Germanic and Slavic Studies

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies.

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Browsing Germanic and Slavic Studies by Author "Deppermann, Arnulf"

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    Culture-in-interaction: Using idiomatic-sounding membership categorizations in German interactions
    (University of Waterloo, 2022-08-29) Profazi, Nina Rahel; Betz, Emma; Deppermann, Arnulf
    Understanding (Verstehen) and establishing common understanding (Verständigung) are foundational to human communication. Interactants not only work to understand their conversational partners, but they also act to ensure that they are understood correctly themselves. To this end, interactants use a wealth of linguistic and embodied resources which they tailor to their recipients and their communicative purposes in a given interaction. One such resource is the use of membership categorizations, a practice for positioning people within the realm of a jointly experienced world. Such categorizations (of self and others) can take on an idiomatic quality when they carry culturally specific knowledge, that is the communal common ground (Clark, 1996), of a social community. Following Stokoe’s (2010a) work on English, such categorizations as “ich als Mann” or “typisch Italiener” are glossed as “idiomatic-sounding membership categorizations” and examined in this paper for German, using a combination of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA). Natural conversations from the corpus FOLK (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch), at the Leibniz Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, Germany, serve as the data basis for this work. The data samples stem from private and institutional domains and include both co-present and telephone interactions. The study at hand provides a qualitative analysis of a collection of such categorizations in spontaneous interactions and will focus on describing their sequential position, as well as their interactional function. Results will show that idiomatic-sounding membership categorizations are used in a number of ways to achieve or maintain mutually shared understanding (intersubjectivity) between interactants. Firstly, and confirming prior findings on idiomatic-sounding membership categorizations, such categorizations are used as summaries of conversational sequences, indicating the speaker's understanding and stance toward the previous conversational action. Furthermore, they are systematically used for accounts, which are regularly employed to justify another person’s behaviour. New insights provided by this work is the use of idiomatic-sounding membership categorizations as an interpretive key at the beginning of a narrative multi-unit turn, thus guiding the reception of the story through the chosen categorical lens. Finally, they represent a linguistic resource for resolving delicate conversational situations and thus maintaining the social solidarity in interaction. The results of this study emphasize the importance of socio-cultural belonging in the process of understanding, as it is made relevant and negotiated in interaction for specific interactional purposes in concrete moments. Cultural knowledge is invoked as an interpretive key for ongoing actions and larger activities, thus providing a window into processes of identity construction, knowledge mediation, as well as the production and reproduction of social order.
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    German as a foreign language: Fostering intercultural and symbolic competence in integration courses in Germany
    (University of Waterloo, 2019-09-09) Lissitsin, Jasmin; Schmenk, Barbara; Deppermann, Arnulf
    In the globalized 21st century, frequently rising international and intercultural encounters, mass migrations, and growing displacements happen to increase the necessity of intercultural language teaching, especially in integration courses. Drawing on two more and more for the language teaching sector important concepts, the intercultural competence and the symbolic competence, this research examines the existence of cross-cultural reflection in one popular German textbook that is especially used in integration courses. It argues, that Hier! Deutsch für die Integration A1.1 predominantly contains material of traditional language teaching while excluding innovative pedagogical and didactic approaches in the field of German as a second/foreign language. Additionally, it uncovers the prevalent construction of language learners in the textbook that is tied to the native speaker ideology and the monolingual bias. The theoretical framework is grounded on a critical discourse analysis of a structuralist and constructivist view of the concept of culture as well as guidelines second-language pedagogy derived from these two different perspectives. Built on these theoretical thoughts, two sets of criteria were developed to search for both, intercultural, and symbolic components within the chosen textbook. The outcomes of the analysis show that especially the intercultural competence was taken into account during the material designing process, while the integration of symbolic competence could not be found for the greatest extent. The discussion offers some line of thoughts for future research inquiry that would promote both competences as well as critical language awareness in German integration courses.
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    “tu_s oben DRAUFlegen”: tun-constructions as context-sensitive practices in German
    (University of Waterloo, 2020-12-21) Bühl, Kira; Betz, Emma; Deppermann, Arnulf
    There are a variety of syntactic formats available to get others to do something in German interaction. To make a request or give an instruction, speakers of German may use an imperative, a declarative, a single word, or gestures. When making requests or giving instructions as part of a collaborative activity such as renovating a room or cooking dinner, speakers of German use a number of different verbs, including the polysemous verb tun. Speakers use both the periphrastic format of tun as an auxiliary verb followed by an infinitive (tus da hinlegen) as well as tun as a main verb with a directional adverbial or prepositional phrase (tu des weg; tu des in den Kühlschrank) to instruct interactants to complete a certain task or to direct them to perform a certain action. The first represents a highly stigmatized use of tun (Dudenredaktion, 2014), the latter often considered too vague (Kreß, 2017). This multimodal, conversation analytic study investigates these two tun constructions as context-sensitive practices. I analyze the occurrence and function of 37 examples (13 examples tun + infinitive periphrase; 24 examples tun + directive adverbial complement) in naturally occurring request and instruction sequences. Data are observed in audio and video recordings of everyday German interactions taken from the FOLK corpus that is part of the Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD). Even though tun in the above-mentioned examples is widely believed to be “bad German” (Brinckmann & Bubenhofer, 2012), the study demonstrates that tun appears in specific contexts for particular types of requesting actions. In most cases, interactants are already oriented to a joint activity. The tun-constructions thus extend something already in progress and mobilize a recipient’s immediate bodily action. As tun has not been studied in greater depth from a conversation analytic approach, this study contributes to the practices of spoken interaction in German.
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    =und wenn_s nun mal heißt dass die männer mehr leistung BRINgen?: An interactional to the functions of the modal particle „nun mal“ approach
    (University of Waterloo, 2016-08-30) Eberz, Isabelle; Betz, Emma; Deppermann, Arnulf
    Human interaction is mainly based on conversation. Without conversations, we would not be able to communicate with each other. To communicate, we use words and each word has different and specific meaning. In the German language, there is a rich variety of (modal) particles; that are usually small and short words, which are often and easily overlooked as they are mainly seen as an element of the spoken language. Especially for language learners, modal particles are difficult to learn and understand because their meaning is highly pragmatic. This thesis deals with the actual disposition and function of the modal particle nun mal in real conversation. Until now, there are almost no studies which worked according to conversational analysis and used an interactional approach, but concentrated on invented examples to define the function of modal particles in general. The thesis is based on 76 data examples, which include different varieties of nun mal (56x), such as nu mal (8x), nu ma (5x), nun einmal (5x), nu einmal (1x), and nun ma (1x). The analysis will show that nun mal marks some type of evidence of a constructed reality, which seems to be unchangeable. The grounding of these constructed realities are based on different levels of epistemic domains, which refer back Allgemeinwissen, common sense, personal common ground, communal common ground, and/or the pre-interaction or the personal epistemic domain of the speaker. The grounding can refer back to more than one of these domains and can be supported by additional linguistic tools. Furthermore, it will be shown that by using nun mal, speakers mark the information as given and explicitly not new to the recipient. Nun mal is used in environments, in which speakers are misaligned, which are problematic or in which it is likely that someone objects to the current talk. Based on the constructed reality, speakers use nun mal to achieve different goals, e.g. to constitute a consensus, to end a discussion or topic, to introduce a logical result and outcome, or to work as an objection. Additionally, this thesis will analyze different examples at syntactic boundaries, which are not congruent with the current research of modal particles as they are traditionally seen as limited to the syntactic inner field. This could open new possibilities for future research in this field.