Volume 2025, Issue 83

This article presents the results of a linguistic study designed to investigate how and for what purpose age is systematically made relevant in (municipal) political communication formats, older age is politicized, and how representations of age are popularized. On the basis of three recorded video excerpts of political speeches and statements, it is shown to what extent age references or representations are negotiated by the participants to achieve certain communicative goals. Among other things, deficits with regard to a lack of consideration of vulnerable groups are denounced by political agents alike. This kind of portrayal has the potential to be face-threatening for the mayors and city administrations involved. In this article, however, it is not about communication in old age, but about communication and popularization of old age in political speeches and statements.

In Belgium, the ‘Commission of the German-speaking Community for German legal terminology’ plays an important role in the development of a proper “Belgian-German” legal language. It is responsible for translating federal legislative terminology into German. As such, it guards both the internal (within Belgium) and external (with other German-speaking legal systems) terminological consistency and enhances the quality of legal translations. However, empirical data on the problems that the Commission encounters and the strategies employed to overcome these are currently lacking. Without such insights, the Commission – which faces a substantial workload – will have difficulties optimising its current translation policy. To this end, this paper looks at working documents provided by the Commission which contain problematic terminological issues the Commission needed to resolve. This study analyses (i) which problems the Commission encountered, (ii) which (legal) sources it solicited, and (iii) which solutions it proposed. Results show that the Commission faces a variety of recurring problems, yet can maintain a consistent translation policy. More challenging, however, are the limited extent to which the Commission considers European legislation and the need to further explore the pragmatic dimension (readability, textual cohesion, plain language) of legislative language.

Forests are the site and cause of many conflicts which exist mainly due to different concepts and functions of forests, different expectations of the stakeholders and associated attitudes. Society's growing demand for wood in itself is also problematic, as is the increasing demand to leave forests untouched to promote biodiversity and climate protection. Based on a small corpus of texts published by six German forestry offices on the subject of fully mechanised timber harvesting, this article analyses how forestry offices position themselves in relation to timber harvesting and which topoi they use to argue in favour of the use of the so-called harvester. The results show that, in their texts, forestry offices react to socially controversial issues rather than to forestry-related issues, among other things through the use of topoi, and thus enter into a dialogue with the public.

Research into the characteristics of spoken language has been a core component of linguistics for many years and has led to the realisation that oral and written language have different functions and purposes. This knowledge is crucial for (prospective) German teachers. However, empirical data from small student groups working on data of classroom interaction show that students often appear to analyse these data based on written language norms. This can be reconstructed by analysing the students‘ metapragmatic statements. The article suggests that valuable insights into issues relevant to the acquisition of subject-specific concepts can be gained from the analysis of these statements. From this professionalisation-oriented perspective on tertiary learning, the linguistic concept on orality can be understood as a threshold concept that is difficult for students to grasp due to their written language bias.

It has been asserted that the development of sociolinguistic perception (including language attitudes) is protracted, with changes continuing throughout childhood, adolescence, and even into adulthood. However, this assumption of lifelong attitudinal development has primarily been explored on the basis of dialects and accents of English; whether the same is true in other contexts is unclear. In this contribution, we employ generalized additive modeling to investigate cross-sectional developmental trajectories of language attitudes among 304 German-speaking Austrian respondents across adolescence and adulthood (ages 14–84). Results underscore that language attitudes appear to remain flexible across the whole of life, and changes in language attitudes are especially pronounced among individuals in later life. Moreover, given the tenet that linguistic development is shaped by an individual’s lived experiences and reactions to life-stage specific linguistic demands, we investigate for the first time the extent to which cross-sectional changes in language attitudes are sensitive to significant life events, specifically ‘beginning a degree’, ‘entry into the workforce’, and ‘retirement’. Our findings reveal that retirement temporally coincides with particularly strong patterns of discontinuity in language attitudes. The results contribute to current issues regarding the temporal specificity of language development across the lifespan, and to outstanding questions concerning what drives this development.

Multimodal metaphor research has received significant attention in recent years, with numerous empirical studies examining metaphors across diverse genres. However, a comprehensive theoretical framework for the qualitative analysis of metaphors in multimodal communication is still lacking. By comparing theoretical approaches from social semiotics and cognitive linguistics, this study emphasizes the complementarity between these two theoretical perspectives and proposes the social semiotic integration model. The model suggests interpreting semiotic representations based on signs’ metafunctions in social semiotics and incorporates conceptual blending theory to explain the metaphors’ cognitive mechanisms. It also emphasizes the influence of pragmatic factors and relevant elements in the interpretation of semiotic representations. Using two editorial cartoons as case studies, the paper demonstrates how this model enhances metaphor analysis in multimodal contexts, leading to a deeper understanding of the text's overall meaning.