Cramer, Rahel K. (2015). Why Australians seem “laid-back” and Germans rather “serious”: A contrastive semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of Australian English and German, with implications for second language pedagogy. MA thesis, Hamburg University. PDF (open access)
This study aims to explore manifestations of cultural characteristics in spoken conversational Australian English and German to reveal the relation between cultural values and ways of speaking and to facilitate their understanding, in particular for second language learners. It is a two-part contrastive analysis. Part One gives a cultural overview by identifying macro-concepts of the two speech communities (‘Ordnung’ and ‘Angst’ for the German culture; the ‘no worries’ attitude, ‘friendliness’ and ‘good humour’ for the Australian culture). Part Two provides a detailed semantic and pragmatic analysis of micro-concepts, which includes a section on social descriptor terms (laid back, relaxed and easy going in Australian English; locker and sympathisch in German) and a section on conversational ideals (anregend and ernsthaft in German; friendly and not too serious in Australian English). The methodological approach is a combination of corpus linguistics and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). The findings from this analysis are considered in relation to their applicability to and usefulness for second language pedagogy.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
