Based on current research in historical and cognitive linguistics this thesis examines the German semantic field ( ), partly contrasting it with its Swedish correspondent . Starting at the time of ...Old High German the analysis follows the historical development of word and concept, exploring how attitudes to the Christian religion are verbalised in different ages. One important assumption is that ideas and attitudes are accessible to us through the lexicalised items of a language. The thesis is part of the interlingual research project “Ethical concepts and mental cultures”, which, by applying a pluralistic method, examines various ethical fields, and assumes as central the oppositions a/o (action directed to others vs. to oneself), right/wrong (virtues vs. vices) and too much/too little vs. the ideal mean. This study shows that true piety, in order to be classified as a virtue, has to include both trust and critical thinking in equal proportions and that if either of the two outweighs the other the virtue will become a vice. Furthermore, it is shown that a shift in meaning has taken place from ‘profitable’ or ‘advantageous’ in Old High German, through ‘excellent’, ‘righteous’, ‘virtuous’ into ‘religious’, with Luther’s usage as the critical factor in giving the word its religious meaning. As a result of Secularisation and Individualisation negative connotations have developed in modern German usage which do not seem to exist to the same extent in modern Swedish. This is confirmed by two corpus studies, evaluating the usage of fromm/from in German and Swedish newspaper texts, according to which fromm tends to be transferred to profane contexts, meaning for example ‘hypocritical’, ‘uncritically credulous’ and ‘uncritically obedient’ more frequently than its Swedish equivalent. Based on results from socio-psychological research the study also identifies some strategies that speakers employ in order to mark distance or adherence to a group of believers or non-believers, for example metaphors (i.a. GOOD IS UP ÷ BAD IS DOWN) or stereotypes, which are often used to ridicule, criticise or insult a member of another group in order to strengthen the speaker’s own social identity.
Las reflexiones sobre la actividad de traducción y sus resultados han estado marcadas históricamente por el mayor o menor alejamiento respecto de la obra original. También a través del tiempo se ha ...intentado dar respuesta a la pregunta ¿qué es una buena traducción? con la formulación de reglas generales, es decir, prescribiendo. Afortunadamente, hacia mediados del siglo XX, comienza a sistematizarse el estudio de la actividad de traducción y se entiende la complejidad que la sustenta, ya que en ella confluyen aspectos diversos, tanto lingüísticos como cognitivos, culturales o comparativos. De allí en más, los estudios sobre la traducción abandonan la prescripción y asumen una mirada descriptiva y explicativa, que se relaciona con las normas del género discursivo que se traduce, con las normas sociales del público para el cual se traduce y con las que se establecen entre la editorial o cliente y el traductor. Desde las aparentemente ingenuas definiciones de traducción, pasando por un recorte histórico de la evolución de su estudio, este libro recorre la relación entre lingüística y traducción, discute la evolución de los conceptos de unidad de traducción y equivalencia, expone la problematización del sentido en la lexicología y la terminología, que son campos afines con la traducción, e introduce la relación entre cultura y traducción.
This study investigates, theoretically and empirically, the role of animacy in the development of gender systems. The theoretical background is a grammaticalisation approach to language change. ...Concerning gender, this presupposes that classifications begin as semantic distinctions in the realm of animacy with flexible, contextually based agreement between the gender-marking elements. This kind of gender is called contextual gender. In the course of time, these classifications will spread into other areas, they become desemanticized and the agreement relation grammaticalizes into one of government where the inherent gender of the head noun controls the gender of the agreeing elements, irrespective of contextual factors When this leads to a great number of violations of the principles of contextual agreement in the realm of animacy, a new cycle of semantic classification will begin, creating layers of classifications. For German and Swedish two different layers are discerned respectively. The empirical starting point of this project was the observation of two opposite developments in the area of female person reference in Germany and Sweden. As a consequence of feminist critique of language, mainly targeted at the use of socalled masculine generics, in Germany the use of female gender-specific nouns increased substantially, the major means being female derivation with –in, so-called motion. Although similar means for female derivation exist in Swedish, i.e. -inna and -ska, the number of derivations used is decreasing. In order to isolate socio-cultural and historical facts from language-internal mechanisms behind the diverging tendencies, a historical sketch of the development of equal rights, of language criticism and of the development of the female suffixes is drawn for the respective countries. It is obvious, that the German strategy to achieve gender-fair language use is established by making women visible by means of motion, while in Sweden the use of gender-neutral forms for a long period of time has been regarded as a sign of equality. This ‘neutral’ use of former masculine and male-specific forms has been made possible by the merging of the two nominal genders masculine and feminine into uter (Sw. utrum). A contrastive study of comparable German and Swedish newspaper texts shows that the lack of motion in Swedish is partly compensated by composition and attribution with gender-specific lexemes. Still, the 64% gender-specific noun phrases in Swedish cannot compare with the 95% in German. But the use of gender-specific forms for well over half of the person references calls into doubt the general opinion shared by most Swedes that Swedish has a gender-neutral person reference system. Linguistic asymmetry persists as long as gender-specification is restricted to one half of the gendered population, whatever the means for specification. The almost exclusive use of gender-specific forms in German is seen as indicative of a grammaticalisation process. Haspelmaths invisible hand explanation of grammaticalisation is used to show how the development of -in in German fulfils just about every requirement on a grammaticalisation process – language-external as well as -internal – while -inna and -ska neither are promoted sufficiently by the speech community nor does there exist a paradigm that could accommodate them. In contrast to Swedish, where the suffixes remain strictly derivational, it is demonstrated that -in is turning into an inflectional marker. The German gender sub-system for person reference is developing into a semantically based system with genderflexible person denominations. A study of the pronouns agreeing with non-personal-agents in a parallel corpus of EU-documents shows that other aspects than purely referential or formal ones impinge on the choice of agreement forms. Non-personal-agents in certain contexts expose both agency and intentionality, which turns them into suitable agreement partners for animate pronouns. In Swedish, all animate pronouns are sexed, leaving a “Leerstelle” for these inanimate but agentive and intentional referents. In German, this problem is covered by the polysemy of the personal pronouns. Non-personal-agents are shown to be one possiblesource for the spreading of a linguistic innovation from the realm of animacy into inanimate contexts via semantic and thematic roles that share important features with animates proper. The last study makes use of different types of German monolingual corpora in order to investigate the agreement between inanimate nouns with female inherent gender – from non-personal-agents and abstracts to concrete nouns – and agent nouns which can potentially expose agreement by female derivation. Although the results are rather heterogeneous, they allow the formulation of the hypothesis that agreement is more likely to occur with nouns for which a metaphorical bridge to stereotypical conceptions of femininity can be constructed and that key collocations with high frequency such as die Kirche als Trägerin or die DNA als Trägerin der Erbinformation contribute significantly to the spread of the agreement pattern.
Die Methoden, die sich im Bereich der Sekundarstufe zum Erlernen der deutschen Sprache entwickelt haben, und die Fortschritte der Linguistik erlauben, ja verpflichten heute, Grammatiken anders zu ...schreiben. Die Grammatik des Didaktikers, der der Verfasser eines solchen Werkes sein muß, umfaßt notwendigerweise die verschiedenen Bereiche der Linguistik und räumt der Prosodie einen großen Raum ein -in enger Verbindung mit Syntax und kontextueller Semantik. Da diese Art Grammatik für junge Lerner bestimmt ist, muß sie besonders auf pädagogische Brauchbarkeit achten, und ist daher bisweilen mehr an schematischen Darstellungen als an einer Genauigkeit orientiert, die der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit vorbehalten bleibt. Als notwendige Ergänzung von Methoden, die auf die Gestalttheorie und auf den Behaviorismus zurückgehen, soll eine Grammatik des Deutschen dazu anregen, über das Funktionieren der Sprache nachzudeuten, und in zahl reichen Übungen zu deren besseren Beherrschung führen.
L'évolution des méthodes d'apprentissage de l'allemand dans l'enseignement secondaire et les progrès de la linguistique permettent et obligent d'écrire aujourd'hui d'autres grammaires. Embrassant nécessairement les multiples domaines qui composent la linguistique, la grammaire du didacticien que doit être l'auteur d'un ouvrage à ce niveau accorde une grande place aux faits de prosodie, liés étroitement à la syntaxe et à la sémantique contextuelle. Destiné aux jeunes apprenants, ce type d'ouvrage doit viser à l'efficacité pédagogique, et de ce fait parfois plus à la schématisation qu'à la parfaite exactitude que seul peut atteindre l'ouvrage de recherche. Complément nécessaire de méthodes fondées sur le gestaltisme et le behaviorisme, une grammaire de l'allemand doit inviter à réfléchir sur le fonctionnement de la langue et à en parfaire la maîtrise par de nombreux exercices.
Pastré Jean-Marc. Collèges et lycées : les enjeux d'une grammaire de l'allemand. In: Cahiers de l'APLIUT, volume 10, numéro 4, 1991. Les Grammaires, du traité théorique au manuel pédagogique de l'ouvrage de référence au recueil d'exercices. pp. 66-73.
