Pragmatics and Society - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018

This article presents a corpus study of lexical chains in the register of popular scientific writing, based on the English and German original texts included in the CroCo Corpus. This register is characterized by patterns resulting from the combination of accessible knowledge and scientific validity. The study aims at investigating cross-linguistic differences in terms of frequency and length of lexical chains. Chain elements are extracted by identifying the most frequent noun per text (and any lexical items associated with it by synonymy, hyponymy, or meronymy). The sentence IDs in the corpus markup are used to automatically calculate distances between occurrences of the target items. The analysis of immediacy chains and discontinuities in chains supports the investigation of contrasts in terms of topic continuity patterns.

This paper compares the linguistic realization of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations in English and German short personal narratives, paying particular attention to the context-dependence of (1) their overt marking with discourse connectives, and (2) their adjacent and non-adjacent positioning. The analysis is based on 20 written texts collected from university students.

The use of discourse connectives with adjacently and non-adjacently positioned discourse relations is more frequent in the English data. Considering the sentence as the unit of investigation, the coordinating relations of Contrast and Result and the subordinating relation of Explanation are marked overtly throughout the English data, while coordinating Narration and Background, and subordinating Elaboration and Comment relations are marked overtly less frequently. The picture is roughly similar with clauses as units of investigation. In the German data, the use of discourse connectives is also more frequent irrespective of adjacently or non-adjacently positioned discourse relations.

In a globalised world, national discourses are also perceived and commented on in other countries and languages. This paper focuses on newspaper coverage of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum in both Scotland and Germany, comparing two print media corpora in two languages. The linguistic depiction of the arguments and conflicts in Scottish newspapers is compared to the discussion of Scottish independence in German newspapers. In order to find conflictive ‘hotspots’ in both corpora, adversative and concessive connectors of both languages are taken as a starting point for a comparative conflict-oriented discourse analysis in seven steps. Differences and similarities of the most important conflicting concepts as well as the role of stereotypes and language difference are then compared and discussed.

Kaiser Wilhelm II’s speech to a German contingent of the international expedition corps, sent to quell the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ in 1900, is today remembered chiefly as an example of his penchant for boastful, sabre-rattling rhetoric that included a strange comparison of his soldiers with the ‘Huns under Attila’. According to some accounts, this comparison was the source for the stigmatizing label Hun(s) for Germans in British and US war propaganda in WW1 and WW2, which has survived in popular memory and continues to be used, though mainly in ironical senses, by British and German media to this day. This paper charts the history of the Germans-as-Huns analogy and argues first, that the usage data render highly improbable any ‘model’ function of Wilhelm’s speech for post-1914 uses. Furthermore, present-day uses presuppose an awareness of the WW1 and WW2 meaning on the part of readers, which serves as a platform for echoic allusions. In the British media these allusions often lead to the ironical (including self-ironical) subversion of preceding uses, while in German public discourse they focus more on historical commemoration and comparison.

This paper undertakes a systematic investigation into the use of German Nazi vocabulary in English. Nazi vocabulary is checked for frequency of occurrence in a large web corpus of English and then, where it occurs, for reference to Nazi discourse. Next, its frequency is compared to similar French and German web corpora, showing whether or not the use of Nazi vocabulary outside German is unique to English and whether or not its current usage differs between German and the borrowing languages. Finally, the use of two words that occur with similar frequencies in all three languages – judenrein and Blitzkrieg – and of two words that occur there with the highest difference in frequency – Anschluss and Lebensraum – is investigated in detail by means of the Sketch Engine corpus tool, including an analysis of collocations which indicate contexts of usage. The results can inform further research into lexical borrowing by demonstrating that borrowed words may be used in ways that differ notably from their use in the donor language.

Recent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have shown that public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of reference to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes. This paper intends to contribute to this new strand of research by investigating discursive transpositions of the historical Germanism Kulturkampf in the donor language, German, and two host languages, Polish and English. Originally used mainly in reference to government attempts to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church in Prussia/Germany in the 1870s, this term has come to be used in German and other languages to signify conflicts in various political and cultural contexts. Adopting a triangulated and trilateral approach and the method of corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS), this paper examines the use of Kulturkampf in large collections of Internet and newspaper data in German, English and Polish. The results show how the meaning of Kulturkampf has been discursively re-contextualised and appropriated to perform local ideological work in public discourses in the three different cultural contexts.