Volume 2010, Issue 52

Linguists dealing with forensic authorship analysis have to take into consideration that anonymous authors of incriminated writings may attempt to disguise their language behaviour. Although this issue has been referred to several times in research literature, there is still a lack of empirical data on the strategies of disguise. The following article presents the results of an experimental study focusing on such strategies as observed with linguistically untrained speakers for the purpose of concealing their authorship. It turns out that in most cases the attempts of disguise fail and the authors can be identified.

The exponential growth and virtually universal use of the Internet has allowed any person to publish his or her opinions with little effort. In this context the following questions may be posed: – How exactly are social networks and blogs by politicians and citizens deployed in elections? – Does a real dialogue between politicians and citizens emerge through the use of such new communication forms? To answer these questions, an analysis will be made of the Facebook pages of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her challenger Frank-Walter Steinmeier during the German federal election of 2009, as well as of a politician's blog and the Internet portal “Abgeordnetenwatch” (Watching Members of Parliament). The analysis will attempt to indicate the extent to which voters see the Internet as a “counter” or alternative public space representing the specific perspectives of citizens and voters in opposition to those of politicians and political parties.

In the field of linguistic pragmatics, observational methods have been common during the last decades. This article presents the findings of a study on Japanese greeting rituals in which experimental methods were used. It aims at exploring the construction of social differences through forms of greetings between people of equal status. After developing the conceptual framework centred around the terms “ritual” and “contextualization” (Section 1), the article characterizes greetings as rituals (Section 2). It develops hypotheses for the influence of social categories on the choice of greeting patterns and sketches the experimental setup (Sections 3 and 4). After introducing the sample (Section 5), this paper identifies four different patterns of greeting rituals and explores the influence of the variables gender, ethnicity, social self-esteem and attractiveness on the choice of each of these patterns (Section 6). It turns out that gender – in various ways – has the strongest influence on the performance of greeting rituals but that also ethnicity and social self-esteem serve as important background variables. On the basis of these findings, the social constructiveness of the four different greeting rituals is discussed (Section 7).

Based on two corpora composed of four discourse genres – spoken interviews, written interviews, newspaper articles and non-fictional books – the article focuses on the way ‘society’ is talked about metaphorically in current German and Brazilian speech communities. Going beyond the mere differences regarding preferences in the choice of conceptual metaphors and image schemas used in both corpora, we want to discuss mainly culture-specific ‘mixed metaphors’ (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors we live by, The University of Chicago Press, 1980), which can be seen as blending scenarios or ‘integration networks’ in the sense of Fauconnier und Turner (The way we think, Basic Books, 2002, Rethinking metaphor, Cambridge University Press, 2008). The analysis shows that we can find significant differences on the level of image schemas. These are more dynamic and mixed in the German corpus as compared to the Brazilian one, in which personification is a more frequent input. Furthermore, we shall also demonstrate that Blending Theory has to be extended by a semiotic-contextual view in order to integrate elements such as the ‘Relevance Space’ (Brandt and Brandt, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3: 216–149, 2005) in order to grasp culture-dependent variation and the involved speech functions displayed by real speakers/writers and hearers/readers in specific communication situations. Based on four proto-typical examples from each corpus, we will illustrate how blending scenarios pursue more argumentative and explicative aims in the Brazilian corpus while in the German one, there is a greater tendency towards intertextual and ironic attitudes. The results show that we have to keep in mind pragmatic and communicative perspectives for any adequate account of metaphor studies – an important aspect left aside in the merely cognitive approaches of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Blending Theory.