Volume 12, Issue 1

The main focus of this paper is on language and communication as the central meaning generating mechanisms of culture. The paper aims to systematically and heuristically investigate the complex alliance of language, culture and communicational interaction and at the same time to introduce several new fields of research by critically discussing their topics and potentials. In this regard, the dilemma of the question if , how much and which theory is necessary nowadays at all shall be examined first; therefore, the After-theory -program will also be addressed. Followed selectively by an illustrating look into the research history about language and about culture resp. about culture and language (without losing sight of the psychological process of “thinking”) with examples from selected linguistic and closely related disciplines. It is before this background, that aspects of culture-sensitive linguistic approaches will be analytically focused on and new paradigms – the Anglo-American “culture linguistics”, the Russian-post-soviet “linguoculturology” and the German Studies originated specifically multilingualism-oriented “intercultural linguistics” — will be closely scrutinised, primarily from the perspective of German Linguistics.

Die Grammatik in fachsprachlichen Texten unterscheidet sich – so die allgemein verbreitete Hypothese – von derjenigen in allgemeinsprachlichen Texten insbesondere durch die unterschiedliche Vorkommenshäufigkeit einzelner morphologischer oder syntaktischer Erscheinungen. In dem Beitrag wird gezeigt, dass Verben wie auch einzelne Verbarten und -formen in fachlichen Texten (hier: Dissertationen und Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) in einem geringeren Maße erscheinen als in allgemeinsprachlichen des öffentlichen Sprachgebrauchs (Nachrichten und World Wide Web). Aus diesen Ergebnissen werden Hypothesen für weitere Analysen generiert.

In the present paper an attempt has been made to determine the mathematical model for the frequencies of occurrence of letters in the corpora, in the word types of the corpora and in the initial positions of words of the corpora while both the word tokens and word types have been taken into account. In the current study corpora written in American English have been used by the selection of the entities from ‘The Open American National Corpus (OANC)’.

The present study aims at investigating the impact of gender and being native and non-native on the use of hedging devices in the discussion part of Applied Linguistics research papers written by native English/non-native (Iranian) male and female research writers. To this end, 60 Applied Linguistic research papers (15 for each group of research writers) were investigated based on Salager-Meyer, Françoise. 1994. Hedges and textual communicative function in medical English written discourse. English for Specific Purposes 13(2). 149–170 taxonomy. The results of Chi-square analyses indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between male and female research writers in terms of the frequency of use of hedging devices adopted in the discussion part of the research papers in the realm of Applied Linguistics. Moreover, the results of the study showed that the discussion parts of Applied Linguistics research papers written by male and female native English research writers were more hedged than those written by their Iranian counterparts. The pedagogical and implications of the findings are dealt with in the discussion and conclusion sections of the study.