Sprache und Wissen (SuW)

In political discourses, there are constant wars about the "actual" meanings of words and the "right" and "wrong" terms. But do these language wars and the related language transformation also bring about cultural change? Or are they its consequence? This study investigates this question by looking at the discourse on same-sex marriage, on the meaning of marriage, and on terms like "gay marriage."

This volume brings together chapters from linguistics, theology, and other disciplines that deal with the topics of death and grief in analog and digital contexts. The interdisciplinary approaches to this topic offer valuable insights into the possibilities and challenges of communicative practices in relation to existential human experiences in a digitalized world.

This volume compiles the current state of knowledge of grammatical discourse analysis in theory and methodology by looking at practical analyses. Its chapters view grammar as a process that emerges and changes in a societal and communicative context, taking various methodological approaches to show how societal and grammatical processes are intertwined.

The goal of this volume is to explore language use in the eighteenth century, providing access to the people, discourses, and contexts of a bygone century. From the perspective of religious linguistics, it introduces text linguistic, lexical, and semantic approaches to the genre of Moravian biography on the basis of the critical edition of handwritten texts presented here.

Trust depends on communication in all life domains – whether in private life, institutions, medicine, education, or other areas. The mechanisms of trust vary, reflecting their diversity. What is the relationship between trust and language? This question requires a nuanced response. This edited volume focused on the linguistic perspective, combining it with facets from neighboring disciplines.

As the findings of this study show, whether the police believe somebody involved in a crime during an interrogation depends not just on the content of their account but also on their linguistic competence. The use of the high-prestige characteristics of educated language thus tends to increase the credibility ascribed to that person by the police.

This volume examines discussions surrounding the legitimacy of the Bundeswehr’s deployments abroad by looking at 2,773 newspaper texts. The study analyzes the use and mentions of prototypical arguments and characterizes their discursive actors. It sketches the trajectory taken by discourse between 1990 and 2015, describing both socially accepted and contentious knowledge in a subject area that has mostly been overlooked by linguistics so far.

This volume examines the stylistic characteristics of threatening and abusive letters by right-wing extremists as well as left-wing extremist position papers and claims to responsibility. It applies qualitative and quantitative analytical methods to identify and describe the differences and similarities between these text types. The findings facilitate understanding of these text types and provide new perspectives for forensic author analysis.

The documenta 14 made headlines due to its significant deficit, sparking a discussion about the use of taxpayer money in the art scene. The debate gave rise to a struggle for interpretative authority: Who has access to discourse? Who is able to assert their perspective on the crisis? What metaphors shape our view of reality? And what role does the critical relationship between art and the economy play in these discussions?

Although connectives fired the starting signal for construction grammar with let alone, they then faded from its focus – potentially due to the challenges that they present to the concept of construction on several levels. This book delves into connectives and looks at the examples of weil, da, and denn, analyzing their use in the interplay of form, function, and context in different communicative contexts.

Scholarly debates about morality necessarily raise the question of what we mean when we speak of morality or even moralization. The chapters in this book respond to these questions from multidisciplinary perspectives, bringing a range of knowledge domains into dialogue with each other, including history, political science, linguistics, philosophy, and theology.

This volume contains systematic considerations about the different methods and theories of religious linguistics and also brings together empirical analyses of contemporary discourse and examples of application by looking at linguistic history. It examines language usage as well as political and cultural practices that focus on transcendence.

This study addresses the rhetorical strategies that the agricultural industry and environmental conservation organizations employ to constitute scientific knowledge in the debate about the agricultural use of neonicotinoid pesticides. It presents a revised, rhetorically expanded model of text world theory that can be used in connection with established approaches from text linguistics, cognitive semantics, and classical rhetoric.

What is a nation? What is national identity? And what do they have to do with language? This study provides answers to these questions from the perspective of linguistic epistemology. It presents identity research and performs linguistic discourse analysis, examining German national identity from 1998 to 2007 to show that knowledge expressed linguistically that is relevant to understanding constitutes the essential core of identity itself.

This book establishes a typology of the arguments made about climate change in the German-speaking Swiss media between 2007 and 2014. By combining corpus linguistic, pragma-dialectical, and discourse analytical approaches, the sectoral theory of argumentation developed in this volume and embedded within its discourse-historical approach provides access to the material topoi of mass-media discourse about climate change.

This volume uses a socio-cognitive concept of knowledge and looks at everyday realms of experience to develop a comprehensive model of folk-linguistic knowledge, which is verified using empirical data. It is the first to comprehensively model lay people. The result is a theoretically based picture of the practitioners of folk linguistics as well as an extensive analysis of data on how linguistic concepts are used in everyday life.

The tensions between humans and nature shape everyday life and are reflected in language. This is why it is important to strengthen the relevance of language-based approaches and disciplines for examinations of topics like nature, the environment and sustainability. This volume brings contributions from linguistics together with perspectives from literary studies, pedagogy, HAS, history and philosophy.

Research from various corners has already shone light on the issue of what speakers know about their own language and their attitudes towards it. However, a joint theoretical and empirical basis is still missing. This volume provides an overview of the latest research in the field of lay linguistics and collects contributions that provide new theoretical stimuli, innovative methodological approaches and practical research.

In spite of extensive research in the field of cultural studies, the topic of fear has not yet been exhausted, especially considering that not even the semantics of its linguistic devices or the diversity of its linguistic constructions have been satisfactorily explained. This study looks to the present day to examine which media generate fear by which means and manage to assert themselves as an acceptable perspective on social reality.

How is it that a definition of a phenomenon like "burnout" can assert itself in spite of academic criticism? This book pursues this question by modelling the embeddedness of discursive practices of definition within academic culture and society and their increasing power. By taking a discourse-linguistic and praxeological approach, this book opens up new perspectives for the (linguistic) research into definition.

This linguistic study outlines patterns of communicative identity construction using the example of one conception of being German that has been publicly reflected upon and legitimised in federal German society since the 1980s: being Afro-German. This analysis illustrates both the multimodal constitution of language use and the diversity of concepts of national identity.

This study looks at the synchronous variation of the regional-syntactical [_sein_angefangen_] construction in the repertoire of autochthon Westphalian speakers. Using an interdisciplinary approach located between variation linguistics, conversation research and psycholinguistics, this study delves into the interplay between language use, language processing and usage-based syntactical representations in linguistic knowledge.

The publication takes a discourse-grammatical perspective to address discourses about destruction in the Second World War and post-war reconstruction in the cities of Mannheim, Paderborn, and Bremen from 1945 to 2016. The basic concept is that not only slogans but also unnoticed figures of speech – such as “in rubble and ashes” and “were the victims of destruction” and “the rebuilding took place” – shape our relationship to history.

Linguistics and medicine is a growing branch of research in the medical humanities. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume address current, socially relevant issues in doctor-patient communication, public mass-media discourses, and specialist communication. They examine the processes through which knowledge is constituted, negotiated, and transferred in various sociocultural contexts.

Modern heroes are people who fight and sacrifice, who help and volunteer, who work in silence but still achieve great things. They are role models, show moral courage and inspire us to follow in their footsteps. They promote reconciliation, impart values and generate identity. This monograph illustrates how the multifaceted phenomenon of the heroic is negotiated communicatively and how heroes shape our society with the way they think and act.

Empathy has become a guiding principle in the cognitive, social, and cultural sciences. Until now, linguistics has failed to adequately address the theme, despite the fact that language and verbal interaction in human relationships are the fundamental means and vehicles for empathy. This volume includes papers from the disciplines of philosophy, ethnology, psychology, and linguistics that are essential for a future linguistics of empathy.

A range of disciplines have described different access points to authenticity, but until now, there has been no empirical, discourse-linguistic investigation of authenticity. Personal authenticity is always linked to its social and situational performance but is manifested first and foremost in the attribution of authenticity. This study presents a systematic analytic model of the discursive creation of (non-)authenticity in the public sphere.

The study focuses on linguistically unsophisticated speakers – linguistic laypersons – and their understanding of good language. The perspectives taken in the study are native to the sociology of knowledge as well as cognitive and social linguistics. By means of qualitative content analysis, the linguistic understanding held by laypersons is reconstructed and modeled in accordance with the novel concept of “language-norm understanding.”

This study examines the variants of the modal verbs “können” [can], “mögen” [may], “müssen” [must], “sollen” [should], “wollen” [want], and “werden” [will], with a focus on the function of the epistemic modality. Their linguistic forms of realization can serve to express personal inferences or references to the statements of third parties. Besides theoretical definitions, the emphasis is on the empirical intelligibility of the phenomenon.

The term “big data” subsumes new forms of modern communication for using and exchanging electronic data. The essays in this volume analyze the “semantic battlefields” around the theme of mass digital data, explicating the ideologies implied by the communicative appropriation of digital data. These approaches are contrasted to studies examining how digital media users actually engage with big data.

This study investigates the notion of security in contentious public discourse to derive conclusions about contemporary societal world-views. It clearly shows that by means of diverse concepts of threat, security has become established as an omnipresent word of legitimation and mobilization, carrying great potential power for implementing political objectives and measures.

This volume demonstrates that pictures are a central communicative resource for constructing knowledge in economics. By examining discursively structured inventories of images, media-specific relations between text and image, and domain-typical ways of processing images, the essays in this volume draw conclusions about the historical and discursive context of pictures, harnessing perspectives from linguistic, literary, and cultural studies.

In the aftermath of school shootings, a discursive wave spreads through the mass media, constantly reformulating personal observations, scholarly proposals for solutions, and legislative measures. The study examines this example of the social constitution of knowledge using pragmatic and text linguistic methods to describe the patterns by which communication is structured in the public sphere.

This study applies the linguistic procedures of semantic frame analysis to trace the origins of complex specialized institutional terminology from the legal domain. Engaging in a detailed discussion of the advantages and limitations of this analytic method, it uses frame analysis to develop a semiotic history of concepts and concept networks in criminal and civil law.

The study examines the metaphorically shaped inventories of knowledge that help constitute discourses of economic and sociopolitical crisis, and their role in legitimizing policy interventions. The author proposes the metaphoric scenario as a unit of analysis and applies it to three crisis discourses: the “oil crisis”, the discussions about “Germany as a business location”, and “Agenda 2010.”

This discourse analysis systematically combines qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the linguistic forms and strategies that invoke agonality and mark conflicts in German and English. It applies a multilayered discourse methodology to compare the language used in media discourses relating to Hurricane Sandy (2012) and the energy extraction method of fracking.

Press articles convey, propagate, and (re)produce explicit and subliminal gender-specific images of body and role. This corpus linguistic analysis looks at patterns of such explicit and implicit statements about gender, both synchronically and diachronically. The social meanings and interpretations found in the texts are examined using a frame-semantic approach.

It is remarkable how little research has addressed the specific ways that language contributes to creating notions of gender and gender roles. This study addresses the overall question of how gender concepts are conveyed linguistically, and extends the question to consider how specific gender concepts found their way into school textbooks in the first place.

In the spirit of linguistics and epistemology, this volume addresses central aspects of the triad of language, knowledge, and discourse. The essays elaborate central questions in historical and cognitive semantics, the theory of language and language comprehension, and textual and discourse semantics.

This volume examines ethnic stereotypes of China and the Chinese people in German public media. It focuses on the formative cultural, linguistic, and media conditions for generating stereotypical views, their manifestations in the new millennium, and methods for studying them. The book surveys current research and formulates suggestions to improve German-Chinese intercultural communication.

Linguistics has been underrepresented in the interdisciplinary field of decision making research. This study seeks to fill this gap by developing a linguistic model for the communicative practice of decision making. For the first time, it combines the methodologies of functional pragmatics and discourse linguistics, illustrating the method by specifically examining German parliamentary decision making in the area of energy policy in 1983–2013.

Drawing upon public political discourse on economic crises, this study applies the principles of discursive linguistics to the history of argumentation to study how linguistics argumentation constructs "crises" as social facts. The author examines various questions, including how "crisis constructions" become incorporated in the legitimization of political action and how certain viewpoints become manifest.

This study develops a detailed description and analysis of passive structures in German along with an original frame of reference. The aim is to locate constructions within a construction network ("constructicon") and to view particularities of construction based on their actual implementations in usage. The study is founded on a broad-based corpus study.

This study examines major print media organizations to analyze and compare the essential features of media discourse on economic crisis in Germany and China. Researchers combine the methodology of linguistic frame analysis with qualitative research methods from the social sciences.

This compendium offers access to readers interested in the humanities and in social, cultural, and legal studies to a broad and multifaceted exploration of linguistic practices in the legal sciences. A range of scholars from the fields of linguistics and the legal sciences focus on specific performative aspects of the connections between language and the law.

This study examines user perspectives regarding virtual research environments in the area of digital publishing. It analyzes user requirements from the viewpoints of edition philology, text and discourse linguistics, information theory, and the theory of science. A focus is placed on information technology practices to manage and disseminate knowledge through digital data, text, discourse, and coherence structures.

Companies trade not only in raw materials and services but also systematically create factual, non-physical realities, such as identity, as part of their object worlds. To understand the linguistic quest for self-image and corporate identity, this study analyzes symbolic systems in companies’ representational texts, including slogans and mission statements.

Campaigns are among the most important instruments of publicly communicating one’s interests. (Re-)Producing the knowledge of a society about itself, they provide information on the collective identity of the German society. A linguistic approach interested in ‘reality’ and aiming to offer insight into societal processes will grant new access to this field.

This corpus pragmatic study addresses the symptomatic function of lexical and grammatical constructions in relation to the speaker’s affiliation with groups that develop discourses through their shared social position. It uses a corpus of spoken and written communications on the bioethics debate to examine qualitative and quantitative correlations between spoken and written verbal patterns and roles, medium and context.

Uwe Johnson’s novel Anniversaries weaves poetic sequences and realities into an artfully composed montage to represent a process of remembrance that is at once fragile and complex. This study combines linguistic and literary approaches to explore the unique structure of this poetics of memory – the reciprocal referentiality of memory and what is remembered – in each of its singular facets.

This study seeks to develop a foundation for a theory of meaning that views linguistic innovation and discursive dynamics as the normal state of affairs. It integrates systems and behavioral theory, identifying discourses as the loci of change in linguistic meaning. An analysis of multi-code metaphors makes plausible the discursive sensitivity of images in advertisements and leads to a proposal for a multicodal expansion of discourse analysis.

This book analyses the content of doctors’ statements uttered before the actual diagnosis as well as their linguistic and interactional features and cognitive processes. Prediagnostic statements include the patient in the process of finding a diagnosis but can also aim at guiding the patients’ expectations and creating trust.

Linguistic knowledge consists of a structured set of form-meaning pairs (constructions), which one can conceptualize as a network or “constructicon.” The essays in this volume engage in a theoretical and empirical exploration of different aspects of such a “constructicon.” The book is addressed to a sophisticated audience and to those readers interested in construction grammar and usage-based descriptive approaches.

The notions of Islam that are prevalent in the public imagination are founded and shaped by public discourse itself. This study examines the process by which perceptions of Islam are constructed using the methods of lexical semantics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. This specific combination of methods illustrates the unique textual and discursive potentials of contemporary linguistics.

The greater part of our knowledge is bound up in discursive contexts. That which incontrovertibly exists is presented discursively as a fact. Thus, factual knowledge is produced in discourses. This role of discourse lends great relevance to discursive analysis and to the process of deciphering discursive practices. This is all the more true when power relations determine which knowledge is worthy of preservation and which should be considered expendable. The studies included in this volume undertake an analysis of discourse from the perspectives of linguistics, sociology, philosophy, and risk research.

Approximately fifty percent of the form and the meaning of transparent German particle verbs with “an” can be deduced from the minimal semantic argument structure of the verb and particle. The aim of this study is to create a format for understanding the remaining fifty percent using construction grammar analysis. The study employs frame semantics to explain the compositionality of the verb and the construction. The system is based on a flexible schema-instance relationship, where instances are the prototypes for schemata.

Using the example of “nonfinite verbal construction” (“Me give up?”), this book tries to move from the everyday use of grammatical construction to its representation in linguistic usage knowledge. Some characteristics of “nonfinite verbal constructions” are discussed across languages and with a view to the problem area of speech and writing.

This interdisciplinary volume contains articles by well-known researchers on the function of art as a medium for the self-affirmation of the individual, of the social group, or of the collective. It is a compendium for all those involved at the theoretical and practical levels in the description, communication, and criticism of art.

The analysis of legal texts in the context of legislation is a previously unexplored field of research. Consequently, this study examines the formation of legal norms using the example of the “online search”. Taking over 1000 texts as reference material, the study illuminates the discourse actors, the semantic struggles and the process of legal textual formulation involved in the legislation.

Using linguistic instruments this work sets out to give a transparent description of the text-supported and discourse-based legal dispute in the process of reaching a legal judgement. It examines a corpus of authentic texts originating from six related legal cases in Germany, identifying distinct speech act patterns and the specific action strategies and perspective-defining efforts that are used with them. With their help a model is developed for the analysis of this specialized communication process.

This work examines discourse analysis in terms of its theory and methodology and their empirical implementation. The linguistics of discourse is seen as being based in action theory. A multilevel discourse analysis model is developed as methodology. With reference to the example of the bioethical discourse surrounding stem cell research, the author shows how keywords, metaphors and the topoi of argumentation are positioned and semantically fixed in the context of ideological argumentation and how this leads to a perspectivized construct of reality.

The cipher “1968” evokes a remembrance that has a strong impact on the collective memory, especially through its language. After forty years the time has come for an interim status report, which this collective volume undertakes. It mainly contains linguistic contributions on “1968”, presenting and describing the various manifestations and aspects of this language. Thus, it represents a contribution of cultural-studies to the history of language, as well as to semiotics, and to the history of the media and contemporary history.

The subject of this book is the media coverage of avian flu (bird flu) in 2006. A large part of media coverage consists of reflection on the media contributions and their potential power, where one aspect stands out in particular: the effect of fear. This is accomplished by means of the two normative poles ‑ playing down the issue and scaremongering. The primary aim of the book is to explain all phenomena, and especially those that are contradictory at first glance. Here, referring to Foucault’s discourse concept, the key category of the discursive role is developed.

Discourse and ways of thinking are mirrored in typical language usage. With corpus linguistic methods it is possible to expose recurring formula and patterns of language usage and their variations. This book demonstrates how inductive theories for cultural studies analyses can be derived from large bodies of text. The methods are illustrated with a detailed analysis of a sample of about 45,000 articles from the ‘Neuen Zürcher Zeitung,’ from between 1995 and 2005. The book is aimed at both scholars doing research in cultural studies and advanced students.

In this volume, the research network Language and Knowledge presents theoretical and methodological foundations of research into the constitution of knowledge in linguistic formations. A particular focus is placed on the concepts of knowledge and discourse, alongside methodological issues from conversational analysis, cognitive grammar and construction grammar. The descriptive instruments presented are demonstrated in numerous individual analyses from the fields of nanotechnology, biomedicine, politics, education, art, religion, mathematics, law and economics.

The book is concerned with frame theory, which in recent years has experienced an immense growth in interest, not only in Germanic Linguistics. Frames are knowledge structures in the long-term memory which are of relevance for understanding expressions in language. Thus, for example, the gratuity frame makes knowledge available about eating in a restaurant. Frames can also be deployed as analytical tools. This is demonstrated using the metaphor of "financial investors as locusts" coined by the then-SPD Minister of Labour Franz Müntefering.

The German verbs verwerfen, nicht implantieren or abtöten have the same denotations when used in reference to dealing with artificially-inseminated embryos; however, the meanings of these words are respectively different. The book examines, against the background of the debate about the introduction of pre-implantation diagnostics in Germany, the role of linguistic naming – so-called thematizations – in the public sphere. The study shows that these thematizations not only reflect linguistic controversy, but at the same time, precisely mirror the current societal debates.