Refine
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- American politics (1)
- Assimilation <Soziologie> (1)
- Bedeutungswandel (1)
- Ethnische Gruppe (1)
- European Americans (1)
- Frame-Semantik (1)
- German Americans (1)
- Internationale Migration (1)
- Isolationismus (1)
- Präsidentenwahl (1)
Publicationstate
- Postprint (2) (remove)
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (1)
- Peer-Review (1)
Based on the empirical data of 97 fourth-graders from three districts of Braunschweig in Germany, this paper investigates the possibility of changing semantic frames in multilingual communities. The focus of study is the verb field of self-motion. In a free-sorting task involving 52 verbs, Turkish-speaking students, in particular, placed the verbs schleichen (‘to sneak’) and kommen (‘to come’) in the same group. When explaining the perceived similarity they also used the word schleichen (‘to sneak’), in a specific grammatical construction that is not found in Standard German. This paper suggests that semantic frames may change along with grammatical constructions when typologically distinct languages come into close contact.
We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.