• Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław •

This socio-linguistic and cultural-linguistic article deals with naming fashions and naming strategies in a German-Georgian comparison. It is based on a study conducted simultaneously in Germany and Georgia in 2016 with more than 1.000 study participants, in which the motives behind the choice of names were surveyed. The article focuses on the assignment of names in both countries and examines naming motives and individualization tendencies in a contrastive way. The following hypotheses are reviewed in this paper: (1) There are culture-specific differences in the choice of given names between Germany and Georgia, which are reflected in different naming motives. (2) In Germany, the rate of individualization is higher than in Georgia. (3) In both Germany and Georgia, class-specific naming leads to the perception of names as particularly negative or positive. Current research on trends in given names often focuses on the linguistic subfields that influence the main motives for choosing names. For example, phonetic structure analyses provide insights into how euphony is created, and which sounds or sound combinations are perceived as particularly euphonic. These studies take a particular look at the role of gender. However, individualization tendencies also have an influence on the repertoire of first names and affect the variants of individual first names. The present study follows up on these research questions but extends them from a contrastive point of view. Based on the comparative survey, information is to be gained about which motives are in the foreground in the choice of first names in both countries and about the tendencies to give children a particularly individual name. The perception of names with particularly positive or negative connotations will also be contrasted.

This paper presents and discusses the findings of a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted analysis (Partington/ Duguid/Taylor 2013, Taylor 2014) of the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal Discourse in German and Italian news. It was conducted to answer the following research questions: − which framings are recurrently used to represent the Emission Scandal as an economic issue? − how do these language patterns influence its representation as a primarily environmental issue? The analysis was conducted by applying Frame Theory (Goffman 1974, Tannen 1993, Lakoff/Wehling 2012), Metaphor Theory (Lakoff/Johnson 20032, Larson 2011) and Erasure Theory (Van Leeuwen 2008, Stibbe 2015) within the more general framework of Ecological Linguistics (Fill/Penz 2018) – “an ecolinguistic approach to the analysis of [...] ‘discourses’, ‘lexicogrammatical patterns’, ‘sense-making resources’” (Steffensen/Fill 2014). The data sets include news articles (totally 230) published from 20th September to 20th October 2015 on the websites of “Die Zeit” (115 articles) and “La Repubblica” (115 articles), and containing at least one of the following keywords of the scandal in the respective language: Abgasskandal or Abgas-Skandal, Abgasaffäre or Abgas-affäre, VW-Skandal, VW-Affäre, Diesel-Skandal; scandalo Volkswagen, scandalo emissioni, scandalo delle emissioni, caso Volkswagen. The quantitative-qualitative analysis of collocations (Baker 2006) and concordances suggests that the framing Dieselgate damages the German economy emerges in discourse, thus backgrounding (Stibbe 2015) the environmental and ecological issues related to the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal (Dieselgate damages Environment and human health).

The present article is devoted to the role of language in the fight against the world-wrecking coronavirus. The aim of the analysis was to demonstrate, on the basis of the excerpted corpus, that language has become an important tool in the combat against the destructive effects of the pandemic. It is constantly influenced by global events connected with the pandemic, reflecting their current status and revealing their multifaceted dimensions. The pandemic leaves distinct traces in our vocabulary. Depending on the stage of the global fight against the pandemic, language users create new concepts, thanks to which they are able to cope with the pandemic reality. The extent to which language manages to deal with the dynamically changing reality, which functions according to the rules dictated by the virus, can be observed particularly well in the media discourse related to the fight against the pandemic. The lexical material which constitutes the basis for the linguistic analysis described in this article was obtained between March 2020 and July 2021, as a result of a query conducted in German-language Internet media. Most of the said research material has a metaphorical quality. The analysis of the above-mentioned corpus makes it possible to state that the corona-concepts appearing in the media discourse belong to two metaphor-forming areas: one connected with military issues and war (Teststrategie, Virus-Attacke, Impfstoffkrieg) and the other – with natural disasters related to the impact of water (Corona-Tsunami Erschütterungswelle, dritte Welle). The analysis in question showed that the metaphorical representation of events related to infections caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 as a wave or tsunami reflects the feeling of helplessness and huge mental stress. On the other hand, expressions derived from the language of war and military issues conceptualize the ability of the world to act and the readiness to fight against the dangerous virus. They are an important element of the crisis-related strategies. The corpus under analysis constitutes evidence that both metaphorical domains are the dominant representatives of the concept of catastrophe in the collective consciousness of the contemporary societies. Conceptualization by means of a controlled threat of war conflict and an uncontrolled threat coming from nature are realized in this corpus most frequently through the use of compounds. The process of compounding offers to German language users almost unlimited possibilities as regards constant creation of new expressions describing the reality. The metaphorically driven corona-compounds are rich in content and attract the receivers’ attention – a phenomenon which is of particular relevance to journalists. For this reason, the rules of compound word-forming processes are often the point of reference in all kinds of discourses describing new phenomena.

Wars, catastrophes, pandemics, epidemics have always meant that man, instead of inventing problems for himself and complicating life, turned in his actions to the basic values of his earthly existence. These dramatic events and phenomena, which are inseparable from human history, seemed to “cleanse” the mind and bring thinking back on track with basic needs and fundamental, mostly positive feelings. The covid pandemic is such a turning point. However, the old concerns remain – including the question of political correctness in the use of language in German society. In this context, the article examines and analyses the guidelines for “Employees of the Berlin Administration on Diversity-Sensitive Language Use” published by the Berlin Senate in September 2020. The linguistically correct reorientation anchored in this document is intended to help the Berlin administration on its way to treating all citizens fairly. However, the German language seems to be a garden of traps in its grammatical structure. Critical voices are rising in society against the new regulations – not against the struggle for gender equality itself, but against the political proposals in language use, which seem to be getting closer and closer to the border of the absurd. In this context, this article attempts to present which difficulties and linguistic doubts arise from the new regulations on language use in Berlin’s authorities and offices. Old and new expressions are compared and the resulting problems of interpretation are discussed. Furthermore, various linguistic means of the form of expression to be corrected are discussed and examples are given. It will probably never be possible to find the final word that no longer hurts anyone and makes everyone in society equal. However, the struggle for social and societal equality must not be abandoned in these troubled times.

Specialized languages make special demands on linguistics. Originating in the 1960s and 1970s, there is still no general consensus on the content and methods of technical language research. Current research designs combine systems linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic approaches. In terms of system linguistics, the main focus is on vocabulary; cognitive is the basis of knowledge about the real world and its linguistic coding; pragmatics looks at the circumstances of communication. This paper addresses this problem by examining the text type “decency literature” more closely. This type of communication is subject to special conditions in that a “teacher” passes on his or her competencies on etiquette to an interested target group. In addition to a book for a general audience, the technical language component is particularly emphasized by the choice of three subject-specific propriety teachings (explicitly for use in law firms, management consultants and trainees). All of them operate under the name „Knigge“, which is the reason to combine them into one corpus. The analysis shows that the four works differ considerably from one another. They do not use any special vocabulary or idiosyncratic syntactic structures, but very well different communication conditions. With the exception of the general work, it is more of a „career guide“ rather than a code of behavior. Nevertheless, they can be referred to as technical language in a cognitive and pragmatic sense, since they deal with a specific “subject”. However, they do not represent a closed system in that they are open to innovations and specific suggestions from the authors. The “compliment” is only mentioned explicitly in one work. In this sense, they are not only map fields of action, but also construct part of social reality yourself through their suggestions.

Understanding and correctly using modal particles is a particular challenge for German learners due to the complexity and contextual dependence of the particles. Yet, they take on important interactional and social functions and occur with great frequency in spoken language. They can express a common knowledge base and socially shared knowledge of conversation partners, as well as signal discrepancy in expectations. Although a conscious perception and detailed knowledge of how they work are not absolutely necessary in order to roughly understand utterances, such a lack of understanding can impair German learners’ interpersonal communication with native German speakers. Therefore, pedagogical guidance is required that provides practical, interactive language knowledge for the use of the modal particles to enable learners to be effective in social contacts and understanding. The following article deals with a teaching unit for the lower intermediate level, in which the modal particle ja is made aware and conveyed to German learners through approaches from conversation analysis. The integration of language data from the Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch enables authentic language situations when introducing and using the modal particle. Learners analyze the particle in real contexts and derive usage rules. With the help of a five-phase teaching model, they derive the functionality of the modal particle and internalize these patterns through structured language practice that strengthen and expand their communicative, sociolinguistic, and intercultural competence.

This paper deals with the online teaching of simultaneous interpreting (in German) during the Corona pandemic in the summer semester of 2020/2021 in a specially developed interpreting laboratory (a specially developed virtual interpreting booth). The Corona pandemic 2020/2021 and distance learning at universities and colleges raised the fundamental question of how to teach simultaneous interpreting in distance learning for master’s degree programs in the Department of German Studies (at the Faculty of Philosophy of Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia), in the specialization of translation and interpreting. For this purpose, a special interpreting software was developed by the Slovak company CONTEST s.r.o., the so-called virtual interpreting laboratory, which simulates a real interpreting booth in practice and which the Faculty of Philosophy of Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica purchased for this purpose. In this paper specifics of online teaching in this special virtual interpreting booth are presented.

The article deals with the adnominal dative+possessive construction of the type in Bęəbən ir Gətrax (‘the women their costume = the costume of women’) and its different variants in the German dialect of Deutschpilsen, a small Hungarian language island in northern Hungary. It is a medieval settlement, in the past its inhabitants were mainly engaged in mining and probably came from the south and the middle east of the German-speaking area. A mixed dialect was created. The basic dialect of the remote village has preserved many archaic elements to this day. The dialect is currently threatened with extinction, it has become a language of elderly people and memory. The adnominal dative+possessive construction has a wide range of literature, and the article would like to present new findings in addition. The analysis is carried out on empirically collected linguistic data that was recorded with the help of a questionnaire in Deutschpilsen. The informants were elderly villagers who still speak the dialect as their mother tongue. Particular attention is paid to the subject of gender and pronominal reference in the dative+possessive construction. The conflict between grammatical and referential gender is shown, as in the example in Hoz iər Gartn (‘the house her garden = the garden of the house’). For this gram- matical discrepancy (neutral article, feminine pronominalization), justifications are sought in literature. The gender congruence between antecedent and possessive is often cancelled in the examined dialect, incongruences between the article and pronoun can arise. Incongruent forms with reference to a masculine or neuter can be observed. The variants with masculine/neutral articles and feminine possessive pronouns are particularly striking: ən Knab iər Štim (‘a boy her voice = the voice of a boy’). I have not found any similar evidence in the dialectological literature. The article documents and describes three types of adnominal dative+possessive construction, illustrated with plenty of example sentences from Deutschpilsen. The relationship between genitive and possessive dative, which is much discussed in the literature, is also shed in a new light.

Pragmatics and Law is an important subfield of theoretical and practical (or “applied”) pragmatics. This article is about criminal speech acts. These are those speech acts for which one can be punished in a given legal system. Criminal speech acts do not form a separate speech act class like assertives or expressives, but occur in all classes. They can be realized both directly and indirectly. Indirect realization involves indirect speech acts in the sense of speech act theory or conversational implicatures in the sense of conversational implicature theory. Two sets of issues are considered in more detail. The first is the area of lying, where lying is regarded as an insincere assertion with the aim of deception. The law does not recognize a separate criminal offense of lying. Nevertheless, lying can be punished in certain contexts. A relevant case is lying in court under oath (perjury). Bullshitting differs from lying in that the bullshitter is indifferent to the truth. Bullshitting thus appears as a practical option to avoid committing to a fact. Moreover, it is asked whether lying is possible through the realization of a deceptive conversational implicature. The second set of issues is the field of insults and hate speech. In the case of insults, it is striking that in every language there are lexical expressions (insult words) that serve the purpose of realizing an insult. They are illocutionary indicators in the sense of speech act theory. Hate speech, which includes the denigration of certain groups in the sense of incitement to hatred, is understood as a type of insult. This means that hate speech is, in principle, covered by the rules for the execution of an insult. The legal assessment of criminal speech acts is based, on the one hand, on concrete utterances and, on the other hand, on an assessment of the utterance context. It turns out that there can be considerable differences in the assessment of criminal speech acts, which has to do with the inherent complexity of these concepts.

The German proverb “Es ist dafür gesorgt, daß die Bäume nicht in den Himmel wachsen“ with its shortened variant „Die Bäume wachsen nicht in den Himmel“ has been transmitted since the early sixteenth century. Its written documentation begins 1526 with Martin Luther, and it appears since 1590 in numerous variants in proverb collections. Goethe quoted it in his autobiography, and it is present in the works of Heinrich Heine, Joseph von Eichendorff, Georg Herwegh, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Andersch, and others. Max Weber and Rosa Luxemburg made socio-political use of it, and that is also true for Winston S. Churchill, who played a part in distributing it in English translation as „Care is taken that trees don’t grow to the sky“ and „Trees don’t grow to the sky“. Joseph Goebbels quotes it repeatedly as a propagandistic leitmotif, and it also plays a role in political contexts by chancellors Conrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Schmidt. Especially aphoristic writers as Dietmar Beetz, Erwin Chargaff, Peter Maiwald, Felix Renner, and Gerhard Uhlenbruck have dealt with it critically by changing it into anti-proverbs. By way of many contextualized references it is shown how the proverb developed during five centuries and how it is marked to this day by its polysituativity, polyfunctionality, and polysemanticity.

The topic of this work relates to the way in which politicians construct mental images with the help of language (better yet: manipulate the audience) by using certain terms in a targeted manner to express the liking for their own side or the public’s dislike for the political opponent to secure. This manipulative use of language can be seen most clearly in the political election campaign, where one can find a number of implicit and explicit persuasive and manipulative utterances. For the purposes of this work, Croatian and Austrian election campaigns were compared, or specific excerpts from the election campaigns, that best present the problem under investigation. In doing so, an attempt is made to point out how language shapes human thinking and how carefully chosen terms and their frequent repetition contribute to the formation of opinions and emphasize the already immanent polarity between the political opponents. In this analysis, the emphasis is placed on discovering which linguistic means the politicians have used in their public appearances in order to activate certain (already existing) mental images in the electorate. An attempt is also made to determine in which election campaign were used more negative statements, i.e. whether it was Croatian or Austrian politicians who set their campaign focus on defamation of the political opponent.

Short texts, either of formal or of informal nature concerning the text producers, are ubiquitous in the public sphere. Concerning the text functions as well as the form of the texts, researchers are confronted with a large variety of illocutionary goals and formal strategies. The description of written and, often, multimodal texts in the public sphere is anchored in the discipline of Linguistic Landscapes. In oder to investigate the principles of the discourse realized by short texts in the public sphere, the present article analyzes official, multimodal short texts that have been published in fall 2019 in public transport, near train stations and in universities in Paris, France. The analysis of the texts who can be mainly considered as part of a discourse of cleanliness focusses on the interconnection of different semiotic ressources and on the specific communicative functions of the texts. After the conceptual definition of the study’s underlying concepts of “public space” and “dispositives” as well as a closer look at the specific reception conditions of short texts in the public space follows the discussion of characteristics of short texts with regard to the corpus. Afterwards, we will present selected examples and discuss their formal design as well as their communicative functions. The analysis shows a wide range in terms of the functional orientation of the short texts examined. It becomes clear that different illocutions are realized in the public space; the corpus contains calls to action, prohibitions and offers for orientation, but also texts aiming at motivation the addressees to participate actively on the cultural level or for generating cognitive pleasure during the process of decoding through cultural references and/or puns. The degree of interaction with the potential recipients also varies. The corpus analysis shows that the combination of the semiotic resources in the conception of the overall message in the documents can be designed in completely different ways. As a consequence, we observe a different degree of multimodal linking on a formal and functional level as well as variances in the connection patterns. All examples make clear that an adequate decoding of the short texts would not be possible without considering the integration of the texts in a specific local context, containing as well objects in the vicinity of the texts.

Much has been written about the Albanian community living in Germany and Switzerland for three generations, but little research has been done on this topic. Little is known about their language situation, even though they represent one of the largest migrant groups in Switzerland. This article provides insights into the language competence of three generations (G1–G3). Approximately twenty people per generation and country (n=120) were asked how they assess their oral and written language competence. The data collected by means of questionnaires and analysed by contrast show that the spoken dialect of origin shapes the everyday life of respondents in Germany and Switzerland and that they rate their oral language competence in dialect and in standard higher than their written competence while the distance between oral and written competence is more pronounced in G3 of both countries than in G2 and G1. As expected, the data values of G1s who have been linguistically socialised in their country of origin are higher than those of G2s and G3s who grew up in Germany and Switzerland. The respondents in Germany’s G2 and G3 rate their oral competence in Standard Albanian significantly higher than the Swiss G2 and G3. This is surprising because it was assumed that the range of Albanian on offer in Switzerland is greater than in Germany and that Swiss respondents in G2 and G3 have better access to standard Albanian.

The article is dedicated to the question of how health and disease discourses are linked to the migration discourse in AfD election programs. For this purpose, twenty election programs of the party from the years 2016 to 2021 are evaluated in terms of content, which were adopted for the elections to the state parliaments, the Bundestag and the European Parliament. Based on the evaluation, seven different sub-discourses can be identified in which health or disease-related topics are linked to the migration discourse. The focus here is on the portrayal of migrants as carriers of diseases, as a danger to the health of the population and in particular of health care workers, and on the exploitation and thus endangerment of the German health care system by migrants. Statistical analysis shows that references to these motifs occur continuously in the programs studied. A significantly stronger access to these discourses can be demonstrated in election programs from the new German states. In general, migrants are directly or indirectly portrayed as a threat to the health of the population in all sub-discourses. Overall, it can be shown that references to health and illness discourses are integrated by the AfD into its xenophobic program in order to generate feelings of threat and fear among voters. Overall, the AfD is thus less concerned with the issues of health and illness than with reinforcing xenophobic emotions among the population.

This article discusses an example of internet communication with the main focus being the communication in fertility forums. Such forums are frequented and used by female users who need medical assistance to become pregnant. The users seek contact with people who experience similar problems and exchange information related to infertility treatments. Although internet forums have been widely examined with the use of linguistic tools, the fertility forums still need further analysis as they undoubtedly offer research potential. This study looks at what speech acts have been employed at a particular forum, and what are the lexical and morphosyntactic components of these speech acts. The forum corpus consists of 130 posts available at www.wunschkinder.net. The analysis of the corpus has shown the repeating patterns in the use of speech acts. It has consequently led to establishing a list of the most characteristic speech acts for the given forum, which are: MENTIONING FERTILITY PROBLEMS, ASKING QUESTIONS, SHOWING SYMPATHY, EXPRESSING UNDERSTANDING, SHARING INFORMATION, OFFERING ADVICE AND CONSOLATION. In addition to neutral expressions, colloquial expressions, and professional medical vocabulary are used in the posts. The tendency to use initialisms or abbreviations is noticeable. On the syntactic level, the forum participants use simple as well as compound and complex sentences. They mostly use complete sentences and, occasionally, sentences without a subject.

An investigation bei comparing 19 sermons about two texts from the Bible demonstrates grate differences of interpretation and preaching by ministers and priests. The question arises whether the interpretation of parts of the Holy Scriptures follows other rules than the reception of profane texts. It seems as if there is something like „theological polysemy“. To be said for it there is not only the medieval teaching of the „fourfold exegesis“ (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical) but also the modern varied methods of interpretation such as the historical-critical, the allegorical, the existential, the depth psychological, the feminist, the liberation theological, the reception aesthetic and the hermeneutic method. But today the general textlinguistic and texttheoretical knowledge must be taken into account even in the exegesis ob Bible texts. Only then a limited and comprehensible ambiguity of texts (polysemy) can be prevented from transforming into an unlimited ambiguity (pantoiosemy) with total arbitrariness of interpretation. Though every text is the result of a communicative act between the text producer with his intentions and the text recipient with his expectations. Different recipients will interpret the message of a text against the background of their individual experiences and their personal ways of thinking. But the language character orientation of texts hast to be considerd as well as an interpretation framework when searching for meaning. It is always about the interrelationship between language structures, communicative acts and the situations of text use. For this reason each interpreter of texts is obliged to justify and to verify his reception towards oneself and other people referring to the language-bound informations even of a Bible text.

Every translator is often confronted with the problem of translatability of proper names, which include geographical names called toponyms (i.e. choronyms, proper toponyms, urbanonyms, hydronyms and oronyms). German and Polish toponyms differ from each other in gender and number as well as in spelling and the order of components. Many differences in the creation of toponyms result from the different ways of thinking in the two nations. Before translating these lexical units, we should first consider whether they can be translated at all, and if so, how to do it, and what criteria should be applied. The (un)translatability of toponyms is strongly conditioned by culture, history, politics, and of course topography itself, which is shown in this article by means of an example of selected groups of Polish and German geographic names. In official documents, where the criterion of comprehensibility is decisive, foreign language equivalents of toponyms are generally used, provided such equivalents exist. Some toponyms have to be modified in translation to make them more precise or to clarify their meaning. Toponyms that are typical of a country or culture and have no foreign language equivalents are usually not translated, but preserve their original form in the translated texts. In order to convey their meaning, foreign language generic names are usually added before them.

Polish online gamers remain in continuous contact with English, either while playing games, communicating with other gamers or using social media. Given the relative intensity of language contact, one may expect gaming sociolect to be a rich source of anglicisms of various type. Nevertheless, the influence that English exerts on the sociolect of Polish gamers has attracted little scholarly attention thus far. The present paper aims at investigating anglicisms occurring in the sociolect of Polish Minecraft gamers, basingon the corpus compiled from 21 YouTube gaming videos and 10 Internet forum threads devoted to the game. More specifically, the author seeks to analyze to which extent the loanwords are adapted into Polish in terms of phonology, morphology and spelling as well as to discuss the examples of calques and hybrids that have been attested in the corpus. Additionally, the paper tries to identify the meaning and function of borrowed elements. Overall, the corpus gathers 122 loanwords (simple lexemes, compound nouns and acronyms), 20 calques and 1 hybrid loan. The analysis has shown preliminarily that although a majority of loanwords is integrated into the Polish language in terms of morphology and phonology, nearly all elements retain their original spelling. Moreover, the corpus reveals a group of lexemes whose pronunciation is based on spelling, which indicates the fact that lexemes are transferred to the sociolect of gamers in a twofold way, namely graphic and spoken. As for the use of loanwords, the study exemplifies both anglicisms used exclusively in the Minecraft community as well as those constituting a universal part of the lexical repertoire of all gamers and thus points out the diversity of the gaming sociolect.

In this article subtitling and the resulting from it translation strategies are analysed. The article puts the main emphasis, on the one hand, on the technical restrictions, the resulting from it need to shorten, con- dense and simplify the text, and the translation strategies used for this purpose according to Gottlieb, Chesterman, Tomaszkiewicz and Belczyk, e.g.: deletion, condensation, omission, numbers, decimation, paraphrasing, simple syntaxis, etc. On the other hand, it deals with the translation of culture-related components, based on such strategies: omission, literal translation, borrowing, adaptations, substitu- tion of Culture-Specifics, generalization, translation of black humour, explications/explanations. The German-Polish subtitling of the movie „Er ist wieder da“ (2015) served as a case study, from which many examples illustrate the discussed phenomena. The aim of this paper is to examine the translated linguistic-cultural-comic triad, taking into account the strategies used in translation. Based on the multidimensional (at syntactic-semantic-pragmatic level) analysis of the original and its translation, these results point to possible that the translator faced seemingly insurmountable hurdles. In order to translate equivalently, he had to make use of many different word combinations. Thanks to numerous examples of text condensation strategies, it can be stated that many movie scenes can be translated intersemiotically. Many omissions that were made could be compensated without problems by means of image and/or sound, so that it is unnoticeable for the viewer at semantic-trans-cultural level.

The rap lyrics often deal with the same subjects from different perspectives. The musicians choose the themes for their rap pieces with which they identify the most. These texts have been thoroughly accepted by linguists, but rap has not been viewed as a whole, but the researches rather have been concentrated on its individual manifestations. In the present article I analyze whether we can regard the German and Polish song lyrics in rap as an autobiographical text type and what information they can use to enrich the biographies of their authors. I will start with the history of rap, which provides information about the primary goal and the main functions of this genre. The research material was taken from 401 quotations from 23 German and 25 Polish songs and compared with available information about the authors. All quotations are assigned to the most frequently repeatable life categories and counted. In the light of the materials I have analyzed, it is clear that there is a diver- gence not only between individual authors, but also between the German and Polish perceptions of many aspects of life.

The paper refers to the emotional level in online communication, which appears in a special way through colorful emojis in social media. The functions of these pictorial symbols enable people to express their emotions and feelings. It is related to the fact that face-to-face situations are less and less common in digital communication. Moreover, their use leads to the multimodality of the numerous digital contributions, which makes them particularly enriching, colorful and complementary. Research on emojis is becoming significant in linguistics over time, so they form a broad field for the development and discovery of new phenomena. The aim of this paper is to consider what emotions can be conveyed with the help of emojis and whether these pictorial signs can create a new form of communication. For this reason, their influence on digital communication is examined by analyzing selected tweets about Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk on the basis of three main criteria (form, content and emotions of emojis). Conclusions bring to light the finding that emojis, despite their ambiguity, can convey positive as well as neutral and negative emotions. The new form of communication arouses interest among Internet users, which can lead to next unknown ways of using them. Emojis are an area that has not yet been thoroughly researched, so their study by linguists is noteworthy.

Although writing is an inseparable part of people’s everyday lives and an integral part of all external exams, it seems to be neglected both by teachers and students of English as a foreign language. One of the reasons might be the fact that the array of activities developing writing skills in textbooks is not varied enough and does not cater for every student’s needs. The author decided to conduct research in order to examine how the textbooks teach writing skills and the educational content contained in them is introduced by means of tasks appropriate for students representing different types of personality. Three textbooks to teach English in secondary schools (Checkpoint B1+ – Macmillan Polska, Focus 3 Second Edition – Pearson), Vision 3 – Oxford University Press) were analysed. Research work consisted in classifying each exercise aimed at developing writing skills to a certain personality type. The classification was based on the description of personality types made by George Jensen and John DiTiberio. The study showed that altogether in three selected textbooks there are 269 activities developing writing skills, most of which are adequate for introverts (69), thinking (40) and sensing (38) types. There is, on the other hand, a relatively small number of exercises suitable for intuition (10), feeling (6) and judging (5) types. The results of the research might be used by publishing houses in their pursuit to create a textbook meeting needs of students of different personalities. For teachers, the following analysis might be helpful in designing their writing lessons in such a way they help their students excel in writing for both everyday and exam purposes.

The aim of the article is to examine the lexical structure of the biographical entries in lexicons and encyclopedias. In the light of previous research questions, there’s no existing treatment of biographical encyclopedic keywords. The analysis is based on encyclopedic entries of a biographical character using the example of Heinrich Laube, the German writer and theater director. For the purposes of the study, the following terms were defined: biography and encyclopedic reference works (lexicons and encyclopedias), entries (lemma articles / dictionary articles). The goal is to examine how the biographical entries in such reference works are structured in terms of content and syntax. The question of whether they have a complex and regular construction and if a sample of the biographical text type can be created on this basis is investigated. The research material consists of printed German and Polish lexicons and encyclopedias, mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, and also includes current online reference works for comparison. The analysis proves that the biographical entries in encyclopedias form a visible and regular structure. The Polish and German documents are compared with one another and, based on the analysis of 18 German and 24 Polish reference works, it is determined that none of the research sources contain any major deviations and that they are structured similarly in terms of both content and syntax. Finally, it is proven that the articles consist of six following thematic parts: Brief introduction (surname, first name, pseudonyms), dates of birth and death, main title (occupation), chronological presentation of facts from life, performance and works and in the case of Online Sources – Additional Notes on His Death and Grave. The analysis could have a practical implementation in further treatment of biographical text types or text variants and complements the previous examination of dictionary articles.

The designations of systemic doctrines are labels and landmarks in the public debate: in relation to them, its participants and observers define their political identity, at the same time projecting ideas about the identity of their opponents. Therefore, their semantic content differs depending on who and for what purpose calls these designations in the public space. This is the main reason why such names have become the subject of attention from researchers interested in language as an element of social life. One of such designations is capitalism – one of the key concepts of the Polish political transformation. However, this designation and the concept behind it were the subject of linguists’ attention to a lesser extent than it might seem. I would like to fill this gap. My aim was to present the shaping of the concept of capitalism in Polish in various historical periods. I analyzed the linguistic material taken from Polish encyclopedias and dictionaries. Being aware that the selection of sources is not representative of the entire Polish language, I treat the results of the analysis as an introduction to further research. I referred to the concept of the linguistic image of the world. Capitalism appears for the first time in Polish encyclopedias and dictionaries at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. From that moment on, the scope of definitions and the number of their semantic components constantly increased, and their final number, type and hierarchy differed depending on the historical period in question. The two great turning points in the profiling of the concept of capitalism are the years 1945 and 1989. This allows us to formulate a thesis about the important role of encyclopedias and dictionaries in petrifying a specific resource of knowledge and legitimizing the political regime.

The paper investigates the communicative construction of interculturality in initial encounters between native German and Russian speaking university students. Contrary to the traditional approach to intercultural communication, culture and cultural belonging are understood here as variables that are communicatively produced in interpersonal interaction, primarily by means of language (Altmayer 2020, Hausendorf 2000, Földes 2007, Günthner 2019). The focus is on the observable ways in which participants indicate the relevance of cultural differences / belongings in the ongoing conversation. Using examples from German-Russian student conversations (approximately two hours of audio data), I will show how participants interactively employ certain methods to (re-)activate cultural belongings in the unfolding conversation and in doing so, construct an intercultural setting. It will also be shown that they use interculturality reflexively as an interactional resource. This article is a contribution to the linguistic research on interculturality in the particular case of German-Russian student encounters. Intercultural communication is regarded and analysed as ordinary communication. The methodology of the present study follows basically the approach of Interactional Linguistics (Selting/Couper-Kuhlen 2000, Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2001). The theoretical basis is provided by current approaches to culture and interculturality (i. a. Földes 2009) and by the notion of intercultural accounts (i. a. Dausendschön-Gay/Krafft 1998, Wolf 1998).

Those who fear the decline of the German language use the following argumentation: countless foreign words in the German language system, patchwork-like language use with all its linguistic phenomena, such as abbreviations and short forms, multilingualism, code-switching, bricolage, hybrid formations and borrowings, grammatical reduction and deviation from grammatical norms, codification of the language. Many of these language-changing processes are explained and even justified by globalisation and the enormous mobility of people in today’s world. There is somewhat less understanding of the use of vulgarisms not only in everyday life but also in the media. What was unthinkable a few decades ago has become reality today: Vulgarisms permeate public language and are even used by celebrities. While individual swear words no longer seem to shock, their accumulation in rock and rap lyrics is completely rejected by many or bypassed as a taboo subject. In his monograph, which is dedicated to a semantic and structural analysis of vulgarisms in German and Polish rap and rock lyrics, Krystian Suchorab deals with the use of vulgarisms and points out the following aspects, among others: vulgarisms and aggression in music; lyrics as a form of communication; semantic and structural analysis of vulgar lexemes in German and Polish rap and rock songs. With this contribution, the author breaks a taboo and enriches with his research the already existing, but not particularly extensive literature on the topic of vulgarisms. The topic still seems to be up-to-date and worth further research.

Functional verb structure (= FVG) is a phenomenon that continues to be discussed controversially in German linguistics. Despite the relatively long research tradition that goes back to the 1960s, there are discrepancies with regard to the definition of this phenomenon, its pre-location in the language system (assignment to grammar on the one hand or to phraseology on the other hand) and its functions in communication. This problem seems to be noticed in linguistics, as evidenced by the monograph by Volker Harm published by de Gruyter in 2021. The article aims to discuss the newly published monograph by Volker Harm and its contribution to German research in this area. The aim of the study presented here is to develop a new approach to the consideration of FVG. In the description of FVG, the theory of construction grammar and selected concepts of lexical semantics are used. Various characteristics that are traditionally attributed to FVG in research are analyzed in detail and evaluated with reference to the specialist literature and selected examples of the use of FVG. The type of connection between the noun and the verb, and more precisely the implication nominal meaning → overall meaning, is raised as the central criteria for the formation of the category FVG, whereby FVG can be distinguished as an independent class of noun-verb connections.

The review article discusses the book of Andrzej Kątny „Das Polnische im Spiegel des Deutschen. Studien zur kontrastiven Linguistik“. In the introductory part, the necessity to conduct comparative studies and the possible reasons for difficulties to lean a language which emerge from the interlingual differences – here between German and Polish – are pointed out. In the next part, the chapters of the book are dealt with in some details, whereas special attention has been paid to the first chapter, which addresses the problem and prominent role of contrastive linguistics for the foreign language teaching. Special attention has been also paid to the two following chapters, in which the author discusses the extremely relevant question of aspectuality. In the next part of the review article the following grammatical phenomena of the German and Polish verbal system are focussed on: tenses, passive voice, mood, modal verbs and the concept of assessment/judgement and the grammatical means of its verbalisation. Taking into consideration the objective of the book as didactic aid its main claims are discussed from the perspective of foreign language teaching.

Idioms are a part of the lexicon in the respective language and are considered by the learners of the respective foreign language as a hard nut to crack. The didactic proposals in the field of idiomatics do not seem to be sufficient. This also applies to the language pair German and Polish. The more welcome are phraseodidactic publications that try to remedy this deficiency. The combination of phraseodidactic and lexicographic practice seems to be a good idea. One such attempt is the work of Daniel Berg: “300 idiomów języka niemieckiego”, which was recently published as an e-book by PWN-Verlag. In the light of the previous phraseodidactic offer for German learning Poles, Daniel Berg’s publication is critically evaluated. Since the publication has many shortcomings in all respects, it is not recommended to use it in GFL lessons. The author disregards all the rules that one has to follow when writing a didactic and lexicographic work. Against this background, it is also assumed that corresponding corrections have not been made. At the same time, it is pointed out that phraseodidactic works require special treatment in which theory is to be combined with practice.