Discourse historiography

Discourse historiography , also discourse- oriented language historiography , describes the Düsseldorf School of Language History . It deals with the development of public, particularly political, language in the FRG including the first post-war years. A Düsseldorf project group led by Georg Stötzel has carried out empirical studies . In the 1980s, for example, the volumes of the large regional newspaper Rheinische Post were systematically checked for heterogeneous language usage. Martin Wengeler, for example, dealt with the history of the usage history of key words in the Federal Republican arms discussion in his dissertation from 1992, in 1994 Matthias Jung dealt with the history of the discourse on atomic energy in his dissertation.

This branch of linguistic history does not deal with the classical linguistic phenomena in the area of ​​morphology, syntax or sound, but with such lexematic, semantic and pragmatic developments that can only be understood in the context of contemporary historical processes and therefore also as a counterpart to contemporary history in linguistic Area can apply. It began in the 1970s, but has not yet been considered an independent scientific sub-area. A volume "History of Language as Contemporary History" published by Martin Wengeler in 2005 is intended to help establish this research direction.