Volume 2019, Issue 71

Linguistics predominantly concentrate on the language use of the National Socialist regime. Resistance and oppostional discourses and their linguistic actions of resisting were only rudimentary taken into account and still represents a research desideratum. Based on a central actor of the exiled resistance – Thomas Mann – an important linguistic strategy of resisting – true saying – is to be made an issue in this context and worked on exemplarily in the BBC speeches held between 1940 and 1945. Based on the uses of the lexeme Wahrheit, wahr and wahrhaftig , their use in the individual speeches should be reflected against the background that it was Mann’s stated goal to discredit the constructions of reality of the NS propaganda and to convey alternative perspectives to the german listeners. The processing of his strategies are the subject of this essay.

Accommdation is ubiquitous in interaction. Depending on the situation, accommodation can be successful or it can fail, either intentionally or unintentionally, leading to under-accommodation, over-accommodation or contra-accommodation. Accommodation plays a vital role in interactional settings, especially in doctor-patient-communication, because accommodation is closely linked to the management of understanding, establishment of shared knowledge and building of trust. It is this interactional work of mutual adaption that this article is about. Using examples from a corpus of oncology consultations between doctors and patients in various oncology departments of a hospital, it is shown how doctors and patients accommodate both in a sequentially and temporally structured way or – only rarely – counter-, over- or underaccommodate.

Although some research on the spoken language and conversational behaviour of older people was conducted in Germany between the late 1990 s and the middle of the noughties, the interest in this field seems to have decreased over the last ten years with studies focusing on written texts produced by older people being virtually non-existent. In contrast to the German-speaking context, Anglo-American research on writing by older adults has flourished since the late 1980 s. This study therefore aims to close a research gap by focusing on writing in German in old(er) age and discusses the specific text genre of calendar entries written by older people. The calendar entries are analysed focusing on text-internal and text-external aspects, such as structure, contents, linguistic features and functional aspects.

Academic language has been the subject of much interdisciplinary discourse. However, a major problem arises when attempting to operationalize the construct of academic language. A common approach is to determine typical grammatical and lexical features. However, such compilations are not suitable for describing and explaining linguistic functions and actions in academic language. They are thus also not suitable for investigating academic language skills, since they neglect a central aspect of language. This problem is addressed in the present article, which considers academic language skills from a pragmatic and functional perspective. First, transdisciplinary aspects concerning structure, diagnosis, acquisition, teaching and standards of academic language skills are considered. On the basis of these findings, a heuristic model for representing different aspects of academic language skills is presented. The three fields of the model consider relevant cultural conditions (domains, functions, fields of knowledge, tasks, interactions and media), academic language actions (modes, units) and relevant individual resources (cognitive, motivational, volitional). These are then discussed with reference to three central concepts in the German-language discourse on academic language: „Alltägliche Wissenschaftssprache“, „Diskurspraktiken“ and „Textprozeduren“.

This paper focuses on easily confused items (so-called paronyms) in German in terms of their general, technical or academic contextual uses. It outlines the semantic discrepancies between contextual usages of pairs such as Methode / Methodologie / Methodik and unehelich / nichtehelich / außerehelich depending on their linguistic registers and varieties. While previous studies lack empirical evidence and primarily operate with morphological criteria (cf. Lăzărescu 1999) the descriptions here derive from corpus-based examinations of general written and of technical discourse. It is shown that causes of lexical confusion arise from formal, phonetic resemblances or semantic similarities, regular co-occurrence, incorrect morphological analogies and political governance of language. Context, knowledge, associations and experience determine the choice of lexical terms. Speakers need to apply linguistic and extra-linguistic principles in order to create adequate contexts. With the help of paronym examples and corpus data, these will be elucidated in more detail.