Latein - Deutsch kontrastiv. Vom Phonem zum Text

Manfred Kienpointner: Latin and German - a Contrastive Description. From Phoneme to Text. To Appear as Volume 23 of the Series "Deutsch im Kontrast". Groos/Stauffenburg: Tübingen. "Latin and German, a Contrastive Description" is the first comprehensive contrastive grammar of Latin and German taking into account the state of the art in modern linguistics. All linguistic levels are described systematically, from phonetics/phonology, morphology and sentence grammar to the text level. The detailed description of grammatical contrasts between Latin and German is always accompanied with short outlooks on contrasts with English and French. The theoretical background of the syntactic part of the contrastive grammar is modern dependency grammar, as founded by Lucien Tesnière and elaborated by linguists such as Hans-Jürgen Heringer, Gerhard Helbig, Ulrich Engel, Igor Mel`?uk, Christian Lehmann and Vilmos gel. Apart from that, especially functional approaches are taken into account, such as Functional Grammar as developed by Simon C. Dik, which has been applied to Latin by Harm Pinkster, Machtelt Bolkestein, Caroline Kroon and Rodie Risselada. The general theoretical framework underlying the contrastive grammar of Latin and German is the functional theory of language established by Eugenio Coseriu. The target audience for this contrastive grammar primarily are teachers of Latin at grammar schools and universities. Furthermore, the grammar could provide some practical input for the teaching of German and for foreign language teaching (English, French). More specifically, the systematic description of contrasts between German and Latin should be useful for the preventive treatment of possible mistakes and the teaching of critical language awareness, especially the overcoming of a nave "linguistic realism" of monolingual speakers (= The world is such as my mother tongue depicts it). Moreover, this contrastive grammar could provide useful insights for goals of contrastive linguistics and typological research. More specifically, the following issues are dealt with: The first chapter presents a contrastive description of the phonological systems of Latin and German. A short outlook summarizes the contrasts with English and French phonemes. Moreover, elements of the syllable structure and the accent in Latin and German are described contrastively. The second chapter deals with contrasts between the morphology of Latin and German. After a short overview from a typological point of view a variety of morphological sub-systems are described in detail, such as word classes, case, gender, number, tense, mood and voice, with short outlooks on English and French morphology. The third chapter is the largest one and deals with contrastive syntax at the sentence level. First a detailed discussion of the central concept "sentence" is presented and Latin and German are typologically characterized as nominative-accusative languages (with a few ergative and active-inactive properties). Then the main constituents of Latin and German sentences are described contrastively. The theoretical background of dependency grammar and functional grammar is used for the contrastive description of the dependency structure of Latin and German sentences. Furthermore, semantic roles and their different encoding in Latin and German are dealt with. Then a list of Latin and German sentence patterns is presented, with a short outlook to English and French sentence patterns. Finally, the syntactic and semantic functions of subordinated constructions (clauses) in Latin and German are discussed in some detail. The fourth chapter is devoted to contrastive text grammar. Based on Coseriu`s theory of text grammar, the phenomena of superordination, subordination, coordination and substitution in Latin and German texts are described contrastively, again with short outlooks on English and French texts. The last section of the chapter deals with word order in Latin and German. The fifth chapter is a short summary, which provides an overview about contrasts between Latin and German at a highly general level, according to the parameters of brevity, implicitness and linear flexibility.