Suchergebnisse

The teaching of Upper Sorbian (USo) is of increasing importance for the survival of this language. A challenge faced by learners is the lack of standardisation. Reliable standardisation has been conducted only in the area of orthography, which offers little indication about pronunciation. Pronunciation, however, is generally missing in all USo dictionaries, and teaching materials offer only general observations. Learners of USo mostly belong to one of two groups which require different teaching strategies: on the one hand, second-language learners aim to achieve authentic pronunciation; native speakers, on the other hand, struggle with the contrast between the standardised etymological orthography and the phonetic representation in everyday language (partly addressed in Šołćina 2014a/b).

In all Upper and Lower Sorbian grammars, aspect is a grammatical category, regarded a typical "Slavic" traitin spite of the fact that since Bermel 1994, aspect can be safely said to have evolved separately in the individual Slavic languages. The character of aspect in Sorbian, especially in Upper Sorbian, is highly disputable (and has been disputed since the beginning of the 20th century (cf. Werner 2003). An exception to one of the rules of Slavic aspect (namely that something happening at the time of talking must be expressed by means of an imperfective verb) are the so-called perfomative verbs. This acceptance and the termAktverben go back to Koschmieder 1929 but have never been thoroughly verified for individual verbs in the Sorbian languages. In this paper, the author makes an attempt at shedding some light on the aspect usage of performative verbs in Upper Sorbian.