»Ist das OK?« Höflichkeit und kommunikative Kompetenz im NHK Japanisch-Lernprogramm Easy Japanese for Work
Florian Grosser
This article analyzes how communicative competence and politeness are co-constructed in one episode of Easy Japanese for Work, an online video-program for learners of Japanese. The episode analyzed in this article introduces a young man from Vietnam whose language use toward his superiors is deemed 'too casual' when asking for permission at work. He tackles a role play challenge that is evaluated by two experts of Japanese language education and business manners, who suggest a key phrase to make his Japanese 'more polite'. Throughout the program, the experts, the learner's superiors at his workplace, and the narrator evaluate his performance. My analysis exemplifies how a single discursive element uttered by the learner (daijoobu desu ka, 'is it OK?') is entextualized and metapragmatically evaluated as insufficiently polite. It is shown that, apart from verbal indexical expressions, various semiotic resources, such as gesture and gaze, but also visual-textual means, e.g. subtitles, and colors, are employed to position the learner as someone who is in need of adjusting his language use in workplace interactions.
Keywords: kommunikative Kompetenz, Textualisierung, Japanisch, metapragmatische Positionierung, Höflichkeit
The Social Meaning of /r/ in Austrian German. A study on the resignification of the phoneme's alveolar variant
Amadia Kilic
Bei der Verbreitung vieler sich im Gange befindenden Lautwandel wird den sich im Wandel involvierten Varianten eine soziale Bedeutung zugeschrieben (Eckert 2019). In der deutschen Sprache hat sich der Artikulationsort des Phonems /r/ zunehmend von einem alveolaren zu einem uvularen verändert. Unterdessen sind in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts Migrant/inn/en mit nicht-deutschen Erstsprachen Teil der deutschen Sprachgemeinschaft in Österreich geworden. Eine auffallende Interferenz ihrer Erstsprachen im Deutschen ist die Verwendung eines alveolaren /r/. Das führte zu unterschiedlichen sozialen Bedeutungen dieser Variante. In dieser Studie wurde die soziale Bedeutung der alveolaren und uvularen Realisierungen, gesprochen von einem jeweils jüngeren (18 Jahre) und älteren (59 Jahre) Sprecher österreichischen Deutschs, untersucht. Teil der Vorgehensweise waren zwei Experimente; eine modifizierte Version des Matched-Guise-Test und zwei Audio- Ausschnitte, gefolgt von offenen Fragen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass obwohl die alveolaren Varianten die archaischen im Lautwandel sind, sie, unabhängig vom Sprecheralter, mit einer sogenannten ›migrantischen Persona‹ assoziiert werden.
Schlagwörter: Social meaning, sound change, Austrian-German, migrant persona, Austrian persona
Erzählen oder beschreiben? Vierjährige Kinder geben die Frogstory wieder
Verena Blaschitz
The paper investigates the way four-year-old monolingual German- speaking children reproduce the so-called Frog Story (Mayer 1969). The main question is which differences can be identified concerning the narrative characteristics displayed in the children’s reproductions. These reproductions were analyzed both in terms of narrative structure (cf. Berman and Slobin 1994), and in terms of the positive realization of certain narrative means (cf. Hoffmann 2018). According to most studies and the relevant literature, (young) children are expected to produce descriptions rather than narratives when reproducing a picture story. The qualitative (and additional quantitative) analysis though reveals that only half of the children’s reproductions are descriptive while the other half shows narrative characteristics of different kind – and to different extent. The groups vary regarding all investigated aspects in a way that children with narrative reproductions show more elaborate results.
Keywords: Narrative Analyse, narrative Mittel, Frog Story, Bildgeschichte, Narration vs. Beschreibung
»Alles das, was in Italienisch gesagt wird, trifft mich direkter«. Eine qualitative Untersuchung der Identitätskonstruktion und des Spracherlebens junger Italiener in Wien
Katharina Meissl/Daria Vogrin/Giorgia Zogu
Identity is assumed to be a discursive construct, often showing a close connection to notions of ethnicity and language. In this paper, we investigate the identity construction of three young Italians living in Vienna. We examine which factors contribute to their (non-)identification with Italy and Austria with a special regard to language. Embedded in the framework of language biographical research and drawing on aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis we analyze three individual interviews along with language portraits and one group interview with the same three participants. Contrary to our prior assumptions, our analysis shows that all three participants unambiguously identify as Italian. Their identification is characterized by an essentialism that closely connects the concepts of identity, language, and ethnicity.
Keywords: Identitätskonstruktion, Spracherleben, Einwanderung, Interview, Sprachenportrait