Die Figurativität der allgemeinen Wissenschaftssprache des Deutschen

Academic discourse relies on a common register that reaches across disciplinary boundaries. This so-called common language of academia includes terms denoting common objects and actions of academic work in the fields of knowing, understanding and learning, of perceiving and observing, of designing and devising as well as of writing and speaking in their many different forms. In German academic discourse, this common register is highly figurative, often creating problems in bilingual contexts as well as during students’ acquisition of academic discourse. This paper presents an ongoing project to identify, describe and categorize the lexical dimension of this common language of academia by means of corpus-linguistic analyses. It presents operators to distinguish said register from non-academic German as well as discipline-specific discourse. Following these filtering procedures, the figurativity of the identified items is discussed in terms of their spatial-haptic, optical-visual, mental-cognitive and acoustic-linguistic character. Prominent cases of ambiguity, when specific lexical items can be used and read as expressing two figurative aspects, are also identified

Genre-related language change:Discourse- and corpus-linguistic perspectives on Austrian German 1970-2010

The motivation and diffusion of language change have been modelled and discussed in frequently conflicting terms, often focused on an isolated set of features rather than more integrative sociolinguistic concerns. We present a case study of language change in Austrian German along a broad range of lexical, syntactic as well as textual features, approached through a corpus based on genres situated in the pertinent fields of news reporting, education and business. Based on our results, we argue that drawing on 'genre' as socially-situated, interactive and goal-oriented patterns of language use provides both a conceptual and empirical framework that may help address some of the more prominent issues in modelling language change: as a concept, it provides a frame within which to grasp the social changes driving language change; as empirical focus, it guides data selection and allows us to describe and explicate complex and seemingly contradictory diffusion patterns

Integration durch Strafe? Die Normalisierung paternalistischer Diskursfiguren zur "Integrationsunwilligkeit"

In zahlreichen europäischen Ländern wurden jüngst internationale Verträge und Gesetze, in denen man gerne »europäische Grundwerte« erkennen möchte, unter Hinweis auf den Schutz ebendieser in Frage gestellt oder außer Kraft gesetzt. Auch in Österreich konstruiert der politische Diskurs Fragen der Migration und Integration zunehmend als Sicherheitsthemen. Dieser Beitrag liefert eine detaillierte diskurshistorische Studie eines Diskursstranges, über den der Schlüsselbegriff »Integrationsunwilligkeit« in Österreich etabliert wurde. Qualitative Analysen der Argumentationsmuster in dem damit zugleich normalisierten Narrativ von »Integration durch Strafe« werden ergänzt durch korpuslinguistische Analysen relevanter Diskursfelder in Gesetzgebung, Rechtsprechung und parlamentarischen Debatten

Borders, Fences, and Limits—Protecting Austria From Refugees:Metadiscursive Negotiation of Meaning in the Current Refugee Crisis

The so-called refugee crisis presents a field of discursive struggle over meanings in politics. In Austria, mediatized politics in 2015 and 2016 was dominated by metadiscursive negotiation of terminology related to building a border fence and setting a maximum limit on refugees. Both issues raised serious ideological and legal concerns and were thus largely euphemized; as responses to ever-increasing pressure from the political right, however, they were also intended as signals to voters. This article presents a discourse-historical study of the normalization of restrictive policies in the theoretical framework of border and body politics, otherness, and mediatization

Testing, stretching, and aligning:Using ‘ironic personae’ to make sense of complicated issues

Irony and humor play an important role in both organizing and organizations, because they both help to collide and contrast ideas as well as mitigate and moderate criticism. Our empirical observations of a senior management team suggest participants frequently use verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor through ‘ironic personae’ – a cast of characters, real or imaginary – as a vehicle for pragmatically making sense of complicated topics. We show how ironic personae perform three functions: (i) testing new positions on topics in a non-committal way; (ii) stretching the frame of comparison of a group; and (iii) aligning shared understanding and commitment. Thus, our analysis sheds light on an underexplored and undertheorised pragmatic vehicle for the expression of humorous verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor

Discourse and religion in educational practice

Despite the existence of long-held binaries between secular and sacred, private and public spaces, school and religious literacies in many contemporary societies, the significance of religion and its relationship to education and society more broadly has become increasingly topical. Yet, it is only recently that the investigation of the nexus of discourse and religion in educational practice has started to receive some scholarly attention. In this chapter, religion is understood as a cultural practice, historically situated and embedded in specific local and global contexts. This view of religion stresses the social alongside the subjective or experiential dimensions. It explores how through active participation and apprenticeship in culturally appropriate practices and behaviors often mediated intergenerationally and the mobilisation of linguistic and other semiotic resources but also affective, social and material resources, membership in religious communities is constructed and affirmed. The chapter reviews research strands that have explored different aspects of discourse and religion in educational practice as a growing interdisciplinary field. Research strands have examined the place and purpose of religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular in English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes and the interplay of religion and teaching and learning in a wide range of religious and increasingly secular educational contexts. They provide useful insights for scholars of discourse studies to issues of identity, socialisation, pedagogy and language policy