Christa Dürscheid

Wie Jugendliche schreiben : Schreibkompetenz und neue Medien

Today, young people write in their leisure time far more than they did 15 years ago. Most often they use the new media to do their writing. This book explores whether the frequent writing of short messages and e-mails and participation in chats and social networks like Facebook have an influence on writing in school. Are there any similarities and relationships between the texts written in school and the private texts? For the first time, based on comprehensive data from Swiss students, this book provides empirical answers to these questions.

Syntaktische Tendenzen im heutigen Deutsch

The essay deals with topical syntactic tendencies and developments that can currently be observed on the level of German syntax. There are three focal points: a) the formation of inflective constructions, b) the omission of the definite and the indefinite article, and c) the use of ethno-linguistic means of expression. After the data has been analysed linguistically, the question of how these can be judged from the point of view of language criticism is raised and discussed. It is argued that the phenomena described are no indication of a deterioration in linguistic skills - provided that the speakers are fully aware of the aptness of their forms of expression from the point of view of communication. The essay concludes by demonstrating the consequences for the teaching of German as well as for academic research into German.

Jenseits des Alphabets – Kommunikation mit Emojis

Abstract The paper provides an overview of the functions of emojis in everyday written communication – either used to complement or to replace text. The first chapter presents the current research literature on this topic and addresses the differences between unicode emojis and the former ASCII-signs. Then we discuss a question hotly debated by the public: May emojis be considered the basis of a new universal language? After having shown on both the lexical and the grammatical level that this cannot be the case we move on to the question whether, within our alphabetic system of writing, emojis may be used as additional graphic signs. The last chapter offers some examples of WhatsApp messages containing emojis in the various functions discussed before (as allographs and ideograms, for instance). Furthermore, a frequency analysis based on the Swiss WhatsApp corpus shows the distribution of emojis in these data.

Areale grammatische Variation in den Gebrauchsstandards des Deutschen

Der Beitrag thematisiert einen in der Forschung bislang kaum beachteten Parameter fur grammatische Variation im Standard: die Arealitat. Im ersten Teil folgen Begriffsklarungen, zunachst zum Terminus areal (mit einer Stellungnahme zur Debatte um das Deutsche als plurizentrische bzw. pluriareale Sprache), dann zu der Frage, wie Standard als Gebrauchsstandard definiert werden kann und in welcher Relation dazu der Terminus Kodex steht. Danach wird mit Blick auf das Projekt „Variantengrammatik des Deutschen“ aufgezeigt, wie areale grammatische Variation im Deutschen empirisch zu beschreiben ist. Der letzte Teil prasentiert Fallbeispiele, anhand derer sich das Erfassen von Varianten - von der Recherche in einem areal ausgewogenen Korpus bis zu ihrer Kodifikation in den Gebrauchsstandards des Deutschen - nachzeichnen lasst.

Neue Dialoge – alte Konzepte?

Abstract The first two paragraphs deal with the question of how the term dialogue is to be understood and how the terms dialogue and monologue are related. Then arguments for and against the assumption that written communication is a kind of interaction are discussed. Paragraph 4 points out the typical features of written interaction, using the example of WhatsApp – an internet-based instant messaging service which can be installed on a smartphone. In this context the following questions are discussed: how are the characteristics of such dialogues to be described? What distinguishes them from spoken dialogues? And why – compared to text messaging via mobile phones – do they constitute a new kind of dialogue? Paragraph 5 deals with Linell’s (1998) concept of dialogism and investigates in what ways this concept is applicable to written interaction. Finally it is shown that not only spoken but also written dialogues may be described in the context of interactional linguistics and other well established research contexts. However, new descriptive methods are needed to do justice to the specific features of written interaction.