Open Access

Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DEREKO and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.

For a long time, the lecture dominated performatively presented scientific communication. Given academic traditions, it is possible to make a connection between the lecture and classical rhetoric, a highly differentiated instrument of analysis. The tradition of the lecture has been perpetuated in the presentation of research results, first in the use of transparencies and subsequently through computer-based projections. Yet the use of media technology has also allowed new practices to emerge, including mediation practices hitherto neglected in the theory of rhetoric.

Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.

A large database is a desirable basis for multimodal analysis. The devel­opment of more elaborate methods, data banks, and tools for a stronger empirical grounding of multimodal analysis is a prevailing topic within multimodality. Prereq- uisite for this are corpora for multimodal data. Our contribution aims at developing a proposal for gathering and building multimodal corpora of audio-visual social media data, predominantly YouTube data.Our contribution has two parts: First we outline a participation framework which is able to represent the complexity of YouTube communication. To this end we ‘dissect’ the different communicative and multimodal layers YouTube consists of. Besides the Video performance YouTube also integrates comments, social media operators, commercials, and announcements for further YouTube Videos. The data consists of various media and modes and is interactively engaged in various discourses. Hence, it is rather difficult to decide what can be considered as a basic communicative unit (or a ‘turn’) and how it can be mapped. Another decision to be made is which elements are of higher priority than others, thus have to be integrated in an adequate transcription format. We illustrate our conceptual considerations on the example of so-called L e t’s Plays, which are supposed to present and comment Computer gaming processes.The second part is devoted to corpus building. Most previous studies either worked with ad hoc data samples or outlined data mining and data sampling strategies. Our main aim is to delineate in a systematic way and based on the conceptual outline in the first part necessary elements which should be part of a YouTube corpus. To this end we describe in a first Step which components (e.g., the Video itself, the comments, the metadata, etc.) should be captured. ln a second Step we outline why and which relations (e.g., screen appearances, hypertextual struc- tures, etc.) are worth to get part of the corpus. In sum, our contribution aims at outlining a proposal for gathering and systematizing multimodal data, specifically audio-visual social media data, in a corpus derived from a conceptual modeling of important communicative processes of the research object itself.