Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (4)
- Article (2)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Language
- English (7) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (7)
Keywords
- Präsidentenwahl (4)
- Deutsche (3)
- Isolationismus (3)
- USA (3)
- Deutsch (2)
- Einwanderer (2)
- German Americans (2)
- Trump, Donald (2)
- Verb (2)
- Wahlverhalten (2)
Publicationstate
- Zweitveröffentlichung (5)
- Postprint (2)
- Veröffentlichungsversion (2)
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (3)
- Peer-Review (1)
- Review-Status-unbekannt (1)
Publisher
- Bournemouth University (2)
- Benjamins (1)
- Cengage (1)
- Elsevier (1)
- The Conversation Trust (UK) Ltd. (1)
- University of Texas (1)
"What makes this so complicated?" On the value of disorienting dilemmas in language instruction
(2017)
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.
Centering on German self-motion verbs, this paper demonstrates the advantages of free-sorting over creating and delineating word fields with more traditional methods. In particular, I draw a comparison to Snell-Hornby’s (1983) work on German descriptive verbs, which produces lexical fields with the help of dictionary entries, a thesaurus, a small corpus of written text and limited speaker feedback. While these methods have benefits, they are limited in their ability to represent the average organization of semantic fields in the mind of everyday speakers. Freesorting, by contrast, does not rely on academic resources, corpora or singular speaker judgments. In sorting, a group of informants creates visible sets of items according to perceived similarity. Psycholinguists have used the method to quantitatively explore the perception of color terms across cultures (c.f. Roberson et al. 2005). With a sufficiently large number of informants, one can generate lexical sorting data that is apt for cluster analysis, the results of which are represented by dendrograms. The experiment I conducted involved 33 school children from a middle class neighborhood in Braunschweig, Northern Germany. My experiment shows that Snell-Hornby’s (1983) representation of the self-motion field can be improved by integrating further dimensions of meaning, such as body-space relations and sound, that young speakers find salient in the grouping procedure.
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.