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This article deals with the notion of reality. During the last twenty years, public discourse in western societies has identified the opposition between the real and the virtual as one of the cultural key questions. Taking concrete examples as a point of departure, the paper investigates the semantics of the polysemic terms virtual and real. A semiotic model of the relation between (human) organisms, concepts and signs is used in order to demonstrate that the virtual cannot be adequately described as something opposed to reality, but must be seen as an indispensable part of it. The way in which organisms constitute reality is discussed in the light of the basic cognitive operations of categorization and the formation of conceptual relations, and also of their linguistic counterparts. The apparent conflict between the real and the virtual, which has led many critics to develop apocalyptic visions of the end of civilization, is, in fact, a phantom, product of an outdated theory of semantics.
This study investigates the language used by six German Gangsta rappers to establish and maintain their identity and authenticity as rappers, in songs released between 2015 and 2016. Gangsta rap is a subgenre of Hip-Hop that emphasises ‘the rappers’ street credibility in texts describing tough [urban] neighbourhoods, violence, misogyny, and the achievement of material wealth’ (Bower 379). The culture of Gangsta rap attracts overwhelmingly negative mainstream media coverage (Muggs; Roper) and is often accused of corrupting ‘standard’ language (Krummheuer). The lyrical content of the songs is indeed controversial and has been previously covered by many academics (Byrd; Littlejohn and Putnam; Bower; Rollefson), as has the emergence of Hip-Hop in Germany (Elflein; Pennay; Nitzsche and Grünzweig).
It was recently suggested in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour that the historical loosening of American culture was associated with a trade-off between higher creativity and lower order. To this end, Jackson et al. generate a linguistic index of cultural tightness based on the Google Books Ngram corpus and use this index to show that American norms loosened between 1800 and 2000. While we remain agnostic toward a potential loosening of American culture and a statistical association with creativity/order, we show here that the methods used by Jackson et al. are neither suitable for testing the validity of the index nor for establishing possible relationships with creativity/order.
Vorwort
(2008)
Dieses Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache ist dem Jahr der Geisteswissenschaften gewidmet und beleuchtet aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive das Zusammenwirken von cultural und linguistic turn. Die Beiträge aus Linguistik, Kultur- und Kognitionswissenschaft sowie Literatur- und Geschichtswissenschaft zielen darauf ab, die kulturwissenschaftlichen Traditionen der Sprachwissenschaft zu vergegenwärtigen und gleichzeitig den Anschluss der Linguistik an die modernen Forschungsrichtungen der Kulturwissenschaft zu dokumentieren: Hermeneutik, Rhetorik und Lexikographie, Kognitionstheorie und Diskursanalyse werden aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Perspektive diskutiert. Darüber hinaus beleuchten die Beiträge die Folgen des linguistic turn in den Nachbarwissenschaften exemplarisch anhand der Literaturwissenschaft und der Historiographie. Insgesamt präsentiert der Band das Spektrum von Grundlagen, Theorien und Methoden sowie anwendungsbezogene Beispiele einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Linguistik.
Wo steht die germanistische Sprachwissenschaft aktuell? Der Band orientiert über den Stand der Forschung zur kommunikativen Verwendung von Sprache, ihrer Rolle in der Interaktion und ihrem Verhältnis zur Kultur. Die Beiträge stellen theoretische Grundlagen und wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Entwicklungen ihrer jeweiligen Forschungsgegenstände dar, illustrieren sie anhand von empirischen Ergebnissen und formulieren Desiderata für die Zukunft der Sprachwissenschaft.