Anglicisms in German: Context-dependent interpretation, dynamic restructuring and generalization

• Applicants: Dr. Heike Baeskow; Professor Dr. Jürgen Rolshoven
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281420799

From a linguistic point of view, the borrowing of anglicisms (Boom), the formation of pseudo-anglicisms (Handy) or hybrid forms (Großevent) and the spreading of loan meaning (realisieren < to realize, meaning to become aware of, Sinn machen < to make sense) open up new possibilities for research into the dynamics and restructuring of the language system in contact situations. Within the present project, this topic will be approached by applying methodically new data-driven and corpus-based devices. These devices will serve as a basis for symbol-oriented descriptions of structural innovation, which follow the notation of the Generative Lexicon. Since linguistic works on anglicisms are largely restricted to the print media and special languages, an innovation will be a data-driven retrieval and systematization of anglicisms on the basis of very large corpora, which include not only internet-based journalistic texts, but also weblogs, chat rooms and discussion forums as modern forms of interactive communication. Proceeding from the corpus analyses, dentotative and connotative functions of borrowings in the German language system will be identified contrastively and described on a broad empirical basis. The results obtained by means of corpuslinguistic investigations will be automatically compared to the German alternatives offered in isolation by Bartzsch, Pogarell & Schröder (2004) and the Anglizismen-Index. It is to be expected that these reference works fail to capture the subtle meaning components which anglicisms tend to display in their manifold contexts. Furthermore, German weblogs, chats and discussion forums will be compared to journalistic texts with respect to lexical innovation, which primarily comprises the application of English morphemes to German word-formation processes. This comparison is expected to reveal the degree to which anglicisms are part of the competence of German native speakers and thus likely to influence the dynamics of the German language system. The influence of English on the German language system also surfaces in verbal loan meanings (e.g. jemanden für etwas aufbauen < to build someone up for something, einen Angriff fliegen < to fly an attack), which constitute a particular type of indirect loans and whose formal analysis is part of the project, too. An analysis of the computationally detected linguistic contexts will show that these forms, like direct loans, are capable of causing diversification within a flexible language system. Thus, the project is innovative in the following ways: (a) it is massively data-driven, (b) it focuses on structures and on the dynamics of borrowing processes, (c) it provides new forms of data compression and thus allows for an empirically motivated, formal description of the meanings associated with anglicisms, (d) it aims at a generalization of the results supported by collaborative IT tools.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants