The article outlines the options for a pedagogically motivated keyword analysis in order to discover differences between the academic writing of Czech and Austrian students of German philology (or related fields). First, the paper presents a brief overview of the presently available metrics employed in keyword analyses, outlining some modifications that can be applied to make the results more relevant and easily interpretable. In the practical part, I explore which lexical items are frequently used by the L1 writers but at the same time are underused in the L2 subcorpus. The product of the study is a word list, which can be utilised by academic writing instructors or students themselves to provide them with an idea of what needs to be taught/learnt.
Finding a German publication in the field of foreign language acquisition that does not explicitly mention the role of literature would be an anomaly. Within DaF (German as a foreign language), the position occupied by works of literature has been subjected to no or very little scrutiny in the past decades. Simultaneously, it has become fashionable to criticise the (supposed) deficiencies of the pragmatic and competence-driven approach to teaching. The paper offers a critical examination of the theoretical underpinnings as well as the arguments often employed by the proponents of the use of literature in teaching. The findings hint at misleading citation practices, the absence of empirical research in the area as well as problematic argumentation at times.
Despite the magnitude of its consumption by the general public, online pornography has to date received comparatively very little attention within linguistics. The paper explores the language in video titles on the pornographic site Pornhub using a corpus-driven approach. A corpus of 17,000 titles compiled specifically for the purposes of the study yielded a word list, which, together with an interdisciplinary literature review, was used to formulate two research questions. With gender as a key variable, the first research question focuses on the linguistic representation of agency by looking at verb objects, while the second examines expressions (nouns and adjectives) used to ascribe roles to the participants. A quantitative evaluation of the data indicates an interplay between gender and the observed features in both questions. The lexicalisation of agency was found to be more complex than previously thought; nine categories were found, and the role of passive voice differed depending on gender. As for gender characterisation, descriptions of women's roles are not only more frequent but also more heterogenous and evaluative compared to those of men.
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