Cohesive substitution in English and German
A contrastive and corpus-based perspective*
Kerstin Kunz and Erich Steiner
University of Saarland, Germany
Our paper outlines a contrastive account of cohesive substitution in English
and German. We start with a clarification of the relationship between cohesive
reference, substitution/ellipsis and lexical cohesion in terms of prototypical
lexicogrammatical realizations, semantic functionalities and types of textual
and cognitive relations. We then turn to a systemic overview of nominal, verbal
and clausal substitution mechanisms and complement it by empirical findings
from the GECCo corpus about frequencies of semantic cohesive functions and
preferred lexicogrammatical realizations depending on language and register
(including originals vs. translations). Finally we provide some initial explana-
tions of our observations and outline how a comparison of English and German
substitution relates to generalizations of contrastive grammar and to possible
pathways of language contact and change.
Keywords: English-German contrasts, cohesive substitution, corpus-based
perspective
- Work reported on here is carried out in the DFG-funded project STE 840/6-1 “Kohäsion im
Deutschen und Englischen – ein empirischer Ansatz zum kontrastiven Vergleich” (GECCo).We
are grateful to Marilisa Amoia, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Katrin Menzel for com-
ments on aspects of this paper, as well as to the referees of our first version, whose critical com-
ments improved the paper considerably. Remaining weaknesses are, of course, ours.
