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Denken in Metaphern ist ein Charakteristikum menschlicher Kognition. Diese Überzeugung, die in der deutschen Linguistik insbesondere von Weinrich (1967) vertreten wurde, ist eines der Axiome der Kognitiven Semantik (Lakoff/Johnson 1980). Umfassende empirische Studien zur Metaphorik bestimmter Diskurse sind aber bislang selten. Im vorliegenden Artikel möchten wir einige Ergebnisse einer solchen Studie präsentieren, in der die Bildung eines Europa-Begriffs1 über Metaphern aus dem konzeptuellen Bereich des Bauwesens in der russischen und der deutschen Presse untersucht wurde. Zunächst stellen wir kurz die empirische Arbeit in dem Projekt, in dem die vorliegende Studie entstanden ist, vor (1). Danach präsentieren wir die Metaphorik des Bauwesens im russischen und deutschen Diskurs zu Europa (2). Abschließend erfolgt eine Diskussion der Ergebnisse (3).
Positioning analysis, a variant of discourse analysis, was used to explore the narratives of 40 psychiatric patients (11 females and 29 males; mean age = 40 years) who had manifest difficulties with engagement with statutory mental health services. Positioning analysis is a qualitative method that captures how people linguistically position the roles and identities of themselves and others in their day-to-day lives and narratives. The language of disengagement incorporated the passive positioning of self in relation to their lives and treatment through the use of metaphor, the passive voice and them and us attribution, while the discourse of engagement incorporated more active positioning of self, achieved through the use of the personal pronoun we and metaphoric references to balanced relationships. The findings corroborate previous thematic analysis that highlighted the importance of identity and agency in the ‘making or breaking’ of therapeutic relationships (Priebe et al. 2005). Implications are discussed in relation to how positioning analysis may help signal and emphasize important life and therapeutic experiences in spoken narratives as well as clinical consultations.
We report an ethnographic and field-experiment-based study of time intervals in Amondawa, a Tupi language and culture of Amazonia. We analyse two Amondawa time interval systems based on natural environmental events (seasons and days), as well as the Amondawa system for categorising lifespan time (“age”). Amondawa time intervals are exclusively event-based, as opposed to time-based (i.e. they are based on event-duration, rather than measured abstract time units). Amondawa has no lexicalised abstract concept of time and no practices of time reckoning, as conventionally understood in the anthropological literature. Our findings indicate that not only are time interval systems and categories linguistically and culturally specific, but that they do not depend upon a universal “concept of time”. We conclude that the abstract conceptual domain of time is not a human cognitive universal, but a cultural historical construction, semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts for time reckoning.
In diesem Artikel werden Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede in der anfänglichen Schematisierung der Stammzellenforschung im öffentlichen Diskurs Polens und Frankreichs untersucht. Zwei Zeitungskorpora (Le Monde und Gazeta Wyborcza) aus den Jahren 1998-2000 wurden im Hinblick auf die Frage analysiert, inwiefern beide Zeitungen ähnliche oder kulturspezifische Metaphernnetzwerke in der Bildung von ‚Stammzellrealitäten’ aufbauen. Der Artikel basiert auf der Annahme, dass Metaphern im Diskurs eine wichtige Funktion bei der Bildung interpretativer Bezugssysteme für die Diskussion sozialer und philosophischer Implikationen der Stammzelltechnologie zukommt. Der Ausgangspunkt bestand in der Überlegung, dass sich die beiden wichtigsten Zeitungen der beiden Länder in der anfänglichen Schematisierung der Stammzellenforschung unterscheiden würden (besonders bezüglich kultureller und religiöser Werte in den jeweiligen öffentlichen Debatten). Im Verlauf der Untersuchung stellte sich jedoch heraus, dass beide Zeitungen sehr ähnliche Metaphern in der Berichterstattung zur Stammzellenforschung gebrauchen. Kulturelle Unterschiede in der Interpretation von Stammzellenforschung existieren möglicherweise eher auf der Ebene ideologischer Gruppen als auf der nationaler Kulturen.
Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying ‘thank you’ as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.
The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.
Reformulating place
(2013)
This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk, and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action.
Dieser Beitrag stellt ein neues, im Aufbau befindliches Parallelkorpus vor: Das ‚Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction‘ (PECII). Zunächst wird der Bedarf nach besser vergleichbaren Daten fur die sprachübergreifende Erforschung natürlichen sprachlichen Handelns in der sozialen Interaktion begründet. Wir diskutieren Fragen der Vergleichbarkeit von Episoden natürlicher sozialer Interaktion, und die methodologischen Herausforderungen, die Ansprüche an ein Korpus natürlicher Sprachdaten mit dem Wunsch nach vergleichbaren Daten in Einklang zu bringen. Schließlich skizzieren wir mögliche Untersuchungsansätze auf der Grundlage von PECII anhand einer laufenden Studie zur Sanktionierung von Fehlverhalten in verschiedenen Aktivitätskontexten. Zukünftig soll PECII der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit als Ressource fur die sprach- und kulturvergleichende Untersuchung sprachlichen Handelns in der sozialen Interaktion zur Verfügung stehen.
This manual introduces a conversation analytically informed coding scheme for episodes involving the direct social sanctioning of problem behavior in informal social interaction which was developed in the project Norms, Rules, and Morality across Languages (NoRM-aL) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language. It outlines the background for its development, delimits the phenomena to which the coding scheme can be applied and provides instructions for its use.
The scheme asks for basic information about the recording and the participants involved in the episode, before taking stock of different features of the sanctioning episode as a whole. This is followed by sets of specific coding questions about the sanctioning move itself (such as its timing and composition) and the reaction it engenders. The coding enables researchers to get a bird’s eye view on recurrent features of such episodes in larger quantities of data and allows for comparisons across different languages and informal settings.
In this article we examine moments in which parents or other caregivers overtly invoke rules during episodes in which they take issue with, intervene against, and try to change a child’s ongoing behavior or action(s). Drawing on interactional data from four different languages (English, Finnish, German, Polish) and using Conversation Analytic methods, we first illustrate the variety of ways in which parents may use such overt rule invocations as part of their behavior modification attempts, showing them to be functionally versatile interactional objects. Their interactional flexibility notwithstanding, we find that parents typically invoke rules when, in the course of the intervention episode, they encounter trouble with achieving an acceptable compliant outcome. To get at the distinct import of rule formulations in this context, we then compare them to two sequential alternatives: parental expressions of an experienced negative affective state, and parental threats. While the former emphasize aspects of social solidarity, the latter seek to enforce compliance by foregrounding a power asymmetry between the parent and the child. Rule formulations, by contrast, are designedly impersonal and appear to be directed at what the parents construe as shortcomings in common-sense practical reasoning on the child’s part. Reflexively, the child is thereby cast as not having properly applied common-sense ‘practical reason’ when engaging in what is treated as the problematic behavior or action. Overt rule invocations can, therefore, be understood as indexical appeals to practical reason.
ln dem vorliegenden Artikel zeigen die Autoren, welche Rolle Metaphern in Vorstellungswelt und Argumentation im Rahmen des politischen Diskurses spielen. Der Beitrag stellt eine empirische Analyse von polnischen und deutschen Pressetexten zum Thema der EU-Osterweiterung im Zeitraum Januar bis März 2000 dar. Der Analyse wurden auf polnischer Seite fünf der auflagestärksten überregionalen Tageszeitungen unterzogen. Auf deutscher Seite wurden die im ,Pressespiegel Polen‘ erfassten Zeitungen genutzt.
Most cultures have metaphors for time that involve movement, for example, ‘time passes’. Although time is objectively measured, it is subjectively understood, as we can perceive time as stationary, whereby we move towards future events, or we can perceive ourselves as stationary, with time moving past us and events moving towards us. This paper reports a series of studies that first examines whether people think about time in a metaphor-consistent manner (Study 1) and then explores the relationship between ‘time perspective’, level of perceived personal agency, and time representations (Study 2), the relationship between emotional experiences and time representation (Study 3), and whether this relationship is bidirectional by manipulating either emotional experiences (Study 4) or time representation (Study 5). Results provide bidirectional evidence for an ego-moving representation of time, with happiness eliciting more agentic control, and evidence for a time-moving passivity associated with emotional experiences of anxiety and depression. This bidirectional relationship suggests that our representation of time is malleable, and therefore, current emotional experiences may change through modification of time representations.
Social agency and grammar
(2017)
Sentence and construction types generally have more than one pragmatic function. Impersonal deontic declaratives such as ‘it is necessary to X’ assert the existence of an obligation or necessity without tying it to any particular individual. This family of statements can accomplish a range of functions, including getting another person to act, explaining or justifying the speaker’s own behavior as he or she undertakes to do something, or even justifying the speaker’s behavior while simultaneously getting another person to help. How is an impersonal deontic declarative fit for these different functions? And how do people know which function it has in a given context? The authors address these questions using video recordings of everyday interactions among speakers of Italian and Polish.
Directing, negotiating and planning: 'Aus Spiel' ('for play') in children's pretend joint play
(2021)
We are interested in how children organize joint pretend play. In this kind of play, children create an invented world by transforming matters of the real world into matters of a fictional world (e.g., pretending to be a 'giant' or treating a particular spatial area as a 'witch's kitchen'). Since there are no rules and no script, every next step in the game is an improvisation designed here and now. Children engaged in free play have equal rights to determine what should happen next. For that reason, they have to negotiate next steps. We are interested in a particular expression that children often use in joint play: aus Spaß/Spiel ('for fun' or 'for play', similar to 'let's pretend'). Based on a corpus of five hours of video recordings of two pairs of twins (the younger children are between 3 and 5 years old, the older ones are 8 years old), we show that children regularly use aus Spiel while playing as a method for shaping the activity. Inventing new events, children try to get their co-players to accept them and act accordingly. In that context, issues of (dis-)alignment and deontic rights become relevant. Here, we are interested in the interactional work that aus Spiel-('let's pretend')-turns do and how co-players respond.