Leibniz Institute for the German Language

Abstract This paper investigates the use of gender-inclusive language on 42 municipal websites from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and South Tyrol between 2022 and 2024. Based on a corpus of two key subpages of each city, namely those that provide information on how change one’s address and online job postings, the study shows that the choice of personal nouns is shaped by both regional and text-specific factors. Administrative texts tend to favor gender-neutral forms such as epicene nouns (e. g. Person, Mensch ). In contrast, job advertisements which are shaped by legal frameworks and have persuasive intent, show a strong preference for explicit gender-inclusive forms, in particular those using non-binary gender symbols such as the asterisk ( Krankenpfleger*innen ) or the colon ( Sachbearbeiter:in ). Regional variation is most evident on pages providing administrative information: Austrian and South Tyrolean cities are more likely to use gender symbols than German or Swiss cities. In Germany, generic masculine forms are the second most common choice after gender-neutral forms, whereas binary pair forms are most prevalent in Switzerland. Despite this variation, patterns of language use have remained relatively stable over the three years analysed. These findings indicate that the flexible, context- and genre-sensitive use of person references is already widespread in public communication within the pluricentric German-speaking area.

The present chapter focuses on corpora that feature multiple layers of annotation and looks at the phenomenon from an application-based perspective, couched in the real-life context of DeReKo (the largest linguistically motivated collection of contemporary written German) and of the analysis engine KorAP that makes it possible to analyse texts with reference to multiple annotations.The authors review the basic concepts needed for talking about multiple annotations, present the most notorious obstacle in dealing with them in an XML-based format, show the basic ways of tackling it that have been suggested in the literature, and conclude with a presentation of KorAP-XML, an internal format designed for the purpose of easy enrichment of DeReKo texts with many diverse annotation layers.

En este artículo se pretende analizar el periodo entre 1933 y 1945 en Alemania desde la perspectiva de una historia social-lingüística-cultural considerando el uso del lenguaje de los actores. En términos generales, deseamos describir espacial y temporalmente los patrones de uso lingüístico como actos de inclusión-exclusión considerándolos como conceptos auto y hetero referentes. Esto debería revelar de manera ejemplar cómo, con instrumentos lingüísticos aplicados al análisis cultural, puede adquirirse un conocimiento lingüístico-histórico. De esta manera, la adquisición de este rédito será aplicada ejemplarmente a los eventos relacionados con el desarrollo social-lingüístico-cultural operacionalizado en el objeto discursivo durante las Olimpiadas de 1936. Con ello quedará claro que una historia lingüística aplicada al análisis cultural y, a la vez, focalizada en la historia sociolingüística del lenguaje de los años que van desde 1933 a 1945 logra revelar la realidad lingüística sobre las perspectivas dominantes y formativas del contexto de estos doce años.

ABSTRACT Our paper discusses language questions in censuses as enactments of ideologies which both reflect, and shape, language policies in two nation states in Europe: Latvia and Germany. Both countries largely base their identities on a unifying national language - Latvian and German, respectively. At the same time, both countries display fundamentally different practices regarding active language policy and management, with Latvia having a strong language policy tradition, whereas Germany does not conduct coherent overt language policies. In this vein, the paper first provides an overview of the development of language questions in the censuses of Latvia and Germany under different political constellations since the first censues took place in the nineteenth century. We then discuss language ideologies in most recent census-type investigations in both countries. In this, we focus on the distinction between monolingual state policies and multilingual realities, and on the relation between languages and ethnic affiliation in shaping and analysing censuses. This relates both to migration-induced multilingualism (regarding, e.g. Russian in Latvia and Turkish in Germany), and to the presence of autochthonous or regional languages such as Latgalian and Low German. Thereby, we hope to raise awareness about language policy implications of language censuses in countries where nation-state ideologies are met by far more multilingual realities.

Diskursive Ordnungen zeigen sich dort besonders deutlich, wo sie gestört werden oder Brüche aufweisen. Dieser Band widmet sich aus diskursanalytischer Perspektive dem Begriff der Disruption, der sowohl die Kontinuitäten Regelmäßigkeiten als auch die Unvorhersehbarkeit und Widersprüchlichkeit diskursiver Ereignisse in den Fokus rückt. Die Analyse von (Zuschreibungen von) Disruptionen ermöglicht es, die wechselseitige Konstitution sozialer und epistemischer Ordnungen pointiert zu erfassen. Die Beiträge im Band behandeln am Beispiel verschiedener Epochen und gesellschaftlicher Domänen sowohl disruptive Aspekte diskursiver Ordnungen als auch diskursive Aushandlungen disruptiver Ereignisse und Dynamiken und verdeutlichen die das große Potential einer diskursanalytisch orientierten Disruptionsforschung. Gesamtband, herausgegeben von Simon Meier-Vieracker, Silvia Bonacchi, Hanna Acke, Mark Dang-Anh und Ingo H. Warnke

Abstract This article examines the use of excuse me as a practice for invoking the complainability of another person’s conduct in the service of sanctioning it as misconduct. It explores how a form that semantically expresses its speaker’s desire to be excused (excuse me ) can be used to flag another person’s doings as transgressive or untoward. It is proposed that, to elucidate this puzzle, it is necessary to adopt a more holistic perspective and to incorporate other uses of the format (e.g., in other-initiated repair, as an attention-drawing device), as well as possible relationships between them, into the analysis. The paper offers a sketch of such a more holistic, integrative account. This account revolves around the idea that practices of speaking that mobilize similar or even the same linguistic resources implicate partially overlapping sets of affordances for action which link different usages together in a larger pragmatic landscape. As such, form-based practices of speaking and the various actions they can implement exhibit demonstrable relationships across different domains of use which may need to be taken into account when thinking about a practice’s fit to the action it implements. One of the key benefits of such an approach is that it allows for mapping out larger pragmatic landscapes and to move beyond the isolated description of individual practices of speaking.

Dieser erweiterte Forschungsbericht stellt einerseits den aktuellen Forschungsstand zur literaturgeschichtlichen Einordnung JAKOB JULIUS DAVIDS dar, andererseits blickt er auf mögliche Synergien zwischen der Feldtheorie und den Digital Humanities, um ihre gemeinsame Anwendung zur Untersuchung der Position von DAVID im literarischen Feld der Jahrhundertwende zu erörtern.

Abstract In this contribution, we report on ongoing efforts in the German national research infrastructure consortium Text+ to make research data and services for text- and language-oriented disciplines FAIR, that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, as well as compliant with the CARE principles for language resources.

Abstract The genitive case in German is predominantly used to form noun modifiers (die Sehenswürdigkeiten [Hamburgs] ‘the sights of Hamburg’). Such genitive modifiers occur in a variety of different registers in German, and they have been claimed to be especially characteristic of non-proximal, written language. In many instances, they are interchangeable with diachronically younger prepositional phrases headed by von, with no noticeable impact on interpretation, thus giving rise to a genuine syntactic alternation phenomenon. There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to the distribution and function of these constructions. Based on corpus data from newspapers and internet discussion forums (approximately 15,000 noun phrases), we discuss semantic and syntactic conditions that limit the scope of this alternation. We then use a mixed-effects logistic regression model to examine a number of intra- and extralinguistic factors that bear on the choice of one construction over the other. We find that von-modifiers are used much less frequently than genitive modifiers overall, but there are grammatical niches in which they seem to thrive and, perhaps, even spread.

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