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This presentation deals with collaborative turn-sequences (Lerner 2004), a syntactically coherent unit of talk that is jointly formulated by at least two speakers, in Czech and German everyday conversations. Based on conversation analysis (e.g., Schegloff 2007) and a multimodal approach to social interaction (e.g., Deppermann/Streeck 2018), we aim at comparing recurrent patterns and action types within co-constructional sequences in both languages. The practice of co-constructing turns-at-talk has been described for typologically different languages, especially for English (e.g., Lerner 1996, 2004), but also for languages such as Japanese (Hayashi 2003) or Finnish (Helasvuo 2004). For German, various forms and functions of co-constructions have already been investigated (e.g., Brenning 2015); for Czech, a detailed, interactionally based description is still pending (but see some initial observations in, e.g., Hoffmannová/Homoláč/Mrázková (eds.) 2019). Although the existence of co-constructions in different languages points to a cross-linguistic conversational practice, few explicitly comparative studies exist (see, e.g., Lerner/Takagi 1999, for English and Japanese). The language pair Czech-German has mainly been studied with respect to language contact and without specifically considering spoken language or complex conversational sequences (e.g., Nekula/Šichová/Valdrová 2013). Therefore, our second aim is to sketch out a first comparison of co-constructional sequences in German and Czech, thereby contributing to the growing field of comparative and cross-linguistic studies within conversation analysis (e.g., Betz et al. (eds.) 2021; Dingemanse/Enfield 2015; Sidnell (ed.) 2009). More specifically, we will present three main sequential patterns of co-constructional sequences, focusing on the type of action a second speaker carries out by completing a first speaker’s possibly incomplete turn-at-talk, and on how the initial speaker then responds to
this suggested completion (Lerner 2004). Excerpts from video recordings of Czech and German ordinary conversations will illustrate these recurrent co-constructional sequence types, i.e., offering help during word searches (see example 1 above), displaying understanding, or claiming independent knowledge. The third objective of this paper is to underline the participants’ orientation to similar interactional problems, solved by specific syntactic and/or lexical formats in Czech and German. Considering the more recent focus on the embodied dimension of co-constructional practices (e.g., Dressel 2020), we will also investigate the multimodal formatting of a started utterance as more or less “permeable” (Lerner 1996) for co-participant completion, the participants’ mutual embodied orientation, and possible embodied responses to others’ turn-completions (such as head nods or eyebrow flashes, cf. De Stefani 2021). More generally, this contribution reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a cross-linguistic comparison of complex multimodal sequences.
Despite being an official language of several countries in Central and Western Europe, German is not formally recognised as the official language of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, in certain situations the use of the German language, including the spelling rules, is subject to state regulation (by acts of Federal Parliament orby administrative decisions). This article presents the content of this regulation, its scope, and the historical context in which it was adopted.
Our current era of globalization is characterized above all by increased mobility, namely by the increasing mobility of people and the development of new communication technologies, including the mobility of linguistic signs and resources. This process raises new theoretical and methodological questions in linguistics, which results in the development of a new sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) in recent years. One of the most obvious ways to trace this new and dynamic development is to analyze individual language repertoires, especially those of migrants. In this essay, I examine aspects of the communicative repertoire of a refugee who fled to Germany in 2015 to escape the civil war in Syria. I draw on two interviews I conducted with him (in the following I refer to him by the pseudonym „Baran“). The first interview with Baran was recorded in 2016, a few months after his arrival in Germany. The second interview is from 2023, seven years later. In both recordings, German was the dominant language of interaction. I will analyze and show the characteristics of his German at the beginning of his immigration, how he resorts to practices of language mixing between German, Turkish and English (which has recently also been referred to as translanguaging) and how his German has developed over the course of the past seven years.
Das nationalsozialistische Mobilisierungsregime war darauf angelegt, Zeitgenoss:innen zu Positionierungshandlungen zu bewegen: vom allfälligen ‚Hitlergruß‘ über die Mitwirkung bei Parteiorganisationen oder Spendensammlungen bis hin zur Anleitung zur Selbstreflexion in Tagebüchern nationalsozialistischer Schulungslager. Allerdings sollte eine solche Aufforderung zur affirmativen Positionierung nicht allein als Zwang verstanden werden, denn dies würde ausblenden, dass viele Zeitgenoss:innen tatsächlich Anhänger:innen des Nationalsozialismus waren oder dem nationalsozialistischen Gesellschaftsprojekt zumindest nicht grundsätzlich oder in allen Punkten ablehnend gegenüberstanden. Demzufolge scheint es treffend, eine je nach Kommunikationssituation und Akteursposition variierende Mischung aus Positionierungsdruck und -bedürfnis für den hier untersuchten historischen Kontext anzunehmen.
Sich und andere politisch zu positionieren, ist eine elementare sprachliche und soziale Praxis. Dies zeigen etwa Diskussionen um europäische Identität in Zeiten des britischen EU-Austritts und einer umstrittenen EU-Grenzpolitik oder die Haltung zu Waffenlieferungen in Krisengebiete im Zuge des Kriegs in der Ukraine, der 2022 ausbrach, ebenso wie wiederkehrende Auseinandersetzungen um Themen wie Alltagsrassismus, Sexismus und Diskriminierung. Diese Beispiele, die aktuelle politische Ereignisse ebenso umfassen, wie fortlaufende, immer wieder neu aufflammende gesellschaftliche Debatten um grundlegende Fragen des Zusammenlebens, verdeutlichen: Wo und wie wir uns in der Gesellschaft verorten, ist eine alltägliche Frage. Politische Positionierungen werden nicht nur ständig vorgenommen, sie werden, wie auch Nicht-Positionierungen, ebenso kontinuierlich thematisiert und kontrovers diskutiert. Diese Einführung in das Band soll in die Thematik des politischen Positionierens durch Klärung des Termins und einem Beispiel aus der Praxis einführen.
Conventional terminology resources reach their limits when it comes to automatic content classification of texts in the domain of expertlayperson communication. This can be attributed to the fact that (non-normalized) language usage does not necessarily reflect the terminological elements stored in such resources. We present several strategies to extend a terminological resource with term-related elements in order to optimize automatic content classification of expert-layperson texts.
The special issue opens up a construction-grammatical perspective on (German) word formation phenomena and goes back to a DFG-funded conference of the same name, which we held at the University of Düsseldorf in December 2020. The aim is to bundle up for the first time research from the field of German linguistics that is oriented towards construction grammar, and thus to lay the foundation for a 'Construction Word Formation' (cf. Booij 2010) also in the German-speaking world. Furthermore, ‘Construction Word Formation’ as a discipline shall hereby be sharpened. In this context, construction grammar should not be seen as a radical alternative to traditional word formation approaches that completely reinvents the wheel, but rather as a further development that builds on traditional concepts such as the pattern term with prominent consideration of usage-based aspects.
What is the subject of German linguistics? This seemingly simple question has no obvious answer. In the ZGL’s first issue, the editors required contributions to cover the whole of the German language and to be theoretically sound but application-orientated, whereas the current ZGL-homepage defines the German language of present and history in all its differentiations as its subject matter.
Looking through the fifty volumes of ZGL, three relationships can be identified as presumably enlightening the role of language, in particular the German language: language and mind; language and language use; language and culture. Though of a different systematic type, language and data should be added as an increasingly important pairing for conceptualizing language. On this basis, I also discuss the position of linguistic studies of the German language, mirrored in the ZGL-volumes, between social, cultural and natural sciences, as well as the corresponding epistemic approaches – like explaining vs. understanding.
Zum Verschmelzungsverhalten von definitem Artikel und Präposition in der Schriftsprache des Deutschen liegen bereits diverse Erkenntnisse vor, wohingegen die Kenntnislage für die gesprochene Sprache noch unzureichend ist. Die vorliegende Untersuchung widmet sich diesem Desiderat und analysiert Präposition-Artikel-Kombinationen anhand von Daten aus FOLK, um die linguistische Beschreibung dieser Struktur voranzutreiben. In der durchgeführten Korpusanalyse werden die Auftretenshäufigkeiten synthetischer und analytischer Präposition-Artikel-Kombinationen verglichen und Gebrauchsbesonderheiten auf syntaktisch-lexikalischer und pragmatischer Ebene herausgearbeitet.
Der vorliegende Beitrag vergleicht die Verwendung der anglizistischen Nomination old school und der nativen Entsprechung Alte Schule im Hip-Hop-Subkorpus des Songkorpus (Schneider 2020). Dieser Vergleich erfolgt auf zwei Ebenen: Zum einen wird die diskurs-spezifische Verwendung anhand eines adaptierten Analyse-Frameworks für Hip-Hop-Texte von Androutsopoulos und Scholz (2002) untersucht, zum anderen wird der syntaktische und morphologische Gebrauch in den Deutschraptexten analysiert. Dabei zeigt sich, dass es jeweils spezifische Verwendungstendenzen auf diskursiver Ebene gibt, die wesentlichsten Unterschiede aber in der syntaktischen und morphologischen Verwendung auftreten, allen voran in der höheren Produktivität der anglizistischen Nomination. Es wird dafür argumentiert, dass sich dies unter anderem auf sprachstrukturelle bzw. wortformale Spezifika des Englischen zurückführen lässt, wie den nicht vorhandenen Flexionssuffixen der Adjektive. Damit werden die in der Anglizismenforschung etablierten Überlegungen zu Verwendungsgründen um eine simple, aber gegebenenfalls folgenreiche Beobachtung ergänzt, die sich vor allem bei den sprachökonomischen Ansätzen einordnen lässt. Schließlich wird darüber auf diskursiver Ebene wiederum auch ein Bezug zu terminologischen Vorteilen hergeleitet: Trotz flexibler Verwendung wird das schriftliche Abbild bei Wortbildungen geschont (Oldschoolstyle, Oldschool-Aufnahmen, Oldschooler), was für die Wiedererkennbarkeit des Diskurselements – neben der zusätzlichen Auszeichnung durch die Eigenschaft ‚fremdsprachig‘ – zuträglich sein könnte.
Communication of stereotypes in the classroom: biased language use of German and Turkish adolescents
(2014)
Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon of describing stereotypes more abstractly. The LIB is the tendency to use language abstraction for in-group protective reasons. Results revealed an unmoderated LEB, whereas the LIB only occurred when foreigners were in the numerical majority, the classroom composition was perceived as a learning disadvantage, or the interethnic conflict frequency was high. These findings provide first evidence for the use of both LEB and LIB in an interethnic classroom setting.
Post-field syntax and focalization strategies in National Socialist political speech. This paper deals with a syntactic feature of spoken German, i.e. post-field filling, and with its occurrence in one specific discourse type – political speech – throughout one significant period of the history of German language – National Socialism. This paper aims at pointing out the communicative pragmatic function of right dislocation in the NS political speech on the basis of some collected examples.
This article examines how the most frequent imperative forms of the verb to show in German (zeig mal) and Czech (ukaž) are deployed in object-centred sequences. Specifically, it focuses on smartphone-based showing activities as these were the main sequential environments of show imperatives in the datasets investigated. In both languages, the imperative form does not merely aim to elicit a responsive action from the smartphone holder (such as making the device available) but projects an individual course of action from the requester’s side in the form of an immediate visual inspection of the digital content. This inspection is carried out as part of a joint course of action, allowing the recipient to provide a more detailed response to a prior action. Therefore, this specific imperative form is proven to be cross-linguistically suited to technology-mediated inspection sequences.
In den letzten Jahren haben sich einige Themen mit Bezug zur deutschen Sprache zu sprachpolitischen Kontroversen entwickelt, die heute mit großer Intensität diskutiert werden. Es handelt sich um Themen wie das der geschlechtergerechten Sprache, das durch verschiedene rechtliche und publizistische Impulse eine immer noch wachsende Präsenz in Medien und Öffentlichkeit besitzt. Auch das Thema des sogenannten politisch korrekten Sprachgebrauchs führt zu polarisiert geführten Debatten. Der vorliegende Beitrag will diese Debatten in ihren Grundzügen nachzeichnen und dabei zeigen, wie diese Themen vermittelt über die Medien und den «Verein Deutsche Sprache» ihren Weg bis in die politische Sphäre gefunden haben. Aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Sicht ist es wichtig, die Grenzen des Politischen so zu ziehen, dass die Sprache selbst in derartigen Kontroversen keinen Schaden nimmt.
Canadian heritage German across three generations: A diary-based study of language shift in action
(2019)
It is well known that migration has an effect on language use and language choice. If the language of origin is maintained after migration, it tends to change in the new contact setting. Often, migrants shift to the new majority language within few generations. The current paper examines a diary corpus containing data from three generations of one German-Canadian family, ranging from 1867 to 1909, and covering the second to fourth generation after immigration. The paper analyzes changes that can be observed between the generations, with respect to the language system as well as to the individuals’ decision on language choice. The data not only offer insight into the dynamics of acquiring a written register of a heritage language, and the eventual shift to the majority language. They also allow us to identify different linguistic profiles of heritage speakers within one community. It is discussed how these profiles can be linked to the individuals’ family backgrounds and how the combination of these backgrounds may have contributed to giving up the heritage language in favor of the majority language.
In this paper we present Trendi, a monitor corpus of written Slovene, which has been compiled recently as part of the SLED (Monitor corpus and related resources) project. The methodology and the contents of the corpus are presented, as well as the findings of the survey that aimed to identify the needs of potential users related to topical language use. The Trendi corpus currently contains news articles and other web content from 110 different sources, with the texts being collected and linguistically annotated on a daily basis. The corpus complements Gigafida 2.0, a 1.13-billion-word reference corpus of standard written Slovene. Also discussed are the ways in which the corpus will be integrated into various lexicographic projects, helping not only in the identification of neologisms but also in monitoring changes in already identified language phenomena.
Im Folgenden soll der Versuch unternommen werden, die bisherigen Forschungen zur Sprachgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im Lichte ihres Erkenntnispotenzials für gegenwärtige historiografische Fragestellungen zu diskutieren. In einem ersten Schritt wird die Forschungsgeschichte zur Sprache des beziehungsweise im Nationalsozialismus von der frühen Nachkriegszeit bis in die 1980er-Jahre skizziert. Deutlich wird hier vor allem, dass in dieser Phase zwar wichtige Arbeiten entstanden sind, jedoch methodische und theoretische Begrenzungen zahlreiche blinde Flecken bestehen ließen. In einem zweiten Schritt wird dargelegt, mit welchen Erkenntnisinteressen und Instrumentarien die jüngere Forschung sich auf diese blinden Flecken konzentriert und welche Ergebnisse sie zutage gefördert hat. Dabei sollen vor allem diejenigen Aspekte benannt werden, die nach Ansicht des Verfassers bei einer noch zu schreibenden Sprach- und Kommunikationsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus zu beachten sind. Es handelt sich konkret um eine Ausweitung der Perspektive in Richtung unterschiedlicher Kommunikationssituationen und heterogener Akteurskonstellationen, um Sprachgebräuche unter den Diskursbedingungen des Nationalsozialismus angemessen beschreiben zu können.
Genau tritt im aktuellen Sprachgebrauch nicht nur in seiner klassischen Bedeutung als Adjektiv oder Adverb auf, sondern wird auch als Fokus- bzw. Gradpartikel sowie Gesprächspartikel verwendet. Bisherige Beschreibungen haben sich nur in geringem Maße und unter Verwendung heterogener Begriffe mit seinem interaktionalen Gebrauch auseinandergesetzt. In diesem Beitrag werden mit Hilfe eines sequenziellen und multimodalen Ansatzes verschiedene interaktionale Verwendungen von genau in Videoaufnahmen deutscher Alltagsgespräche untersucht. Ausgehend von seiner Funktion als Gradpartikel wird genau sowohl als redebeitragsinterne Bestätigungspartikel in Wortfindungsprozessen als auch als responsive Bestätigungspartikel eingesetzt. Da genau häufig das Ende eines Verstehensprozesses bzw. einer Wissensverhandlung markiert, könnte allgemeiner die Bezeichnung des Intersubjektivitätsmarkers in Erwägung gezogen werden. Aus dem responsiven, bestätigenden Gebrauch heraus entsteht eine stärker sequenzschließende und sequenzstrukturierende Funktion von genau, woraus sich auch der zunehmende Gebrauch dieses Lexems als rein diskursstrukturierende Partikel innerhalb eines Redezugs erklären könnte.
Between January 2020 and summer 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary in order to enable communication under the new conditions during the corona pandemic. This rapid expansion of vocabulary has most notably affected lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics. General language dictionaries or terminological dictionaries have quickly reflected on how the German lexicon evolved during the corona pandemic: new entries were added, others were revised. This paper, however, focuses on the ways in which a German (specialized) neologism dictionary project, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" at the "Leibniz Institute for the German Language, Mannheim" published (online, see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/start.jsp) has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Neologisms are (following the definition applied here) lexical units or senses/meanings which emerge in a language community over a specific period of time of language development, which diffuse, are generally accepted as language norms, and which the majority of speakers perceive as new for some time. Thus, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" used to record neologisms only retrospectively, that is after their lexicalization. As a consequence, users of the dictionary were often not able to obtain details on words that were particularly conspicuous at a particular time in a specific discourse, thus raising questions concerning their meaning, correct spelling, etc. This, however, did not imply that the lexicographers of the project had not already collected these words with some preliminary information in a list of candidates for inclusion in an internal database. Therefore, the project started to publish online an index of monitored words including lexical units that had emerged since 2011, for which only time will tell whether they will diffuse and manifest as language norms. This list format was used since April 2020 to also issue a compilation of corona-related neologisms as part of the "Neologismenwörterbuch". In October 2021, this inventory included more than 1.800 Corona-related neologisms, and still, more than 700 candidates in an internal database awaited lexicographic description and inclusion into the online index (see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/listen/corona.jsp). In this paper many examples are presented to illustrate how new words, new senses and new uses in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic are reflected in the dictionary.