Volume 2011, Issue 55

Scientific research is often understood as an activity or process focussing simultaneously on seeking and explaining universal laws of nature. This is especially true concerning the STEM fields of S cience, T echnology, E ngineering and M aths. These fields' universal laws of nature are widely understood as independent from human beings and individual languages. Due to this, the use of English as a lingua franca is often assumed to be beneficial for the internationalisation and globalisation of academic life. In contrast, the use of different languages is more widely accepted in the social sciences, the humanities and the arts as their interests do not focus on universal laws of nature but instead on societal phenomena. In these disciplines, also the paradigmatic variety is broader, and the “laws of nature” approach accepted in the STEM fields is disputed. However, also in the social sciences, the humanities and the arts there is a growing pressure to publish in the current lingua franca, English, as international publishing is the most rewarded of all scholarly activities, in terms of international reputation, funding and academic positions. One argument that supports the overarching trend towards the use of English is that any concepts not translatable into a “terminologically highly developed language”, such as English, are not “clear”. The aim of this paper is to challenge this assertion, by elaborating on the relationship between the research process and language(s). Firstly, Fleck's concepts of Denkstil (thought style) and Denkkollektiv (thought collective) will be introduced, and it will be argued, together with Fleck and others, that any cognitive activity is sociocultural in nature. Next, the connection of Denkstil and language usage will be illustrated concerning textlinguistic studies in medical scientific writing. Finally, the connection between Denkstil and choice of language, or more precisely, the lack of choice thereof in academic life will be discussed. This lack of choice will be critically scrutinised in terms of the way in which academic life is becoming increasingly commercialised.

In this paper a unified concept of linguistic well-formedness is established by bundling different criteria and parameters as a tool for empirical studies in (applied) linguistics. Linguistic well-formedness will be conceptualised in five different dimensions as a basis for developing specific concepts of linguistic wellformedness. It will be shown that such a multi-dimensional concept of linguistic well-formedness makes it possible to adequately compare studies and their results, to operationalize aspects of linguistic well-formedness and to justify the choice of appropriate methods.

This paper introduces executive coaching as an object of research for applied linguistics. Unlike other types of professional discourse such as psychotherapeutic talk, this relatively recent, yet booming format in human resource development has received little if any attention in our field. As language and communication are both the primary means and the primary method in coaching, a functional linguistic description of its underlying (coaching-specific) communicative practices is highly relevant for linguists and coaching practitioners alike: Applied linguists discover a new and stirring communicative activity and extend their understanding of professional and institutionalized discourse, while coaches are offered the possibility to heighten their awareness of their own professional communicative activities. Moreover, AL can contribute its expertise in discourse practice and discourse consultancy, as linguistic findings make a valuable contribution to the ongoing professionalization and accreditation debate in the coaching business. This paper lays out the special requirements of a project that functionally describes executive coaching for the first time and at the same time aims to generate findings of practical value.

This study compares the use of modal verbs in German with their equivalents in Thai by analyzing a bidirectional parallel corpus consisting of 4 Thai and 4 German contemporary short stories and their translation into the other language. The purpose is to identify similarities and differences in the modal verb system of these two typologically different languages. German has six modal verbs which have developed into a very symmetrical system by expressing deontic modality on the one hand and epistemic modality on the other hand. In Thai, there is a set of pre- and postverbal modal markers which can be regarded as equivalents to the German modal verbs. However, their polyfunctionality in terms of deontic and epistemic modality is different compared to their German counterparts. The Thai modal system shows a tendency to grammaticalize two different sets of markers as expressing only either deontic or epistemic modality.