«Würzburg mark description» as an early monument of the Old High German language

The article concerns the issues of discussion about the composition of the monuments of ancient German writing that are relevant to the history of the German literary language of the initial period, in particular the texts of agrarian law of the 8th century descriptions of land detours and demarcations of the Main Franconian region. The thesis of the clerical exclusivity of ancient German writing dominates by inertia in Russian historical Germanic studies. The relevance of the research carried out on the material of the unique monument of the so-called second description of the Wrzburg mark is associated with the approbation of an integrated approach to the analysis of the language and genre and stylistic affiliation of the text. The place of this source in the corpus of autochthonous texts of the VIII century from Wrzburg is determined. The research solves the problem of decoding the semiotic meanings contained in this old-written text, which is identified as a protocol for oral presentation. The main research methods are onomastic and component analysis (toponyms, anthroponyms), a toolkit of historical-stylistic, discursive and hermeneutic approaches using digital technologies. The genre content and linguistic characteristics of the monument are specified. The description of the Wrzburg demarcation and related texts is considered in the context of the linguistic situation of the VIIIXI centuries. The main conclusions of the study: as a small-format legal text, this monument has a special semantic nature, encodes valuable historical and cultural information, unique relics of the transitional early feudal era in Germany; its reference (referential) function, areаlogy, toponymic and anthroponymic semiotics are revealed through intertextual connections with other Old High German monuments of the XVIII century.

Media Genres and Compositional Speech Forms of Journalism: Relationships and Connections

The existing set of media text modifications with their numerous contexts remains largely understudied in terms of text typology. There are no complex descriptions of the types of media messages. The article raises the problem of correlation between media genres and the compositional speech forms of journalism. The author interprets compositional speech forms as complex functional textual units that structure the thought and give it integrity and completeness. Genre approaches to classifications and current media text typology issues dominate in the contemporary text linguistics, despite the fact that the genre remains its central category. The Germanic studies have accumulated enough experience to generalize the existing points of view and cover all possible journalistic representation forms (journalistische Darstellungsformen). From the standpoint of text linguistics, it is the genre variety of media proposals that confirms the priority of the term Textsorte, which covers homogeneous text classes that are hierarchically the same. This article focuses on the term Textsorte, since it covers the whole variety of media genres and fixes the hierarchical principle of the text function in the system of communicative speech classifications. Therefore, Textsorte is the main operational reference point in German genre studies and the basis for multidimensional classifications of media texts.

SYSTEMIC DESCRIPTION OF GERMANIC LEXEMES (EXAMPLIFIED BY THE LEXEME WEOROLD IN OLD ENGLISH)

The article aims at presenting a procedure of systemic description of the linguistic characteristics inherent in lexemes in Germanic languages. The present research is of a complex nature. A complex approach exercised to achieve the goals of the research suggests addressing a number of consecutive descriptive tasks pertaining to particular linguistic aspects, to wit: etymology, morphonology, semantics and word-formation. The analysis focuses on the Old English noun ‘weorold’ intended to examplify the typical formal procedure of description. The scientific methods used in the course of the research are as follows: descriptive method, comparative-historical, etymological analysis, morphemic analysis, distributive analysis, method of oppositions, component analysis. In the aspect of etymology the lexical correlations of the lexeme under study and its morphological components are detected in cognate old and modern Germanic languages. In the aspect of morphonology the analysis focuses on the morphological structure of the noun ‘weorold’ and its evolution in the Old English period as compared with the prewritten period. There also is some study of the phonetic factors and processes which conditioned the phonemic composition of the lexeme ‘weorold’ and the interaction of its phonemes as separate entities. In terms of semantics attention is largely paid to the development of the main meanings. To this end an inventory of all the dictionary meanings with contextual examples is provided. In the aspect of word-formation the productivity of the analyzed lexeme as a word-forming basis is put to scrutiny. The compounds formed on the basis of the noun ‘weorold’ are noted to feature a unity of semantics provided by the word-forming basis that they share. The article may be of interest to linguists who do research in Germanic studies, lexicology and history of English.

Język a kultura w lingwistycznych badaniach germanistycznych

The aim of the article is to reflect on the development of research within broadly understood cultural linguistics in Germanic studies. The collected corpus of texts of key importance for the development of cultural linguistics in Germanic studies shows how language and culture are defined in the context of their mutual relations. The article also discusses the terms used in the literature by linguists to define and describe their research, in order to use the examples from these two fields to illustrate the aims of anthropological linguistics (anthropologische Linguistik) and cultural linguistics (kulturanalytische Linguistik) and the methods used to analyse the linguistic material. The article ends with a summary of developmental trends in the discussed linguistic sub-discipline and with an interlinguistic commentary.

At the Origins of Modern Lithuanian Literary Studies. Phenomenon of Juozas Eretas

The article under studies is a critical survey of the activities of a Swiss scholar Juozas Eretas (1896–1984), one of the founders of Lithuanian Literary Studies, whose origin is closely related to the revival of the Lithuanian State (1918 р). Raised on the principles of the so-called Fribourg School, J. Eretas may be regarded as a vivid example of a catholic scientist. He emphasized the importance of the connection between research and thinking. In the 20-30s, having mastered the Lithuanian language, under the influence of the first translations of the world literary works into Lithuanian, Eretas laid the foundation of analytical criticism. He also took up the translation and, at the same time, became the founder of Lithuanian Germanic Studies, paying most of his attention to the Medieval German Literature, the heritage of mystics, the literature of “storm and drive”, particularly the works by Goethe and Schiller. In addition, Eretas made a considerable contribution to Lithuanian Theory of Literature: “Creating Philosophical Criticism in Literature” (lecture, 1922), “Philosophy and Poetry” (1924), “Methods of Literary Analysis” (1929). Eretas’ approach to German Literature was purely conceptual and rested on the idea of its universal nature (especially concerning Goethe): monographs “Young Goethe” (1932) and “Goethe Hundred Years Later” (1933). It is worth mentioning Eretas’ attitude to Goethe’s “Faust”. He interprets the main character typologically, as an eternal image of the world culture, pointing hereby to the increased attention to this image during the epoch of “storm and drive”. Eretas’ interpretation of the images of Faust and Mephistopheles, which present the idea of “dual world” that is so peculiar for Romanticism, seems very interesting and promising. Besides, Eretas was first in Lithuanian Literary Studies to refer to Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” as to the novel of upbringing. Another significant subject of Eretas’ research was the History of World Mystics (the work “From the History of Mystics”, as well as the monographs on Tauler, Eckhart and Suso).

“Ih wallota sumaro enti wintro sehstic”: The Familiar and the Foreign in Old Germanic Studies

This collection celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the Dutch Society for Old Germanic studies, the Vereniging voor Oudgermanisten. The collection brings together contributions by both veteran and early career members of the society and centres on the theme of the encounter between the familiar and the foreign. This theme is also of central importance in one of the most widely studied Old Germanic poems, the Hildebrandslied. This poem features the culmination of Hildebrand’s thirty-year exile: a one-on-one fight with his estranged son.