Language and German Disunity


Book Description

"This book investigates the history of national disunity in Germany since the end of the Second World War from a linguistic perspective: what was the role of language in the ideological conflicts of the Cold War and in the difficult process of rebuilding the German nation after 1990?" "German division and re-unification were crucial to the development of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. This account of the relationship between language and social conflict in Germany throws new light on these events and raises important questions for the study of divided speech communities elsewhere. The book will interest sociolinguists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists."--BOOK JACKET.




Language and German Disunity


Book Description

"This book investigates the history of national disunity in Germany since the end of the Second World War from a linguistic perspective : what was the role of language in the ideological conflicts of the Cold War and in the difficult process of rebuilding the German nation after 1990?" "German division and re-unification were crucial to the development of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. This account of the relationship between language and social conflict in Germany throws new light on these events and raises important questions for the study of divided speech communities elsewhere. The book will interest sociolinguists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists."--Résumé de l'éditeur




Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages


Book Description

Purism is an aspect of linguistic study which appeals not only to the scholar but also to the layperson. Somehow, ordinary speakers with many different mother tongues and with no formal training in linguistics share certain beliefs about what language is, how it develops or should develop, whether it has good or bad qualities, etc. The topic of linguistic purism in its many realisations is the subject of this volume of 19 articles selected from the contributions presented at a conference at the University of Bristol in 2003. In particular, the articles deal with the relationship of purism to historical prescriptivism, e.g. the influence of grammarians in the 17th and 18th centuries, to nationhood, e.g. the instrumentalising of purism in the standardisation of Afrikaans or Luxembourgish, to modern society, e.g. the existence of puristic tendencies in computer chatrooms, to folk linguistics, e.g. lay perceptions of different varieties of English, and to academic linguistics, e.g. the presence of puristic notions in the historiography of German or English.




National Socialism and German Discourse


Book Description

In this discourse history, W J Dodd analyses the ‘unquiet voices’ of opponents whose contemporary critiques of Nazism, from positions of territorial and inner exile, focused on the ‘language of Nazism’. Individual chapters review ‘precursor’ discourses; Nazi public discourse from 1933 to 1945; the testimonies of ‘unquiet voices’ abroad, and in private and published texts in the ‘Reich’; attempts to ‘denazify the language’ (1945-49), and the legacies of the Nazi past in a retrospective discourse of ‘coming to terms’ with the Nazi past. In the period from 1945, the book focuses on contestations of ‘tainted language’ and instrumentalizations of the Nazi past, and the persistence of linguistic taboos in contemporary German usage. Highly engaging, with English translations provided throughout, this book will provide an invaluable resource for scholars of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and German history and culture; as well as readers with a general interest in language and politics.




Linguistic Perspectives on the Construction of Meaning and Knowledge


Book Description

This book is an exploration of the dimensions of meaning in language from several important perspectives that are of major interest to scholars today, bringing together studies from the realms of linguistic pragmatics, semantics, ontological knowledge engineering, and computational linguistics. Situated within modern functional-cognitive constructional-ontological and computational paradigms, the analyses here are supported by authentic language data, including corpus data, from a rich set of languages. Context and situation play an important but complex role in meaning elaboration. The role of context and situation is elusive and has proved difficult to elucidate with respect to meaning and knowledge representation. This volume provides evidence of the nature of the, often rapid, emergence of meaning in the digital world of the internet, social media, and Internet memes. The use of computational avatars and the rise of human language technologies, including big data and digital corpora, have made the construction of meaning and human language understanding essential to the work of linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists who are increasingly working together in collaborative teams to share insights.




Germany's Two Unifications


Book Description

Germany's unique historical experience of undergoing national unification twice in a little over a century makes it a fascinating object of study. In this volume the processes of unification are analysed from the point of view of historians, political scientists and literary historians. Because each event had quite different historical pre-conditions (the first having been long anticipated and pursued, whereas the second took virtually all participants by surprise), the processes of adjustment to it have differed in many ways. Yet in each case the idea of national unity has held sway powerfully as a norm guiding the responses of those involved.




Language, Discourse and Identity in Central Europe


Book Description

Central Europe has always been a highly multilingual region but how has this been affected by the social and political transformations of the last 20 years? The German language in particular has long played a key role in processes of identification here: but what role is the relationship between German and other languages playing today in the reshaping of societies and communities in this rapidly changing region? How is this relationship articulated in discourses on language and language ideologies? How is it manifested in individual repertoires and social practices? How is it determined by social and cultural policies? How is it exploited in the construction of European identities? These are just some of the questions addressed in this book, in which individual studies explore language practices in the multilingual contact zones of central Europe and the impact of both past and present migrations. Analysing a wide range of sources from media texts to language biographies and from business meetings to salsa classes, the authors demonstrate the local effects of global processes and some of the many ways in which language figures in contemporary social change.




Ossi Wessi


Book Description

Ossi Wessi includes the proceedings of the fourteenth annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference at the University of California, Berkeley (2006), which explored issues surrounding the Berlin Wall, both pre- and post-reunification, in language, literature, and visual media. The collected articles discuss the situation of the Berlin Wall, describing its portrayal as both a dividing and uniting boundary, and often discussing the continued existence of the Wall in the minds of Germany’s citizens. The multi-disciplinary range of approaches contained in this volume reveals how diverse the portrayals of the history of the Wall have been, as well as how controversial the division of Germany remains today. Topics covered in this collection include Wende Literature and film, linguistic changes and attitudes since 1989, the complicated history of the Neo-Nazis, and the visual arts. Although Ossi Wessi is by no means a comprehensive reference work, each of its essays serve as a though provoking springboard for further research.




Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics


Book Description

The first edition of ELL (1993, Ron Asher, Editor) was hailed as "the field's standard reference work for a generation". Now the all-new second edition matches ELL's comprehensiveness and high quality, expanded for a new generation, while being the first encyclopedia to really exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics. * The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field * An entirely new work, with new editors, new authors, new topics and newly commissioned articles with a handful of classic articles * The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics through the online edition * Ground-breaking and International in scope and approach * Alphabetically arranged with extensive cross-referencing * Available in print and online, priced separately. The online version will include updates as subjects develop ELL2 includes: * c. 7,500,000 words * c. 11,000 pages * c. 3,000 articles * c. 1,500 figures: 130 halftones and 150 colour * Supplementary audio, video and text files online * c. 3,500 glossary definitions * c. 39,000 references * Extensive list of commonly used abbreviations * List of languages of the world (including information on no. of speakers, language family, etc.) * Approximately 700 biographical entries (now includes contemporary linguists) * 200 language maps in print and online Also available online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit www.info.sciencedirect.com. The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics Ground-breaking in scope - wider than any predecessor An invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in the fields of: linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition, language pathology, cognitive science, sociology, the law, the media, medicine & computer science. The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field




Discourses on Language and Integration


Book Description

One of the most pressing issues in contemporary European societies is the need to promote integration and social inclusion in the context of rapidly increasing migration. A particular challenge confronting national governments is how to accommodate speakers of an ever-increasing number of languages within what in most cases are still perceived as monolingual indigenous populations. This has given rise to public debates in many countries on controversial policies imposing a requirement of competence in a ‘national’ language and culture as a condition for acquiring citizenship. However, these debates are frequently conducted almost entirely at a national level within each state, with little if any attention paid to the broader European context. At the same time, further EU enlargement and the ongoing rise in the rate of migration into and across Europe suggest that the salience of these issues is likely to continue to grow. This volume offers a critical analysis of these debates and emerging discourses on integration and challenges the assumptions underlying the new ‘language testing regimes’.