Concrete language

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Concrete language [ betõˌʃpʀaːxə, betɔŋˌʃpʀaːxə ], even Wooden language or wooden language ( English language Wooden , French Langue de bois ), and totalitarian language as well as Xyloglossie or Xylolalie ( Greek  ξύλον xylon "Wood" and γλῶσσα Glóssa "language" or λαλιά lalia "the Talking ”) is a rhetorical figure that serves exclusively propaganda purposes and the ideological manipulation of the public .

Origin of the term

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The term wooden language appeared at the beginning of the 1970s and established itself particularly in the 1980s . It is a loan word from Russian mediated by Polish : " дубовый язык " (language made of oak) was both the expression of the massive administrative apparatus of the declining tsarist empire and that of the USSR . In the course of the Polish Solidarność movement, which generally felt the Russian language to be oppressive, this term was used and also taken up by the English and French-language press.

In German, on the other hand, the term “concrete language” has become established for the language of socialist regimes such as in the GDR and USSR.

Xyloglossia or xylolalia are compounds that are themselves concrete language, which makes their use to describe concrete language ironic .

use

This type of communication is used to hide ignorance or to avoid arguments about factual issues by using abstract and pompous expressions to proclaim banalities. It is less about trying to impress the listener with your own eloquence and more about a strategy that makes it possible to avoid topics or questions by keeping silent about the content but speaking anyway. This leads Gérard Lenclud attributed that to have been to have been politicians rejoice heard, but do not brag understood.

Politicians are often accused of using concrete language in order not to have to take a clear position in a discussion . In general, concrete language is used in politics as a means of diplomacy in that the words neutralize or weaken their own meaning so that none of the negotiating partners can feel offended.

Concrete language is also used in the form of slogans or slogans , making use of the fact that they are easy to remember and exclude any further discussion.

Examples :

"Deus, Pátria, Família"

"God, fatherland, family"

- António de Oliveira Salazar : The former dictator of Portugal at the time of the Estado Novo used this slogan to abstractly summarize the values ​​to which he felt obliged.

"Tudo pela Nação, nada contra a Nação"

"Everything for the nation, nothing against the nation."

- Antonio de Oliveira Salazar

"Vós pensais nos vossos filhos, eu penso nos filhos de todos vós"

"You think of your own children, whereas I think of all of your children."

- Antonio de Oliveira Salazar

Linguistic structures affected

The influence of concrete language is differently strong on the different areas of language. While the effects in areas such as the lexicon or pragmatics , which are viewed as more changeable, become visible earlier and more strongly, changes at the phonetic level or even in the grammar are less numerous and take a long time to appear.

The decades-long maintenance of communication situations in which concrete language is used is, on the one hand, a sign of extreme inequality between the communication partners, as often occurs in dictatorships, and, on the other hand, leads to a language change, the elements of the concrete language even after the end of the influencing phase can also conserve.

Dictionary

Unambiguous terms are replaced by other words depending on the ideology of the user of the wooden language, so that the original meaning and associated associations are obscured and subsequently disappear. In the communist dictatorship, religious terms such as biserică ( Romanian “church”) or mănăstire (“monastery”) were replaced by the neutral expression monument (“monument”). Physical and psychological torture of political prisoners was also not referred to as such, but called a demasca ("unmasking") or a reeduca ("re- educating ").

phonetics

Due to the constant repetition of the same slogans, the pronunciation of the individual words wears out to the same extent as their meaning is lost. Even on high- profile occasions or speeches, colloquial pronunciation occurs: indicații (“the instructions”) was often spoken by officials as [indikətsiʲ] and not [indikatsiʲ]. The loss of meaning becomes particularly evident when word stresses shift in the course of frequent and always expressive use in such a way that the connection to the original word is lost: the stressed syllable in the word prevederi ("dispositions") shifted from [preveˈderʲ] to [preˈvederʲ] so that the connection to the verb a vedea ("see") was lost.

Morphosyntax

The use of verbs can also change through their use in the context of concrete language: the intransitive verb a gândi ("think") was often used transitive , as in the expression a gândi o măsură ("think up a measure"), which has been preserved to this day. or replaced by the awkward verb phrase a face o gândire ("to perform an act of thinking").

Web links

Portal: Linguistics  - Politics

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Norbert Franz : The legacy of the GDR in an all-German Slavic studies . In: Peter Kosta , Holger Kuße, Christian Prunitsch, Ludger Udolph (Hrsg.): Journal for Slavic Studies . tape  38 , no. 1 . Walter de Gruyter , March 1993, ISSN  0044-3506 , p. 130–135 , doi : 10.1524 / slaw.1993.38.1.130 . Rixta Wundrak: The Chinese Community in Bucharest: A Reconstructive, Discourse Analysis Case Study on Immigration and Transnationalism . 1st edition. For social sciences (VS), Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17247-7 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed June 30, 2015]). Manuel Ghilarducci: Gert Neumann's establishment of a "linguistic resistance" in the GDR . In: Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (Ed.): Revista de Filología Alemana . Volume 22. Universidad Complutense de Madrid , 2014, ISSN 1133-0406 , p.

      107–126 , doi : 10.5209 / rev_RFAL.2014.v22.45312 ( online (PDF) [accessed June 30, 2015]). Walburga Hülk : Movement as the mythology of modernity: four studies on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Taine, Valéry . 1st edition. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-8376-2008-5 ( limited preview in Google book search [accessed June 30, 2015]).
  2. ↑ a b Laetitia pill, Pierre-Yves Raccah: Aristote pratiquait-il la xyloglossie? (PDF) 14th World Congress of French Linguistics. In: hal.archives-ouvertes.fr. HAL , 2013, accessed on June 30, 2015 (French, German Did Aristotle use xyloglossia? ). Thomas Boutonnet: La LRO: xyloglossie dans la Chine post-maoïste . In: Dominique Wolton (Ed.): Hèrmes . Les langues de bois. tape
     58 , no. 3 . CNRS , 2010, ISSN  0767-9513 , doi : 10.4267 / 2042/38684 ( summary (French / English) [accessed June 30, 2015] German glasnost and perestroika: xyloglossia in post-Maoist China ).
  3. ^ A b Fréderic Mathieu: Jamais sans ma Novlangue! Le Décodeur de Poche. (PDF) In: surinite0.magix.net. MAGIX Online Services, April 2015, accessed on June 30, 2015 (French, German Never without my Newspeak. The pocket decoder ). Pierre Cordier: Le Chimigramme . Racine Lannoo, Brussels 2007, ISBN 2-87386-494-X ( limited preview in the Google book search [accessed on June 30, 2015] (French) German Das Chemigramm ).
  4. ^ A b Stefana-Oana Ciortea-Neamtiu: Wooden language. (No longer available online.) In: eeo.uni-klu.ac.at. Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt , archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on June 30, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / eeo.uni-klu.ac.at
  5. ↑ Gilles Guilleron: Langue de bois . Éditions First, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-7540-1604-9 , La langue des bois, c'est grave docteur? ( limited preview in Google book search [accessed on June 29, 2015] (French) German wood language ).
  6. ↑ Andrei Pleșu : Germans, profess your language! Why totalitarian systems harm language. In: welt.de. Die Welt , June 14, 2007, accessed on June 30, 2015 : “For someone like me from the European East, all this is called" wooden language ". ... The wooden language is a mixture of poverty and talkativeness. "
  7. ↑ Gérard Lenclud : Parler bois: A propos d'un ouvrage de Françoise Thom . In: Études rurales . No.  107-108 , pp. 257–268 ((French) German wood talk: Regarding a work by Francoise Thom ).
  8. ↑ a b c Pensamentos e frases emblemáticas. In: oliveirasalazar.org. Retrieved on June 29, 2015 ( Portuguese , German thoughts and emblematic sentences ): "Deus, Pátria, Família / Tudo pela Nação, nada contra a Nação / Vós pensais nos vossos filhos, eu penso nos filhos de todos vós"
  9. ^ A b c d Iona Vintilă-Rădulescu: The language of dictatorship and post-dictatorship in Romania . In: Klaus Steinke (Ed.): The language of dictatorships and dictators . Contributions to the international symposium at the University of Erlangen from July 19 to 22, 1993. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 1995, ISBN 3-8253-0330-6 , p. 314-316 .