Volume 48, Issue 1

This article contains a comparative study of heuristic textual practices in various scientific disciplines. By this we mean formulation practices with which new knowledge is generated in institutionally influenced routines and connected to existing knowledge, e. g. ‚highlighting the relevance of a research topic‘, ‚defining a concept‘ or ‚supporting a statement argumentatively‘. The aim is to find out to what extent such textual practices occur in different scientific disciplines, how they are distributed and combined. Furthermore, we study the effects domain-specific contexts have on heuristic textual practices. The data basis of our study is a corpus of 65 dissertations from the 13 different faculties of the TU Darmstadt. In the pilot study we report here, we examined the introductory chapters of the dissertations. Methodologically, it is an annotation study: Based on the current state of research on the subject, we have derived a basic annotation scheme, which we have developed and refined in a collaborative process of guideline creation. Our study affiliates on socio-pragmatic research on text production and formulation routines in the sciences. It is theoretically informed by the philosophy of science research on heuristics, methodically we make a contribution to the scientific debate on collaborative annotation procedures.

Based on a corpus study conducted using the GerManC corpus (1650–1800), the paper sketches the functional and sociosymbolic development of subordinate clause constructions introduced by the subjunctor da ‘since’ in different text genres. In the second half of the 17 th and the first half of the 18 th century, the da clauses were characterized by semantic vagueness: Besides temporal, spatial and causal relations, the subjunctor established conditional, concessive, and adversative links between clauses. The corpus study reveals that different genres are crucial to the readings of da clauses. Spatial and temporal usages, for example, occur more often in sermons than in other genres. The conditional reading, in contrast, strongly tends to occur in legal texts, where it displays very high frequency. This could be the reason why da clauses carry indexical meaning in contemporary German and are associated with formal language. Over the course of the 18 th century, the causal usages increase in all genres. Surprisingly, these causal da clauses tend to be placed in front of the matrix clause despite the overall tendency of causal clauses to follow the matrix clause.

The present paper deals with item- and feature-based changes of the modal semi-schematic construction with verstehen in written German during the 20th century. To understand this development, the century is divided into four equal periods. Applying a simple collexeme analysis for each time span, the study ascertains which lexical verbs appear as typical items in a schematic slot constituting its collostructional profile. Comparing the distributional behavior manually in a pairwise fashion, the analysis reveals that solely three verbs, namely machen , umgehen and meistern , stay constantly highly attracted within the top collexemes of the verstehen -construction during the 20th century. Using a dependency-based semantic space model, the study demonstrates that the collostructional profile of the fourth period differs considerably from the previous time span. Utilizing random forest of conditional inference trees, changes in terms of usage features of the modal construction are pinpointed. As a result, its grammaticality degree has not increased demonstrating solely minor changes in temporal functionality as well as in realization of subject forms.

Under the background of the current refugee crisis in Europe, Germany is undoubtedly playing an increasingly decisive role, which is why the substantive changes to German Asylum Act have attracted attention worldwide. In order to contribute to a better understanding of the information delivery and communication of the Asylum Act, this article analyzes the relevant paragraphs of this Act from a functional sentence perspective (FSP). By scrutinizing the influencing factors of the communicative dynamics (CD) of the Asylum Act, this article examines and clarifies how FSP participates in the communication of the Act. Besides tracking and assessing the related approach, varied types of results that can be achieved by functional analysis are particularly presented. This article hopes to produce some new insights into the FSP theory and shed light on future research directions for the applications of FSP.