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Figurative language in intercultural communication – a case study of German-Southern African international academic discourse

  • Karsten Senkbeil

    Karsten Senkbeil is an assistant professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication at the University of Hildesheim. He has published various monographs and articles with discourse analyses, corpus-based linguistic and pragmatic studies of various types of intercultural communication and popular culture. His work aims at combining cognitive linguistic, pragmatic, and culture-theoretical approaches to intercultural discourses, including oral communication but also transcultural phenomena in literature, art, film, and sports.

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 6. Dezember 2017
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Abstract

This article analyzes intercultural academic discourse in an international research project involving German and Southern African scholars, with an eye on the use of figurative language in authentic communication. It combines intercultural pragmatics with a cognitive approach to figurative language as an expression of conceptual, cognitive patterns. This paper intends to show how international academics involved in intercultural communication actively and creatively apply metaphoric and other forms of figurative language to co-construct and conceptualize academic subject matter in transculturally understandable forms, and to forge a group identity in what has been called a “discursive interculture.” The quality and communicative success of figurative language for such purposes depends on various factors, for which both pragmatic and cognitive linguistic perspectives provide explanations, which is why an interdisciplinary integration of methods is advisable.

About the author

Karsten Senkbeil

Karsten Senkbeil is an assistant professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication at the University of Hildesheim. He has published various monographs and articles with discourse analyses, corpus-based linguistic and pragmatic studies of various types of intercultural communication and popular culture. His work aims at combining cognitive linguistic, pragmatic, and culture-theoretical approaches to intercultural discourses, including oral communication but also transcultural phenomena in literature, art, film, and sports.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the whole SeLA group for their collaboration, the team of transcribers, and specifically Stephan Schlickau and Vasco da Silva for their assistance with the data used in this paper. Furthermore, I am grateful to Nicola Hoppe and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful constructive feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

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Published Online: 2017-12-6
Published in Print: 2017-12-20

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 11.10.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ip-2017-0022/html?lang=de
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