You may use one of these topics, you may develop a variant of it, or you may develop your own, in discussion with Nicola.

1. Suffixoids are words that are used as part of noun and adjective compounds: examples include -mäßig, -freundlich, -arm, -süchtig, -werk, -wesen, -zeug. They are like ordinary suffixes such as –lich, -haft, -heit, but they still carry meaning of their own, even though it may be more general and abstract than that of the stand-alone word. (See Russ 1994).

Investigate the use of a selection of the adjective suffixoids listed by Russ (1994:231) based on data from 1978. Which suffixoids occur most frequently as part of other words? Do some occur as part of a large number of different compounds, while others are restricted to just a handful? How does their relative frequency in your corpus compare with that given by Russ? What can be said about what elements the suffixiods collocate with, and about the text-types in which they occur? (For instance, the Duden Richtiges und Gutes Deutsch suggests in the section under “Kompositum” (Duden 1985: 401) that outside advertising, the use of –freundlich to refer to objects rather than things should be avoided. Does usage in your corpus accord with this prescription? )

2. Choose two or three English terms, whose various possible translations are all discussed by Beaton (1996). Beaton attempts to outline under which circumstances which translation would most commonly be used. Investigate the use of these terms in one or more corpora to which you have access. How does his account compare with what you find in your data from the corpus? Describe the usage patterns you have found, and compare with Beaton, as well as with at least three other appropriate dictionaries (from the following: Langenscheidt or de Gruyter Deutsch als Fremdsprache dictionaries, the Duden Universalwörterbuch, Wahrig, or Collins bilingual dictionary). (This question invites you to undertake a more qualitative analysis rather than only quantitative.)

Examples that students have considered in the past include:

• mind (Geist, Sinn, Verstand, Seele and others)
• follow (folgen, befolgen, verfolgen, nachfolgen ...)
• increase (zunehmen, steigen, ansteigen and others)
• responsible (verantwortlich, zuständig, zurechnungsfähig ...)

3. Examine the use of the genitive or dative with the prepositions such as während, trotz, wegen, and laut, innerhalb, außerhalb, as outlined in (at least) the following reference works: Hammer’s German Grammar, Eisenberg’s Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik, Dreyer / Schmitt’s German Grammar, Helbig & Buscha’s Deutsche Grammatik, and the Duden, Richtiges und gutes Deutsch. Carry out a corpus investigation of the use of one or more of these prepositions. Does your investigation confirm, add to or undermine any of the accounts you have found in the reference works you have consulted?

In the past students have done the following:

• looked for any evidence for the claim in the Duden Richtiges und Gutes Deutsch (Duden 1985:665) that the dative is common with trotz in Austria, but that elsewhere the genitive is usual?
• examined the use of wegen in spoken language
• You could also look at the usage of laut to see if you can account for / shed light on the rather contradictory accounts of it given by various reference works.

When you do your analysis, remember to be careful with prepositions governing feminine nouns, where you can’t tell if it’s the dative or genitive; also plural nouns ending in –n, e.g. wegen seiner Verbrennungen

4. The use of German modal particles (words like doch, eben, schon, wohl which tell us something about the speaker or writer’s attitude to a proposition) is often difficult for learners to master. In this essay, look at the use of 3 particles – e.g. doch, wohl, and schon – and try to get to grips with how and when they are used. First, consult (at least) three German dictionaries: a German-English dictionary (such as Collins); a large Deutsch als Fremdsprache dictionary such as Langenscheidt or de Gruyter; and a large standard German dictionary for native speakers (such as Wahrig or Duden). Outline how these reference works describe the use of the three particles. You may also find it helpful to look at a grammar such as Hammer to find out more about modal particles generally. Then carry out a corpus study and compare what you find there with the accounts given in the dictionaries. Do the occurrences you find match the usages described in the dictionaries? Are some usages more frequent than others? For at least one of the three particles, use the Chemnitz translation corpus (part of the ChemnitzInternetGrammar available online:

• http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/real/index.html) to investigate what English expression the German particle translates.

NB In your corpus investigation, be careful to exclude from analysis instances of the words schon, doch and wohl that are not modal particles. For instance, when wohl means “well” as in wohl begründet (“well-founded”), it is not a particle, but a normal adverb; similarly schon in Sie ist schon gefahren, “she has already left”; or doch when it is used as a conjunction to mean “but, however”: Doch es ist zu spät “but it is too late”.

5. Recent research by Davies and Langer (2006) has found that although reference grammars state that the relative particle wo can be used after expressions of time (as in “Es gab Zeiten, wo ich nicht anders konnte”), many speakers today and style guides over the last century seem to consider it colloquial / poor style. Begin by consulting a number of grammars to which you have access to see how wo is treated there. Then carry out an analysis of the use of wo in a corpus of your choice, and establish in which contexts wo is used. (You will need to come up with your own categories for usage: “temporal wo” will be just one such category.) Do your findings tally well with the accounts given in the reference works you consulted? Can you find evidence for the assertion that wo with a temporal sense is avoided in formal language?