Going “out” to Vienna

This paper examines the use of spatial adverbs and preverbs, such as up, down, in or out, in combination with toponyms in directional and local expressions in a number of nonstandard varieties of Alpine Gallo-Romance, Burgenland Croatian, Hungarian, Romani, Upper German and Slovenian. This feature has been described as a form of geocentric orientation system that refers to salient landmarks characteristic for the route between a reference point and a remote place, such as a river or a mountain. However, the adverbs and preverbs do not serve as an orientation system per se but rather enable a speaker to perspectivize his/her utterance. The choice of an adverb or preverb depends on the speaker’s sociogeographic point of view which is, in turn, shaped by the community a speaker belongs to. Our paper aims at offering a different approach towards this feature by analyzing the social references, the pragmatic function as well as the use of these adverbs and preverbs with regard to aspect and aktionsart. Based on this, we propose a function-based approach to explain the fact that this feature is found in a variety of languages since we consider topography-based models not to be sufficient to explain the spread of this feature over the topographically diverse regions and typologically diverse languages of southern Central Europe

Linguistics · Political science · History · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy

• Sprachkontakte Deutsch – Tschechisch –- Slowakisch

  Open Access•Stefan Michael Newerkla•Sprachkontakte Deutsch -…•2004

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