Volume 2017, Issue 66

As a result of the structuralistically-based distinction between langue and parole , with its bias towards langue and its emphasis on the detection of universals, the questions of language in authentic contexts, linguistic diversity, the social construction of reality and cultural conventions have been neglected and have even been treated as „irrelevant for linguistic research“ (Ehlich 2006) in „mainstream linguistics“. However, promising new lines of research on language, communication and culture are emerging, which „constitute language’s latest pendulum swing back into the world of culture“ (Enfield 2013). This article contributes to recent developments within Anthropological Linguistics and, thus, to the study of language as a cultural resource and communicating as a cultural practice. On the basis of a contrastive analysis of Chinese and German SMS-communication, this paper aims at investigating practices of addressing related and non-related co-participants by means of kinship terms. The analysis reveals how communicative practices are related to cultural conventions. I will argue that intersubjective communication not only represents the natural habitat for the construction and modification of cultural formations, but it also constitutes the empirically observable site of everyday constructions of culturality.

By the way that we dress, we communicate a certain style to our social environment. Because of a process of searching and expressing an own identity, fashion and self-stylization processes have a special significance to young people in adolescence. The following article investigates the ways in which a youthful style can be expressed by the clothing of young people. Subject of the analysis is the multimodal language-picture-text prints in a corpus of 70 T-shirt- and sweatshirt photographs of adolescents’ clothes. Special focus is placed on the characteristics of linguistic and visual elements as well as on their multimodal relations.

In the German education system, a relatively strong connection between immigration background and educational success has repeatedly been observed. It is often assumed that this is due at least partly to differences in linguistic competence in German between mono- and bilingual children. However, results from international studies on language acquisition do not suggest a correlation between bilingualism and linguistic deficits, or delays in the development of linguistic competence. It seems necessary, therefore, to take a closer look at the linguistic development of mono- and bilingual children in specific cultural and educational settings. In this paper, I am going to present two studies conducted on the basis of 264 written narratives by third-graders in a small German town. The results of the first study show no significant difference in syntactic complexity between the texts of mono- and bilingual children. The second study shows small but significant differences in the number of grammatical errors, but not in the domain of syntax. Thus, differences in educational success are not due to an incomplete or delayed acquisition of syntactic structures.

The article presents findings from the interdisciplinary research-project “Signs of the Metropolises: Visual multilingualism in the Ruhr-Area/Germany” (funded by MERCUR), which investigates the occurrence, regional distribution, function, production and perception of visual multilingualism in representative neighbourhoods of the cities Duisburg, Essen, Bochum and Dortmund. The focus of this paper will be on the structure and features of an online data base – the main corpus of the project – and its application opportunities for the sociolinguistic and linguistic landscape research. The image database encompasses about 25,595 geo-coded digital photographs. The photographs are linked to a map of the Ruhr Area to show the distribution and density of visual multilingualism. The image database also provides metadata for the following categories according to Scollon and Scollon (2003) and Backhaus (2007): choice of language/variety, type of discourse (e.g. commercial, regulatory, transgressive, commemorative), type of name (e.g. institution, shop, gastronomy, toponym), information management (e.g. complete, partial, extended), appearance, typography (e.g. Antiqua, Grotesque, Fraktur type, handwritten), and size. This tagging system allows complex search strategies to analyse sociolinguistic and geographical aspects of visual multilingualism.

In 2014, the yellow press magazine Closer revealed an alleged secret love affair between the French President François Hollande and a French actress. Accordingly large was the media interest in the revelation called „Gayetgate“ respectively „l’affaire Hollande Gayet“. Based on a multimodal corpus of advertisement linked with this scandal and published on Twitter and facebook , this paper aims to describe form and function of parodying a scandal via humorous advertising. A number of examples are discussed and it’s argued that storytelling plays a key role to create a parody.