Melanie Schroeter presented her research on interdiscursive encounters and interdiscursive misunderstanding at the BAAL-ICSIG Seminar 2012 at the Dept of Languages, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, on 17-18 May 2012.

1. Interdiscursive Encounters and
Interdiscursive
Misunderstanding
Melani Schröter
University of Reading

2. Introduction
Structure
• Present a case of an interdiscursive misunderstanding
• Conclusions regarding discourse determined semantic
structures
• Contrastive discourse analysis/ICC: common interest
(?)  Your views?
• Project on contrastive analysis of discourse key
words (ongoing yet at the beginning)

3. An Interdiscursive Misunderstanding
• Multicultural society = (~?) (≠) multikulturelle
Gesellschaft?
• Angela Merkel, 16 October 2010 (at a conference of
the CDU young party members‟ organisation)
Of course the approach to say okay we‘ll have
multiculturalism (Multikulti) here and live side by
side, happy with one another, this approach has
failed. Utterly failed.

4. An Interdiscursive Misunderstanding
• Reactions in the British Press
Angela Merkel declares death of German multiculturalism
(Guardian, 17.10.2010)
Angela Merkel’s claim that multiculturalism has ‘utterly failed’
has put her country’s attitudes to immigration in the spotlight
(The Sunday Telegraph 24.10.2010)
~ reads the „funeral rites over an open society‟; thinks
immigrants „should conveniently disappear, taking their wives,
their children, their benefit needs and their political
antagonisms with them‟
(Independent, 21.10.2010)
In a landmark speech, she broke one of Germany’s last taboos
and courted anti-immigration support by claiming those from
a different background failed to live happily side-by-side with
native Germans. (Daily Mail 18.10.2010)

5. An Interdiscursive Misunderstanding
• NOT…
o “a starling shift from her previous views” (Guardian 18.10.2010)
o “breaking a long standing taboo in Germany” (The Express,
18.10.2010)
o “a lurch to the right” (Guardian 17.10.2010)
…but different discourse position and meaning
• German migration discourse
o Area of tension between multiculturalism, assimilation and
integration – latter = favoured middle ground
o CDU long dismissed multiculturalism as naïve laissez faire
approach esp. stigma word Multikulti (lacks seriousness; idealistic);
post 2001 political climate; Merkel pushes for integration with a
range of political measures

6. An Interdiscursive Misunderstanding
• Use of multicultural in British Commons and House of Lords
debates; first occurrence 1973; 80 times between 1990-1998; since
1999 on average more than 100 times per year
• With first person plural
Of course we are a multi-ethnic and multicultural society (Mrs. Angela
Rumbold, Commons, 8 May 1990)
(…) how to combat religious and racial prejudice in our plural, multi-cultural
society? (Mr Anthony Lester, Lords, 28 March 1994).
• Attributive to Britain
In today’s multicultural Britain, (…) (Mrs Marha Singh, Commons, 20
November 1997)
• Attributive to a range of different aspects of the social world
Multicultural…city, education, projects, awareness, exchange,
programmes

7. An Interdiscursive Misunderstanding
• Germany‟s Upper House; searchable database 2000-2011 one single,
and symptomatic, hit
The process of integration therefore is much more complicated whereby
I admit that we should not fall into randomness. I also believe that
the term „multicultural“ is misleading. [...] There are indeed
binding agents, perhaps it is what some understand by a nation built
on culture. (Otto Schily; Bundesrat, Stenografischer Bericht, 771.
Sitzung., 20. Dezember 2001: 742. Debatte über Entwurf des
Zuwanderungsgesetzes)
 Metalinguistically commenting, with critical distance, and in
immediate vicinity of concurring concepts (integration, and,
implicitly, guiding culture – a debate going on in 2000)

8. Discourse semantics
• Difference in meaning and usage of mcs/mkG responsible for
interdiscursive misunderstanding
• UK: mc refers to social reality resulting from a historical process of
immigration; Germany: contested and largely discarded political
approach to dealing with the result of a historical process of
immigration
 Discourses not only under different conditions in different ways, but
determine meaning even in the nutshell of a political key word –
resulting language use reflects and contributes to this
 Discourses construct, therefore determine, and reflect „what we
know‟ about (social) „reality‟
• Particularly apparent in contrastive (discourse) semantic analyses

9. Discourse Key Words (DKW)
• Semantic complexity, cognitive relief Globalisierung (globalisation)
• Trigger and/or express attitudes and/or evaluations Kriegsminister
(‘minister of war’)
• Bound up in discourse context (time, frequency, ensemble) –
Gastarbeiter (guest workers)  a past, not a current DKW
vs. integration  currently a central DKW, but not the whole
discourse – part of an ensemble incl. other DKW
• Inherently controversial (signifier; Verteidigunsminister OR
signified; Globalisierung – opportunities vs. dangers)

10. Discourse Key Words (DKW)
DKW analysis lends itself to…
• a contrastive/comparative programme
(systematic, manageable)
• Keeping up with discourse analysis
(DKW cannot be analysed isolated from related
discourse, complex semantics generated in multitude of
discourse related texts/utterances; profit from
methodological adaptability of discourse analysis)
• Producing accessible results
(e.g. DKW dictionaries)

11. Discourse Key Words (DKW)
Analysis of Discourse Key Words lends itself to….
• Combination with corpus analytical approaches (phenomenologically
distinct)
• Cognitive linguistics/frame analysis
(complex, discourse determined semantics; ~ nodes in semantic network of
specific discourse, arguments, evaluations…wound up in DKW); frames as
typicalised and structured segments of collective knowledge which result
inductively or abductively from the intersection of similar individual
experiences. (…) An activated frame regulates language and activity in that
it triggers expectations regarding information that fits into it, or more
precisely regarding potential elements of knowledge in the available slots.
(Ziem 2008b: 97f; translated from German; MS)
 Semantic structures of DKW entail patterns of usage due to discursive
formations
 The use of a DKW triggers expectations/knowledge – may therefore differ
across discourses/languages!

12. Common interest (?)
…between a contrastive approach to the analysis of
public/political discourse and ICC
• Discourse semantic structures; implicit –
expectations/knowledge triggered with the use of
DKW – unreflected  prone to misunderstanding
• ~ cultural key words; (cf. Stubbs 2001/2010;
Wierzbicka (1997; 2006; 2010)
 (also) at the level of lexical semantics, we may
talk about different things while we think we talk
about the same

13. AHRC funded networking project
• Researching and Documenting Key Words in
European Migration Discourses (AHRC
Translating Cultures theme)
• Participants from the UK, France, Italy, Germany
• Corpus-based, comparative, relating DKW to
cognitive conceptualisations
• Aim to produce a comparative DKW dictionary of
GB, F, I, D migration discourses, relating
discourse „history‟ and semantics

14. References
Schröter, M. (forthcoming): Die kontrastive Analyse politischer Diskurse.
Skizze, Verkomplizierung und Ausblick. In: J. Kilian and T. Niehr (eds)
Politik als sprachlich gebundenes Wissen. Erwerb, Entwicklung und (Aus-)
wirkung politischer Sprache im lebenslangen Lernen und politischen
Handeln. Bremen: Hempen.
Stubbs, M. (2001) Words and phrases. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stubbs, M. (2010) „Three concepts of keywords‟, in M. Bondi and M. Scott
(eds) Keyness in Texts, pp. 21–42. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Wierzbicka, A. (1997): Understanding Cultures through their Key Words.
English, Russian, Polish, German , and Japanese. Oxford: OUP.
Wierzbicka, A. (2006): English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: OUP.
Wierzbicka, A. (2010): Experience, Evidence, and Sense. The Hidden Cultural
Legacy of English. Oxford: OUP.
Ziem, A. (2008a) Frames und sprachliches Wissen. Kognitive Aspekte der
semantischen Kompetenz. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.