Kritisieren und Komplimentieren : Ergebnisse kontrastiver Studien deutsch-türkisch zum Umgang mit sprachlicher Höflichkeit

Politeness has become a key qualification in intercultural competence and didactics. The paper presents parts of an empirical research of the development and shaping of verbal politeness in critical incidents investigating the way German and Turkish students of the German language deal with criticism and complimenting. The findings show that Turkish students of German as a foreign language avoid direct criticism and prefer manners considered to be polite in German. Complimenting is an expression of their own positive feelings and acts as “messages about oneself”, whereas the German students prefer “meritorious praise” referring to merits. The discriminating effects of migration within the Turkish students are smaller than expected perhaps because of the increase of transcultural knowledge. This should give new ideas for the didactics of politeness

Interkulturalität – immer noch eine Herausforderung für Linguistik und Deutsch als Fremdsprache

The paper discusses the perspectives of intercultural linguistics as a new paradigm of German philology. Concepts of cultural standards are critizised and deficits of cultural contrastive analysis are demonstrated as shown by the example of code mixing. It is argued that interculturality is more than cultural contrastivity and more than transculturality and furthermore that for intercultural research the analysis of language is of utmost importance. Finally the paper demonstrates that in the central subject of intercultural communication it is worth while not only looking at misunderstandings but also at the different modes of linguistic politeness