Volume 58, Issue 3

This article presents the results of a study analyzing the discourse of two German rap formations with regard to questions of cultural and linguistic creolization.1 It investigates the ways in which German rappers position themselves vis-à-vis American hip hop culture and some of its most salient concepts. In this process, which is far from being a smooth act of creative localization of the global, (African American Vernacular) English becomes a source of prestige as well as a site for contestation. The different indexicalities connected to it can account for a variety of uses of English in German rap. The resulting discourses at times develop forms that contradict assumptions about the enabling nature of cultural hybridization and localization

Literary texts are core material in Cultural Studies, especially as taught in German universities. This paper shows how the analysis of literature can be fruitfully enhanced by a linguistic analysis. Recourse is made to what is called New Historical Stylistics, which is first explained in its complexity and then applied to the analysis of embedded discourse presentation in 19th-century narrative fiction. The functions of embedded speech, writing and thought presentation will be explained via recourse to a cognitive stylistic framework drawing on Text World Theory (Werth 1999) and blending theory (Fauconnier / Turner 2002)

Ever since its emergence in the 1990s, postcolonial translation theory has become a household name in literary and Cultural Studies, with influential works by Tejaswini Niranjana (1992), Douglas Robinson (1997) and topical edited collections by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (1999), Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (2002), and Raoul J. Granqvist (2006). In postcolonial translation discourse, “translation” is used as a rather broad category that includes interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic meaning transfer as well as metonymic uses of the term. Sometimes neglected in these debates, however, are some very concrete and tangible linguistic issues concerned in postcolonial translation, and especially in two fields of linguistic inquiry. They can be divided into (1) sociolinguistic and language political considerations and (2) socio-cultural and pragmatic considerations. These concerns will be exemplified in a detailed analysis of two 1960s Shakespeare translations into the Sierra Leonean Creole language Krio, Juliohs Siza (see Decker 1965/1988) and Udat di Kiap Fit (see Decker 1966/forthcoming)

The special issue in which our article features bears evidence to the growing concern for a linguistically informed study of culture and, vice versa, a culturally informed study of language. In recent years, Cognitive Sociolinguistics has established itself as a viable approach to analyze and systematize linguistic realizations of conceptually coded cultural patterns (see e.g. Wolf / Polzenhagen 2009). In our article, we give a brief summary of the fundamental tenets of the Cognitive-Sociolinguistic approach as regards culture. Highlighting the field of World Englishes, we demonstrate that certain lexical items and entire lexical fields in non-native varieties of English cannot be properly interpreted without cultural background knowledge and, more specifically, without a systematic account of their underlying cultural conceptualizations. This insight is then applied to the analysis of expressions and collocations from Hong Kong English; under investigation are, in particular, socio-culturally salient conceptualizations from the domain of FAMILY. Our paper closes with a discussion of the applicability of Cognitive Sociolinguistics methods and findings to curriculum reform and design. Emphasized here are the potential for students’ hands-on analytic engagement with texts produced in culturally “alien” varieties of English, and, more globally, intercultural competence as a possible learning outcome