• Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław •

Our aim is to relate criteria for quality assessment in translation to micro elements. Punctuation in Arno Schmidt seems to be a good bet as, with him, this supposedly formal element is instrumental in constituting the sense of a text to a degree far beyond standard state-of-the-art routine.

The article discusses problems of profiling and the epistemological perspective in German economic discourses. Newer documents from the external business press („Manager-Magazin”) are cited. Discourses often employ linguistic operations in which the same facts acquire a different valuation and meaning. Through reinterpretations and framing profiling can be realized. The same entities then appear in different forms in different media. This allows the authors of discourses to construct reality.

Modal particles have several special features and related difficulties, unlike other function words, such as articles, prepositions and conjunctions. In what follows, modal particles are described in respect of terminology, and the different definitions. In the second part, the modal particles are characterized their importance and functions are shown. Modal particles are becoming more common and more important, especially in the spoken language. After a study of the issue, we can ascertain that these types of words have a rather marginal status in grammar and linguistics. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to find a common terminology for modal particles, although this is may not prove be an easy task.

German is a European language whose future will be determined primarily in Europe, because it is here where this language is used most of all. Although the German language’s usage wasn’t expanded due to colonial achievements the number of the speakers who consider it their mother tongue makes nearly 95 million people in Europe and 120 million throughout the world. Seven European nations provide German language with official status. When they speak about this language in European context globalisation issues come forth at once. First of all it designates not only the intertwined economical and environmental development processes, but also discovery of new sales markets and borders opening, deeper integration of new nations due to scientific and economical exchange between them and “Old Europe” countries, technological progress, cultural impact and didactic attraction of the German language as well as the exchange and dissemination of ideas, thoughts, and views leading to mutual understanding between nations.

The following article is the result of a partial study of the German patchwork language in the lyrics of German-speaking rappers with the so-called migration background. In the works of Haftbefehl, Kollegah and Bushido, not only typical social problems are discussed, but also drug addiction, violence and urban life. Particular attention is drawn to a mixture of languages, dialects, colloquial language, neologisms and abbreviations, which constitute a kind of code for shifting the inner mental boundary, conquering new worlds by people with a torn soul who feel suspended between the old and new homeland. The language of hip-hop, though often vulgar and brutal, can become a bridge to overcome the sense of alienation by encouraging discussion among the fans and opponents of rap.

Due to corpus linguistics and the logical positivists’ theory of meaning classical linguistics has deliberately ignored the question about underlying sense and its constitution. Given the fact that translation is about texts and thus discourses, the constitution of meaning is the key challenge of translation. This article deals with the discursive nature of translation and the resulting paradigm shift after the transition from transcoding to the concept of the dynamics of language and the constitution of meaning in praxeological contexts. The correlation between the process of discerning meaning and the restrictions of a language subject to the rules of grammar is explained by applying the concepts of relevance and use.

The article aims at learning the apology in the German linguoculture. The definitions of the apology in the German language are examined there. We study the linguistic properties of the apology and give their diapason. The commonly used examples of apologies are given in the article. The usage static of Entschuldigung and Verzeihung is provided there; the usage of the apology in the German linguoculture is explained in the article.

The article deals with the metalinguistic knowledge of Jerezano speakers about the variation within the Southwestern Andalusian dialectal zone, applying the perceptual dialectology. In particular, we investigate the metalinguistic knowledge about a possible phonic norm in Southwestern Andalusia that presumably diverges from the national standard of Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, we focus on metalinguistic representations: the results show a clear division between a ceceante (Jerez and rural Cádiz) and another seseante zone (Seville capital and Cádiz capital). With it, the speakers themselves believe in a non-existence of a Sevillian norm based on seseo for the local speech community.

The nowadays trendy hunt for increasingly new, more and more unexpected domains of linguistic research is a run from acknowledging that linguistics has one unique object: language communication, conceived of as a particular cultural-historical event that is subject to social norms; and one fascinating goal: to explain how language communication works in an impersonal way, so that members of a given cultural-historical community are able to understand one another. Linguistics is surprisingly young a science, and still more surprisingly, it can disappear as science from one day to the next, so that academic life will not even notice: there will be departments of linguistics, but no linguistics any more. Linguistics was inconceivable until, two hundred years ago, Wilhelm von Humboldt consummated the Kantian philosophical revolution by stating that thought does not exist except within a language, and through language communication. Linguistics is highly endangered now by a kind of non-reflected Aristotelianism that is, ingenuously enough, still accepted in sciences as common sense and theory-free thinking. Since Humboldt, linguistics has been endowed with a tool appropriate to its tasks: with the bifacial language sign, which is usually ascribed to Ferdinand de Saussure; since Saussure, linguistics has been set to proceed in a consciously semiological way. The Prague Linguistic Circle, which has been working on those issues for more than ninety years, proposes itself as a platform for discussing the current subjects and procedures of contemporary linguistic research aiming at the future.

Language is a tool which – apart from its informative function – also conveys emotions and values. Political discourse abounds in axiological declarations. In almost any message, politicians announce what values they hold, evaluate their opponents and the socio-economic situation, make judgements, present a certain hierarchy of values and try to convince their listeners to accept it. In the paper, the author analyses the statements of several politicians from the Law and Justice party. The statements contained clear and distinct messages due to the use of drastic vocabulary, which was to guarantee their resonance among the general public. The analysis of the politicians’ statements and of the linguistic means employed by them allows us to find out what the current political culture is and to discover the ruling party’s reasons for action, its argumentation methods as well as what traits of opposition politicians are reviled by it.

An extraordinary role is assigned to images not only in everyday communication, but also in media texts. The focus of this article is on selected types of images and their relationships with texts. The corpus of the study is comprised of press texts from selected glossy magazines. The starting point is an argument that images as forms of communication are in a certain sense more unambiguous and more convenient in some situations and have greater information-persuasive and visual potential than texts. Starting from this assumption, the article attempts to analyze glossy magazines in regard of presence and usage of images.

Machine translation as permitting instant translation of an extensive volume of texts, is becoming an invaluable tool for quick communication. This article reviews the problems encountered in machine translation and attempts to solve them.

Multisegmental short forms (especially acronyms) are indispensable components of public texts. Terms of parties, organisations, institutions etc. generally appear in abbreviated form. But not always. How is the choice between short form and long form influenced in speeches to the public, speeches in Parliament, etc.? Is this just a question of practical brevity? Most likely not. The use of short words is motivated by a complex of aspects, only one of which will be examined in the presentation: sympathy/affection (such as political closeness).

The Harz, the highest mountain range in the Northern Germany, is a region of utmost importance for German culture. Mining of ores has flourished here already in the Middle Ages, with time, health-resorts started to appear in the foothills and mountain summits and valleys filled with holidaymakers and tourists. Among the latter, a number of outstanding writers visited the Harz, either from Germany (e. g. J. W. von Goethe, H. Heine and Th. Fontane) or from abroad (e. g. H. Ch. Andersen). As the highest range of Bohemia and Silesia (and also, at a certain time, the Kingdom of Prussia), the Giant Mountains (Riesengebirge / Karkonosze / Krkonoše) were not only a natural border between these neighbouring regions, but in a way it was also an obvious focus of attention of learned excursionists describing them as early as at the close of the Middle Ages, but more importantly in modern times. This paper deals with the comparison of culture and literature of the Harz and the Giant Mountains.

The objective of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of rhetorical tools for analysis of marketing texts published on the internet and to outline the phenomena which are interesting from the perspective of an educator and researcher on rhetoric in the discussed area. In reply to the crucial question how ars rhetorica is used or overused in communication nowadays, we can answer contrarily that it is definitely underused. The relatively new areas connected with communication, such as marketing or web writing, follow many rhetorical guidelines in practice. Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that the inclusion of rhetoric as a theory and practice into education in the sphere of new communication-related domains helps build the full awareness of a persuasive communication participant, both as the author and the addressee of messages. Rhetoric provides the author with various kinds of instruments which facilitate persuasion, community building or establishment of one’s own credibility. Most of all, however, rhetoric teaches how to express thoughts and meanings, so that a human being, together with a system of values and beliefs, should still remain the focus of communication. The author is convinced that the didactics and practice of rhetoric are indispensable for the human-centred communication.

Reich citizens deny the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the recent past, this political group has repeatedly struck with crime. The article examines whether the violence affinity of the Reich citizens can also be demonstrated in their texts. For this purpose, a lexicon of violence is identified on the basis of a corpus of Internet texts of the Reich citizens. Furthermore, these texts are examined for characteristic discourses. It can be shown that violent discourses play an important role in the empowerment of Reich citizens’ identity. At the same time, however, it can also be stated that the focus for the Reich citizens is on their own victim perspective, while the emphasis on their own readiness for violence plays a rather subordinate role.

The present paper focuses on the question of how the phenomenon of terrorism is conveyed in the form of terrifying images and which motives and aspects are thematised. The corpus is composed of multimodal communications, which were determined by means of an internet search with the help of the search engine Google. Multimodal communications are understood to be combinations of written texts and two-dimensional static images that, together with other relevant modalities such as typography and colour, determine the reception. The analysis will explore the following questions: What will be shown? How is it shown? What functions do the text and image as well as the multimodal communication as a whole have?

Although Marx and Weidacher (2014:91ff.) claim, at Internet language doesn’t exist, is unfortunately the language used in discussions and comments on Facebook, Twitter or weblogs often full of offensive, hateful words and expressions. It is precisely this type of language that is called hate speech. The following paper contains an qualitative analysis of comments, which appeared on Facebook in Germany, Denmark and Poland after the terrorist attack in Manchester in May this year. I try to find answer on following questions: Which linguistic methods are characteristic for such comments? Are some of these methods preferred? What are the authors of such comments trying to achieve? What are the differences between German, Danish and Polish comments? Which aspects of content do they touch?

The paper aims to show which aspects of gustatory perception are talked about literally and/or figuratively. First, attention has been paid to philosophical, epistemological and neurophysiological issues of taste perception. This led to the conclusion that the sense of taste should be viewed in two ways: taste in the narrow (taste) and wide (flavour) sense. Subsequently, the gustatory perception frame has been established, whereas attention has been especially drawn to the three fundamental perceptual parameters – hedonic value, intensity and quality. The empirical part of the paper shows based on the analysis of the adjectival cooccurrences of the lexemes Geschmack and smak in German and Polish corpora, how the above-mentioned parameters can be talked about whereas they have been further divided into additional subgroups.

Specialist terminology analysis in linguistic research to date has generally focused on unitary specialist terms or on entire specialist vocabularies or complete terminologies. What this research has disregarded is an important aspect of specialist vocabulary: the issue of how terminologies are constituted textually or how specialist vocabularies are deployed in specialist texts. My considerations are illustrated with examples from texts by law researchers from the 19th century German Historical School of Jurisprudence.

The article is based on the summary of the results of the master’s thesis that focusses on the issue of interlinguistic interferences between Slovene and German and aims to examine the interlingual errors occurring as the consequence of the influence of the mother tongue on the second language acquisition. The empirical part consists of the analysis of linguistic choices contradicting the terminologically, morphologically and syntactically appropriate language, which were made by first year bachelor’s as well as first year master's students of German at the University of Ljubljana. The results of the analysis offer a precise answer as to how much the percentage of interference errors depends on the length of study, the influence of other languages as well as on the early acquisition of German.

In my article I would like to describe the main linguistic features of multiethnic youth language in Germany and Sweden and the main areas of their application. The aim of this presentation is therefore to show what distinguishes Kiezdeutsch and Rinkebysvenska on different language levels. This is to try to show what special features are typical for this variety and how they can be identified. Since the linguistic characteristics of such ethnic linguistic phenomena are often considered faulty, distressing, and incorrect, because they are very different from the norms of the standard language, I intend to create a positive perspective of the multilingual constellation, since this is one of the conditions under which the German and Swedish languages can not only develop, but even become enriched.

This appearance concerns a reflection on space and the importance of rhetoric as a tool of visual communication based on a social theory of proxemics – relationship between the human and surrounding space. This case study examines the example of selected buildings in Wroclaw characterised by their unique architectural detail. Such detail provides for an educational medium while being a symbol and a metaphor. Further, it uses the language of architecture as a propaganda tool, while sometimes referring to the concept of “Machtkunst”.

The article aims to explain the importance of qualitative methods in assigning style labels to words in dictionaries. Style labels, as elements of pragmatic information, should be as objective as possible, but in practice they often lack objectivity because they are assigned to words intuitively. A chance to give them more rigor is offered by the PELCRA search engine in the National Corpus of Polish which computes stylistic distribution of search words. The considerations concern the research possibilities that the use of statistical and computer tools in verifying dictionary qualifiers. The method is tested on a sample of 100 words marked as 'bookish' in the Polish Language Dictionary by Mieczysław Szymczak, because it is one of the most mysterious qualifiers.

Today’s linguistics deals increasingly with linguocultural as well as linguocognitive aspects of language existence. One of the universal categories of conceptualizing the world is comparison. Although there are similar comparative models, each culture categorizes the world differently. Anthroponyms, which are person's names, can also be used in comparative models like other language units. The wide variety of examples of comparison with anthroponyms in the mass media makes this topic suitable for further analysis. The language potential of the political anthroponyms Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl und Gerhard Schröder, who are known as the most important politicians in German and European history in the 20th century and at the turn of the century, is to be analyzed in this paper.

The article sheds light on the topic of black humor from an intercultural perspective. The research deals with the peculiarities of German black humor on the basis of its thematic classification. The subject of German black humor is divided into two major groups: general and cultural-specific subjects. In addition, an attempt is being made to identify which cultural-specific elements in the humorous texts are important to humorous reproduction in Germans.

The starting point of discussion on foreign lexemes registered in consecustive editions of Italian dictionaries is the opinion about increasing number of Englishism formulated by Tullio de Mauro. The analysis covers terms used in the Italian language of economics and finance. Gian Luigi Beccaria, Gaetano Berruto, Alberto Sobrero and Maurizio Trifone understand this language as one of the specialised languages. Because of the numerous terms used in specialised discourse devoted to economics, I will narrow the discussion to: credit crunch, rating and spread. The presented Theory will be supported by examples derived from the specialised press. The corpus contains phrases found in Il sole 24 ore journal.

The article presents a linguistic analysis of the German vocabulary. We will deal with the lexis and collocations that are related to football. The reason is that football is the most popular sport in Germany today. Football catches the interest not only of German viewers, but also foreign viewers. In the Bundesliga or other leagues in German there are also foreign football players who need to learn the German language and football terms as a foreign language. The German language, like any other language, has a system of combinatorial rules in lexicons that is specific and idiosyncratic. Therefore, collocations are structured differently from other languages. The aim of the article is to create a collocation glossary that optimally covers the lexis and collocations of this subject area.

This paper is concerned with a special kind of impersonal constructions in Polish. The relevant constructions have a demoted subject with reduced referentiality and arbitrary interpretation. In particular these are the so called -no/-to-construction, the reflexive impersonal and the 3pl construction. Researchers agree that these constructions imply a subject that is obligatorily [+human], but even with human referents these constructions exhibit different degrees of acceptability with different verbs. These differences seem to depend on the agentivity of the implicit subject caused by the verb. We will follow Dowty’s (1991) proposal, in which the agent is considered a prototype category that is decomposed into different semantic role features.

Language is one of the main tools politicians use in their work. An accurate language use and following the principles of rhetoric are crucial in creating a nuanced public image, gaining followers and obtaining power. The aim of this article is to examine the characteristics of the language of politics mainly in relation to linguistic structures used to manipulate and maximize political gain. A starting point for the discussion is formed by parliamentary speeches of a Dutch politician and the leader of populist party PVV, Geert Wilders.

The paper deals with historical fiction, the specific features of which, apart from the genre characteristics, consist in author’s interpretation of the historical events. It is highlighted that the integration of literature and history may add to history studying. Two remarkable novellas by Swiss authors of the period of the Realism were chosen for the analysis. Both novellas report the events within the Reformation. The predominant aim of the investigation was the determination of the objectives of the authors of historical novellas, the way of presentation and the practical importance of the genre.

The article presents the computer language of the Russian and Polisch EDV experts. The introductory part defines the computer language. The central question of the article is: How strongly do the Anglicisms influence the Russian and Polish computer language? The aim of the analysis is to compare Russian and Polish with computer language anglicisms.

In the article the author approaches the problem of plant naming from the polyconfrontative perspective, concentrating on the binomial nomenclature. Special attention is paid to the specific epithet of the selected garden plant names in Dutch, Polish, English and Czech. The names of the phytonyms in native languages are analysed from the point of view of onomastics phenomena in comparison to their botanical names in Latin.

This onomasiological study is a political linguistic research, in which meanings of different words in a synonymic row are examined. Various semantic features of these words are identified, and different types of synonyms are found. It is necessary to explain semantic connotations of the words so that they could be used correctly in the migration discourse. In this research, I study the onomasiological diversity of designations for the term Flüchtling in migration discourse. The survey methods are research and document analysis of the material sources. Fixing, data selection and structuring are chosen as a preparation method. The discourse analysis, used as an evaluation method, is an interdisciplinary research approach that, due to its variety of methods, is suitable for the study of meaning constructions depending on different contexts.

Audio description as a service in favor of blind persons consists in the audial description of visual content of a film production or a painting. It represents an intersemiotical variety of audiovisual translation, but is still underrepresented in research literature. The quality analysis of the audio description by the Landesmuseum Mainz shows that it implements the aesthetics of the performativity. Blind art recipients are moved through language to perform certain actions, with their perception of art embedded in a particular (time) space. Such an intervention may indicate that the audio description becomes an extraordinary staging.

Space and time are the main categories of people’s cognition and they must be counted as the most important aspects of the fictional world, as everything that happens is bound to time and space. There is no action without space because one can imagine the world only spatially and temporally. The opposition FRIEND or FOE is culture-specific and eternal. One can find the examples of this opposition in various discourses, e.g. in the literary discourse. Space can be enclosed by boundaries, e.g. it may be the imaginary boundary between friends and foes. The paper deals with the concept of the semiotic borders as well as textforming opposition FRIEND or FOE in the mountain novel „Niedergang“ written by R. Graf.