ANGLICISMS IN GERMAN JOURNALISTIC DISCOURSE

Abstract

Our study aims to supplement and in some aspects change the existing ideas about the nature and place of Anglicisms in German-language journalistic discourse, as well as to make a certain contribution to the development of a complex issue of the role and peculiarities of borrowings in the language as a whole. The novelty of the study lies in the involvement of new linguistic material, the expansion of the chronological and thematic boundaries of English vocabulary outside its linguistic environment, as well as the use of functional (Anglicisms in Spiegel magazine) and semantic (peculiarities of the use of Anglicisms in various communicative spheres) types of analysis.

The material of the study was a sample of anglicisms from Spiegel magazine of different years of publication (1950-2020). The study involved 6 copies from each annual issue of the magazine with a total of about 8,000 pages.

The study showed that the use of Anglicisms on the pages of Spiegel magazine is steadily increasing: from 2.3 borrowings per page of text in 1950 to 4.7 in 2020. The most open to the adoption of Anglicisms are the communication areas of 

"sports" and "advertising and announcements", while the "foreign and domestic policy" section „Spiegel“remains the most conservative. The most frequently used Anglicisms include both relatively "old" borrowings, i.e. borrowings from the 18th and early 20th centuries, and new ones, i.e. words that entered the German language after the Second World War.

A detailed analysis of anglicisms has allowed us to identify the following reasons for borrowing: absence of the corresponding concept in the cognitive base of the receiving language, "loss" of the German equivalent in competition with the borrowing in the receiving language, provision of stylistic (emphatic) effect, expression of positive or negative connotations that the equivalent unit in the receiving language does not have, the need to distinguish between conceptually close but still somewhat different concepts, the need to specialise concepts in a particular area for certain purposes, the tendency to denote an object that is not dismembered into separate components with a single word rather than a combination of words, the perception of a foreign language word by the whole group of speakers or a part of it as more prestigious, with a better sound, as well as the communicative relevance of the denoted concept.