Conversations of Intercultural Couples

Product Description

Language in Text and Discourse is an innovative state-of-the-art interdisciplinary series of monographs and edited collections that focus on cutting-edge linguistic studies at the interface between discourse and society including corpus approaches. This series is a forum for studies of language in interaction with other semiotic modes which address the question of how meanings are activated, remade or re-shaped within a variety of contexts and interactions, such as social or textual structures, places, styles, or discursive moments. These are considered to be resources for placemaking or positioning, which correlate and are indexically linked with repetitive semiotic patterns. Verbal and non-verbal positioning as well as conventionalised forms of patterning determine, construe and reflect historically variable concepts of social reality. These are part of a complex network of discursive realities, power relations and voices. The series incorporates studies of social styling and language usage as well as processes of position-ing in a number of different linguistic as well as social, cultural, aesthetic and historical contexts.

By transcending disciplinary boundaries the series is integrative in a number of ways. We will publish linguistic studies written in English or German about grammatical, knowledge-oriented, stylistic and sociolinguistic approaches within the fields of discourse analy-sis or corpus linguistics. These studies com-bine quantitative and qualitative investigations or represent mono- or multi-modal analyses. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Editors:
Beatrix Busse, professor of English linguistics, is Vice-rector for teaching and learning at the University of Köln (Germany).
Ingo H. Warnke holds the chair of German linguistics and interdisciplinary linguistics at the University of Bremen (Germany).

Auf der Grundlage empirisch erhobenen Sprachmaterials untersucht die Studie das diskursive Aushandeln von Sprache und Identität innerhalb der intimsten "Community of Practice (CofP)", der Ehe zwischen interkulturellen Sprachpartnern. Die Studie ist in die sozialpsychologischen Konzepte von Identität und "Positioning" eingebettet. So wird am Beispiel von Interviews mit interkulturellen Paaren - genauer: englische Muttersprachler/innen, die mit deutschsprachigen Schweizer/innen verheiratet sind, in einer diglossen Sprachregion in der Zentralschweiz leben und über drei Jahre interviewt wurden - die Verhandlung und Performanz hybrider Identitäten analysiert und gezeigt, wie "doing Swiss" diskursiv ko-konstruiert und ausgehandelt wird. This book presents an empirical study that examines intercultural couples' reasons for specific language practices and investigates the negotiation and performances of hybrid identities within the marital unit, the most intimate community of practice (CofP). The theoretical framework adopted draws on the sociocultural linguistic approach to identity and the social psychological theory of positioning. The data stem from ethnographic observation and recordings carried out over a three-year period with intercultural couples, namely Anglophones married to native German-speaking Swiss, who reside in central Switzerland, where a diglossic situation prevails. The positionings individuals take up or refute indicate that the performance of "doing Swiss" is not only discursively co-constructed, but a site where the negotiation of meaning emerges within the context of social interaction. About the Author Kellie Gonçalves ist Assistentin der Modernen Englischen Linguistik an der Universität Bern, Schweiz.

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