„What our book aims at is providing a comprehensive description of the major contrasts in the grammar and lexicon of English and German based on relevant comparative and non-comparative work on the two languages, both traditional and recent. In addition to that, our contrastive study is based on a variety of insights and generalizations formulated within relevant typological work. Understanding the space of variation across languages in the domain of possessive constructions or reflexivity, for example, is extremely helpful for the task of describing the position that English and German occupy within such typologies.“

„Given the close genealogical relationship of the two languages under comparison, we can use formal criteria of comparability in addition to functional ones, e.g. in the discussion of tense and aspect systems in Chapter 5. While differing in terms of their functions, the English Present Perfect and the German Perfekt exhibit a parallel formal make-up, consisting of a possessive verb (have, haben/sein) and a participial form, both of which derive from common (West Germanic) ancestor categories. For the same reason, we can compare formal elements and categories such as phonemes, gender, case etc. Even though the historical processes have led to mutual unintellegibility of English and German, there is a certain amount of shared distributional or functional ground providing the basis for comparison and the identification of differences.“

„As far as the theoretical framework used in our analysis is concerned, we will draw both on more traditional descriptive and functional views of grammatical organization and on insights gained within the framework of Generative Grammar. Our goal of presenting our findings in a way that is intelligible to a wide audience excludes, of course, any attempt to adopt the terminology of a specific theory of grammar. The book, which was primarily written as a textbook for BA or MA modules for programmes in English or German, should be intelligible to any student in the second or third semester.“

„In order to describe the location of something or to identify an object or event in space and time, we need points of reference (orientation). The location can then be described in relation to that point (five miles to the north of Cambridge, at the beginning of 2003, a year ago today, etc.). As far as orientation in space is concerned, many points of reference, man-made and natural ones, are available: lakes, mountains, trees, towns, buildings, streets, etc. For orientation in time we use salient events as such reference points. Calendar time is established on the basis of some major event in a particular culture, the birth of Jesus Christ for Christians (‘200 BC’, ‘2005 AD’, etc.), the flight of Mohammed from Mekka to Medina for Muslims and the beginning of a dynasty of emperors in Japan. There is, however, another salient point of orientation that plays a crucial role for such notions as ‘past’, ‘current/present’ and ‘future’ as well as for tense distinctions in languages, viz. the moment of utterance, which simply divides time into two spheres: everything before it (the past) and the time following it (the future). This point of orientation is invoked by every act of utterance and the rough divisions it provides play the most fundamental role for temporal orientation in natural languages. The meaning of tense is both relational and deictic. It can be characterized as locating a situation (or ‘event’, ‘eventuality’) in time relative to (before, around, after) the moment of utterance. A first rough differentiation of tense systems is therefore often made in terms of a three-term distinction between ‘past tense’, ‘present tense’ and ‘future tense’, depending on whether a situation is located before, around or after the moment of speech. This, however, is only a first rough systematization, which does not do justice to the complexity of most systems found in languages and is based on notional rather than formal criteria.“

„Among the most common questions asked by beginning learners of any language is: “What does that word mean?”. This question can be answered relatively easily for words like apple, hammer, or table, that is, for lexical items with highly specific (concrete and referential) meanings. However, such a question is more difficult to answer for words with a more general or abstract meaning. For instance, a word like top does not correspond to any specific German word and requires different translations according to the noun it combines with (e.g. top of the hill, top of the list, etc.). The following generalization is relatively robust: the more general the meaning of a word is, the more polysemous that word will be, and the more translational equivalents it will have in other languages. Accordingly, it is to be expected that the most striking lexical contrasts between any pair of languages will be found among words with more general meanings.“

Ekkehard König, Volker Gast