Volume 6, Issue 1

The paper discusses methods of historical semantics (word semantics and conceptual semantics). The example of the concept ‹Geist› of Max Weber will show means by which the linguistic description of complex semantic phenomena (transcending the level of single words) can be captured and described. Based on the original works of Max Weber, the concept ‹Geist› will be approached in three steps: investigation of the single word (the lexeme) Geist , investigation of the word formation field { geist } and investigation of the lexical field G eist (the latter, for reasons of size, must be limited to several examples). A summary of the results and an outlook on possible extensions of the question will conclude the contribution.

Although there is much linguistic work concerning morphological complexity of words no study tries to scale their physical form. In this paper firstly we present a scaling of word's morphological complexity considering reduplication, compounding, derivation, inflection and suppletivism. Secondly we show some quantitative analyses of morphological complexity with respect to arc, motif, and distances of words in a Slovak poem as an example.

In the present paper, the introductions of articles from the academic journal Zeitschrift für Soziologie are analyzed both on the macro- as well as microstructural levels. The study is based on Szurawitzki/Eiglsperger (2014), who studied medicine article introductions from the Deutsches Ärzteblatt . The corpus comprises four articles. The methodology used is a top down model especially developed for a combined macro- and microstructural analysis. The results presented here are part of a larger ongoing interdisciplinary corpus study of article introductions. The result presentation entails a comparative dimension between the sociological and medicine introductions.

The following paper presents the structure of a language teaching inspection of the topic of capitalization applied within sentences in the secondary education level, which comprises both a quantitative and a qualitative research part. The emphasis of this paper, in respect to its content, does not lie in the discussion of each and every result, but concentrates on the question of how the quantitative and qualitative results can be correlated to each other, and on what types of complementary information can be deducted from it from a language teaching point of view.

This paper is a study of code-switching and crossing into “guest worker's” German in chat communication between female bilinguals of Moroccan background, who are the descendants of so-called “Gastarbeiter” (‘guest workers’). Code-switching and crossing can both be seen as manifestations of ethnolectal speech. Linguists pay little attention to the language use of the Moroccan community in Germany, whereas the language use of migrants with Turkish background is well-researched. The results of studies concerning the language use (especially about language alternation) of bilinguals with ethnic Turkish background are compared with the results of the present study. The most important results are the following: The chat communication of the bilingual Moroccan migrants is characterized by code-switching, which is restricted to pragmatically delimitable constituents (such as in the case of religious routine formulas, which are the focus of this analysis) and by crossing into “guest worker's” German, which manifests itself when the pronunciation of specific words are imitated. Whereas bilinguals with Moroccan background apparently prefer code-switching as type of language alternation, bilinguals with Turkish background display a preference for code-mixing in addition to code-switching. This result stands in accord with the study of Dorleijn and Nortier (2008), which investigated the language alternation of Turkish and Moroccan migrant groups in the Netherlands. It is supposed that bilinguals with Moroccan background show no code-mixing, because they are, with regard to their language of origin, a heterogeneous group (Berber and Arabs) and because Moroccan Arabic has lost, in diasporic context, its function as lingua franca . Code-switching as well as crossing into “guest worker's” German have obviously an identity constructing function. Bilinguals of Moroccan background use code-switching to distinguish themselves from the majority society, whereas crossing is used to show closeness to the parental generation.

What is a textual genre? How do the genres of typologically different languages differ from each other? How systematic differences of the genre systems reveal variations among languages in terms of the information structure? These are fundamental research questions in contrastive linguistics. The central purpose of this paper is to investigate variations between textual genres of British English and Mandarin Chinese by using large-scale language data bases. The corpus analysis shows that textual genres of the two languages are different from each other systematically, which thus sheds new light on the inherent cognitive and cultural differences between the two language and cultural systems.