Volume 44, Issue 1

On the basis of a law text corpus which consists of judicial decisions and jurisprudential papers on so-called assisted suicide from 1977 to 2011, agonal centres are determined within the paradigm of corpus-based pragma-semiotic text analysis. Agonal centres are defined as action-guiding concepts that are in conflict with each other concerning the general acceptance of event interpretations, options for actions, claims of validity, contextual knowledge and values. These action-guiding concepts are derived with the help of quantitative and qualitative methods. Discourse linguistic interpretations are thus rendered more objective with the help of semi-automatic methods; furthermore, specific discourse features of the discourse and approaches to interpretation can be derived from (un)expected linguistic significances of occurrence, distribution, frequency etc. at the linguistic surface. Finally, these agonal centres specific to the language of law are compared to agonal centres which are determined on the basis of a media corpus on the same issue. This provides a comparative insight into the constitution of a seemingly identical fact in everyday and special language, which demonstrates the sociopolitical relevance of analysing the constitution of reality as instructed by language.

This paper proposes a reception-oriented and discursive concept of genre by using the example of „Wutreden“, i. e. public and medially distributed rants and their coverage in (online) media and Web 2.0. On the basis of a corpus of video recordings and transcriptions of Wutreden as well as comments made by journalists and users, it is shown that neither their linguistic features nor their situational functions qualify Wutreden as a distinct genre. Rather, the medial and internet-based recontextualisations of Wutreden build an orienting framework for the reception of discourse. It is these recontextualisations that put disparate speech events in order, so that they can be received as instances of one single genre. The analysis of accompanying discourse like media reports, user comments, and tweets as well as the multimodal surroundings of the respective videos shows, that such documents of reception reflect a genre awareness of Wutreden which will shape their reception as well as the follow-up discourse. The increase of Wutreden in the recent past as appears to be as a result of altered conditions of reception in online environments – conditions, which the linguistic study of genre and genre change within digital media should not neglect .

This paper investigates the structure and emergence of a new construction in German, the wie -X- ist-das-denn! exclamative (roughly corresponding to ‚How X is that!‘), usually with X being an evaluative adjective. A quantitative and qualitative investigation based on the DeReKo (German reference corpus) shows that the construction is spreading also in written German. It also reveals a clear prototype with little variation (the latter affecting the placement and use of the modal question particle denn , the use of other pronouns than das , and the use of non-evaluative adjectives in the X position). On the basis of a discussion of the construction’s relationship to various neighbouring constructions it is shown that it strongly resembles the German leading question construction, but differs from the latter above all in invariably placing the nuclear accent on the demonstrative das . It is argued that the most plausible origin of the new construction therefore is a blend of the leading question construction with the prosodic exclamative construction, which has led to the cancellation of the implicature inherent in leading questions. While in leading questions, the implicature is that the proposition contained in it is wrong, the new exclamative construction has a direct semantic-pragmatic reading which can be paraphrased as an expression of the speaker’s surprise about the degree to which the property expressed in the X-position applies to the referent of das.