Błachut, Edyta / Gołębiowski, Adam (eds.): Beiträge zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft. Band 8: "Synchronie und Diachronie. Gegenstand - Methoden - Ziele", Wrocław, Atut, 2019
On the Metaphor of the Metalanguage from the Perspective of Translation Studies using the Example... more On the Metaphor of the Metalanguage from the Perspective of Translation Studies using the Example of “Geschichte der neueren Sprachwissenschaft” (The History of Modern Linguistics) by Gerhard Helbig
The topic of the article is the conduit metaphor of the metalanguage as a problem of translation. The essay is a continuation of a cycle of studies on the metaphor in meta-linguistic discourses. The Polish translation of Gerhard Helbig’s work „Geschichte der neueren Sprachwissenschaft“ (‘The History of Modern Linguistics’) documents similarities in the metaphorics of the German and Polish metalanguages, which confirms the thesis about the congruence of metaphors of Western culture. Theoretical aspects will be discussed that may help in the translation of the metaphor.
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Papers by Paweł Bąk
The topic of the article is the conduit metaphor of the metalanguage as a problem of translation. The essay is a continuation of a cycle of studies on the metaphor in meta-linguistic discourses. The Polish translation of Gerhard Helbig’s work „Geschichte der neueren Sprachwissenschaft“ (‘The History of Modern Linguistics’) documents similarities in the metaphorics of the German and Polish metalanguages, which confirms the thesis about the congruence of metaphors of Western culture. Theoretical aspects will be discussed that may help in the translation of the metaphor.
Forms of expressing ideas, the ability of convincing, and effectiveness of argumentation are a matter of survey for many scholars, media experts and linguists. Persuasion of a copywriter, a politician or a journalist may appear in different stylistic forms and in various topics, and shall be – according to the writers and the experts – used deliberately. They use strategies of supporting the text with images in order to attract the listener and to make recording of the information easier. Unfortunately not all the methods may be uncritically accepted, what can be seen from the analysis of the presented material from Polish and German media. The main goal of the paper is to evaluate the usefulness of the linguistic models in the description of rhetoric endeavors that occur in advertisements, newspaper texts, and the language of politics. Another goal is to present justification for the strong disapproval for controversial rhetoric devices.
This article sheds light on the connection between euphemism, dysphemism, and verbal aggression. Based on the relevant literature, especially Bonacchi (2013), (verbal) aggression is understood to include various (linguistic) forms of behavior that are based on a hostile intention (aggressive illocution).
Dysphemisms mostly appear with a pejorative effect in the literature, whereas euphemisms appear with a preventive or mitigating function. The concept of this article is based on the conviction that euphemisms and dysphemisms are not to be understood as expressions that inherently contain an enhancing or disavowing function. Rather, they involve euphemistic or dysphemistic acts, respectively, whose success (i.e., effect) is determined by all sorts of factors, and not only by lexical meaning. Among other things, the perlocutionary effect depends on the situational and linguistic context, on the relationship between the interactants (i.e., discourse participants), on their roles in the discourse, and on the individual characteristics of the interactants (i.e., language competence, discourse competence, awareness, empathy, aggressiveness, etc.).
In addition to overt verbal aggression, the article also considers rarely investigated aspects of covert aggression based on examples of private and public discourse; that is, verbal attacks through euphemisms and non-aggressive effects of dysphemisms. At the center of these considerations are the prevention of aggression, overt and covert forms of verbal aggression, and intended (i.e., intentional) and unintended (i.e., unintentional) hostility. The article discusses with which communicative factors and in which speech acts certain expressions have a euphemistic (i.e., polite) or dysphemistic (i.e., aggressive) effect, and, furthermore, which factors constitute euphemisms and dysphemisms. This discussion highlights the most important features of these.
The paper discusses problems of illocutionary speech acts in German employment certificates. This genre differs significantly from its equivalent documents in other languages. From the Polish perspective, German certificates of employment are aimed at the employee’s evaluation, but expressed in euphemistic manner. This is the result of aspects described e.g. in Goffmann’s postulates and the specific legal causation. Interpretation of the utterances from such texts may be performed, among others, through implicatures. The problems under discussion concern challenges encountered in cross-cultural communication, difficulties of interpretation and misunderstanding in the process of text edition, reception and translation.
The present paper discusses diverse aspects of pleonasms in different types of German discourses. Pleonasm, similarly to tautology, is a strongly criticised phenomenon, not only by regular language users, but also by linguists, especially lexicographers. It does not change the fact, that it is widely used in different discourse types, especially in spoken and technical ones. It appears also on different levels of the language structure. It occurs that it is a mechanism of the language use and it should not be treated a priori as a mistake, because it is a specific language universal, present in different languages around the world.
Key words: pleonasm, tautology, linguistic error
Im Beitrag werden einige in den medialen Bereich beobachtete Tendenzen angesprochen. Der Bereich der Medien ist eine Quelle von vielen Belegen für den Gebrauch neuer, konventionalisierter und lexikalisierter metaphorische Wendungen sowie Strategien des Gebrauchs von Sprache. Die modernen Medien ermöglichen den okkasionell benutzten Wendungen eine schnelle Karriere über Neologismen zu geflügelten Worten. Durch häufigen Gebrauch werden jedoch dabei oft pathetische Formulierungen zu Worthülsen und nichts sagenden Floskeln. Darüber hinaus wird oft dem Wort wenig Respekt entgegengebracht, das in den Medien geäußert wird. Solche Probleme eröffnen neue Perspektiven für eine konstruktive Betrachtung vonseiten der Linguistik. Auch in diesem Sinne erweist sich die sprachwissenschaftlich fundierte Reflexion als hilfreich.
Im Folgenden wird versucht, die Präsenz der Erscheinung im Sprachgebrauch, vor allem im Bereich der Wortbildung zu beleuchten. Es werden Beispiele für (Determinativ)Komposita herangezogenen, die als „Kompositionspleonasmen“ betrachtet werden. Bei diesen Komposita erfolgt eine Pseudodetermination.
W artykule mowa jest o różnorakich formach powtarzania wartości semantycznej wypowiedzi. Terminy tautologia oraz pleonazm używane są w różnorakim sensie, nie tylko w odniesieniu do błędów językowych. Dotyczą także problemów retoryki, typologicznych cech języków, kategorii morfosyntaktycznych i semantycznych.
W artykule ukazana jest obecność tych zjawisk w języku, przede wszystkim w obrębie słowotwórstwa. Przytoczone zostają przykłady pleonazmów określonych przez autora jako „pleonazmy kompozycyjne”, w przypadku których zachodzi pseudodeterminacja członów złożeń.
The article discusses the metalinguistic activity of the economic journals’ authors in papers on economy and finances. The Author underlines significant role of the article author’s competent comments. Apart from euphemisms, also the comments themselves make a very interesting material for further linguistic study. The metatext components, that show the article author’s attitude towards the euphemisms are especially worth analysing. Along with the definitely negative opinions, one can also notice the phenomenon of “metaeuphemism”. The term has not been the subject of separate linguistic surveys yet. In the present paper, based on the anthropocentric linguistics, the commentator’s presence occurs to be vital for the proper analysis of the euphemism.