive alternates of accusative and infinitives, but in English and Dutch, and probably also in Latin, most NCI patterns can instantiate three distinct constructions: a passive NCI, a descriptive NCI and an evidential NCI. Though the latter one especially can be seen to be ‘more grammatical’ than the passive NCI, it is not the result of a grammaticalization change that has taken place inside English or Dutch. In English the evidential NCI did become a productive schematic construction that grew to be very useful in journalistic and academic discourses. In Dutch, on the other hand, the productivity of the NCI constructions has much decreased after a brief 18th-century peak. English and Dutch do have in common, however, that a couple of substantive evidential NCI patterns grammaticalized into deontic NCI constructions, which at present is the most frequent NCI construction in Dutch.

This paper presents a contrastive study of modal adverbs in English and French, with a focus on a few pairs such as évidemment vs. ‘obviously’, apparemment vs. ‘apparently’. The relation between inference and epistemic modality is discussed both semantically and syntactically. Modal adverbs license double modality in French, in contrast to their English counterparts. This different syntactic behaviour confirms that the distinction that is generally made between two modal functions — the identificative one and the restrictive one — is relevant to French modal adverbs, but not to English modal adverbs. However, this semantic difference needs to be revisited and backed up pragmatically. It is argued that the identificative function of modal adverbs should be redefined in terms of intersubjectivity. While ‘apparently’ and ‘obviously’ mark the speaker’s identification with the addressee’s point of view, apparemment and évidemment are shown to be able to express the speaker’s evaluation whatever the speaker and addressee’s common knowledge might be. This pragmatic difference in turn provides an explanation for the different constraints on the use of modal adverbs in English and French.

Seen from an interpersonal perspective, within the framework of Appraisal (Martin and White 2005), cleft constructions in English and Swedish function in the system of Engagement as a heteroglossic rhetorical device by which speakers and writers negotiate an authorial position for themselves while implicitly acknowledging the existence of alternative positions. The cleft clause opens up the utterance to heteroglossic negotiation by representing one of its clause elements as a semantic gap. The identity of the semantic gap is then identified by the clefted constituent in the superordinate clause. It-clefts and reversed wh-clefts have different clefting possibilities in English and Swedish, which means that it-clefts and reversed wh-clefts are used to negotiate different types of authorial positions.

Native-like use of preterit and imperfect morphology in all contexts by English learners of L2 Spanish is the exception rather than the rule, even for successful learners. Nevertheless, recent research has demonstrated that advanced English learners of L2 Spanish attain a native-like morphosyntactic competence for the Preterit/Imperfect contrast, as evidenced by their native-like knowledge of associated semantic entailments (Goodin-Mayeda and Rothman 2007, Montrul and Slabakova 2003, Slabakova and Montrul, 2003, Rothman and Iverson 2007). In addition to an L2 disassociation of morphology and syntax (e.g., Bruhn de Garavito 2003, Lardiere 1998, 2000, 2005, Prévost and White 1999, 2000, Schwartz 2003), I hypothesize that a system of learned pedagogical rules contributes to target-deviant L2 performance in this domain through the most advanced stages of L2 acquisition via its competition with the generative system. I call this hypothesis the Competing Systems Hypothesis. To test its predictions, I compare and contrast the use of the Preterit and Imperfect in two production tasks by native, tutored (classroom), and naturalistic learners of L2 Spanish.

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This paper tackles the concepts of ‘Variation’ and ‘Specialization’, frequently used in grammaticalization theory, within the context of progressive aspectual periphrases and from a comparative perspective French-Dutch. Drawing on historical and contemporary data, it is shown that these periphrases (i) have a disambiguating function, (ii) vary as to the level of Specialization operating on them, and (iii) manifest a relatively high level of formal fusion and semantic uniformity, due to processes of ‘metaphorization’, ‘reanalysis’ and ‘desemanticization’. The synergy between ‘Variation’ and ‘Specialization’ as proposed in this analysis allows for a comprehensive account of linguistic phenomena which are subject to (especially incipient) grammaticalization.

Coreference is one essential strategy of coherence and cohesion as it establishes connectivity in texts. This connection is evoked by linguistic devices on the text surface but has to be interpreted mentally as a relation between extralinguistic referents. Since translators are concerned with the reception of connectivity in source texts and the production of the same kind of connectivity in target texts coreference is an important process taking place in translation. The present paper deals with the elaboration of a method for investigating nominal coreference in originals and translations. In order to build parameters for the empirical analysis of coreference in English and German corpora we provide an overview over various mechanisms affecting the creation of coreference relations in source and target texts. We take account of linguistic as well as extralinguistic aspects as interdependent and interacting factors potentially causing shifts in coreference. The model we establish on the basis of these considerations allows us to investigate nominal coreferring expressions as well as analyse the relation of reference identity created between these expressions. Hence, our model facilitates exhaustive research on a very fine-grained scale. It allows us to capture differences on the lexicogrammatical as well as on a semantic and conceptual level and, thus, paves the way for interpretation on a more conceptual level.