Band 2023, Heft 79

This study examines the use of metaphors in the German debate on European monetary and fiscal policy. Though the debates in this policy area garnered considerable interest among linguists, so far there is a gap concerning interdisciplinary comparative studies that examine metaphorical expressions in regard to their divergent political use. This study addresses said gap by posing two explorative research questions: Which metaphors shape the German political debate on European monetary and fiscal policy? And is there a relationship between the use of metaphors and the political perspective of the people using them? To examine these questions, we developed an innovative methodological triangulation that combines qualitative, hermeneutic metaphorical analyses with quantitative, data-driven approaches of corpus linguistics. By analyzing the communication of eleven political actors during three debates on Eurozone policy, we identify the most salient metaphors and compare their political usage. Our results show four types of metaphorical expressions which can be distinguished by their relative openness regarding political perspective and their respective referent. Thereby, this study firstly provides an important guide to understanding the debate at hand; secondly, sharpens the theoretical underpinnings of the comprehension of political metaphors as a whole; and thirdly, is a valuable contribution to the methodical study of metaphorical expressions in the field of applied linguistics.

This article focuses on the use of first person plural ‚wir‘ ( we ) in treatment recommendations. After outlining the research on practices of recommending and decision making in medical interaction as well as the relevance of these practices for therapeutic interventions, we show on the basis of 56 oncological consultations how doctors use ‚wir‘ ( we ) to encode collective agency (e. g. Enfield 2017) and thus index the recommendations as collectively decided upon by a medical team. Using the methods of Interactional Linguistics (e. g. Imo/Lanwer 2017), we then highlight two different strategies doctors use to account for these recommendations: (i) by explicitly naming the tumor board (and sometimes its members) as the decision-making body and thereby emphasizing the collective expertise of the different specialists who are part of the tumor board or (ii) by grounding the recommendation in the diagnosis itself and thus presenting the therapy as routine treatment to which there is no feasible alternative. Finally, we discuss whether our findings are in line with shared decision making (e. g. Koerfer/Albus 2015), which is often regarded to be the ideal in this context. The article aims to contribute to an empirically grounded description of decision-making processes in medical interaction and the role personal pronouns as markers of agency play in them.

Hannah Arendt's political theory remains influential in both the Humanities and the Social Sciences, including in sociology, educational sciences and political education. Arendt's works are utilized in different ways in these contexts. Within sociolinguistics and conversational linguistics, however, this does not seem to be the case. The present article aims to overcome this shortcoming by exploring opportunities for analytically integrating Arendt's understanding of the political and the conversation analysis point of view. Combining these two perspectives results in the added value of expanding the interpretive framework to include Arendt's dimensions of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and access to the world. In line with this goal, the respective phenomenological influences of both approaches, Arendt’s political theory and the phenomenological precursors of conversation analysis, are considered separately. After providing an overview of the phenomenological roots for socio- and conversation analysis (Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, Harold Garfinkel), Arendt's concept of the political is discussed. Subsequently, the analytical nexus of the approaches are elaborated on in the form of three theses. It is argued that Arendt developed an innovative phenomenological concept of plurality which has the potential of forming the basis for an interpretive tool for the analysis of oral interaction (in line with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology).

We analyse how teachers position themselves towards conspiracy theories in teaching contexts following the methodology of conversation analysis and positioning theory. For the analysis we selected sequences in which three teachers narrate and comment retrospectively on incidents from their everyday school life in which their students confronted them with conspiracy theories. Since conspiracy theories are seen as a complex and potentially explosive phenomenon in both public and academic discourse, many see it as mandatory to take or at least express a critical stance towards them. In general, however, conspiracy theories make it difficult to take a clear position, as they are often vague and incoherent on evaluative, textual, functional and epistemic levels. These ambiguities are also reflected in the teachers’ positions as evidenced in our data: On the one hand, they emphasise the need to raising students’ awareness of how to identify conspiracy theories and how to adopt a critical stance towards them. On the other hand, the micro-analytical reconstruction of the narrative sequences of concrete classroom situations shows that the teachers do not always act in line with these beliefs. This can be interpreted as a tension between socially conforming positioning acts towards conspiracy theories on the one and the teachers‘ professional self-perception on the other hand.