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Article published In:
Anglo-German Discourse Crossings and Contrasts
Edited by Sylvia Jaworska and Torsten Leuschner
[Pragmatics and Society 9:1] 2018
► pp. 117–147

Crossing languages – crossing discourses

A corpus-assisted study of Kulturkampf in German, Polish and English

| University of Reading
| Ghent University

Recent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have shown that public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of reference to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes. This paper intends to contribute to this new strand of research by investigating discursive transpositions of the historical Germanism Kulturkampf in the donor language, German, and two host languages, Polish and English. Originally used mainly in reference to government attempts to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church in Prussia/Germany in the 1870s, this term has come to be used in German and other languages to signify conflicts in various political and cultural contexts. Adopting a triangulated and trilateral approach and the method of corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS), this paper examines the use of Kulturkampf in large collections of Internet and newspaper data in German, English and Polish. The results show how the meaning of Kulturkampf has been discursively re-contextualised and appropriated to perform local ideological work in public discourses in the three different cultural contexts.

Keywords: historical Germanisms, Kulturkampf , clash of civilisations, corpus-assisted discourse study, English, German, Polish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Towards a corpus-assisted, discourse-analytic approach
    • 2.1 Kulturkampf as a historical Germanism
    • 2.2Methodology and data
  • 3. Kulturkampf in web corpora of German, Polish and English
    • 3.1Crosslinguistic overview: Frequencies and forms
    • 3.2 Kulturkampf in a web corpus of German
    • 3.3 Kulturkampf in a web corpus of Polish
    • 3.4 Kulturkampf in a web corpus of English
    • 3.5Interim summary
  • 4. Kulturkampf in newspaper corpora of German, Polish and English
    • 4.1 Kulturkampf in the German newspaper corpus
    • 4.2 Kulturkampf in the Polish newspaper corpus plNews
    • 4.3 Kulturkampf in the (British) English newspaper corpus enNews
    • 4.4Interim summary
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.16028.jaw
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