A History of the German Language Through Texts examines the evolution of German, from the Early Medieval period to the present day. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book looks at the history of German through a wide range of texts, from medical, legal and scientific writing to literature, everyday newspapers and adverts. All texts are translated and accompanied by commentaries. The book also offers a glossary of technical terms and abbreviations, a summary of the main changes in each historical period, a guide to reference material, and suggestions for further reading. A History of the German Language Through Texts is essential reading for students of German, Linguistics or Philology.

A History of the German Language through Texts examines the evolution of German, from the Early Medieval period to the present day.
Written in a lively and accessible style, the book looks at the history of German through a wide range of texts, from medical, legal and scientific writing to literature, everyday newspapers and adverts. All texts are translated and accompanied by commentaries. The book also offers a glossary of technical terms and abbreviations, a summary of the main changes in each historical period, a guide to reference material, and suggestions for further reading.
A History of the German Language through Texts is essential reading for students of German, Linguistics or Philology.

The volume gives a multi-perspective overview of scholarly and science communication, exploring its diverse functions, modalities, interactional structures, and dynamics in a rapidly changing world. In addition, it provides a guide to current research approaches and traditions on communication in many disciplines, including the humanities, technology, social and natural sciences, and on forms of communication with a wide range of audiences.

Vocabularies are complex structures. This complexity derives on the one hand from the large number of elements (words and their usages) and on the other from the fact that there are a multiplicity of structuring principles at work. We can regard the development of vocabulary as the interplay between factors favouring both stasis and change in complex systems. The aim is to describe, document, and, if possible, explain this interplay. The book has two major objectives, (a) lexicological: developing a coherent 'pragmatic' conception of the organization and dynamics of vocabulary, and (b) empirical: using this conception to describe German vocabulary around 1600 and - in a longitudinal study - to chart the astonishing history of cross-referential vocabulary in German.

The meaning of expressions in a language is equivalent to the way they are used in a given language community. Views of this nature are central to the assumptions underlying 'usage theories of meaning' and 'action-theoretical semantics'. The first major section of the book provides an overview of approaches to establishing an action-theoretical semantics and the productive aspects these approaches have engendered (Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy, speech-act theory, the discussion sparked off by Grice, game-theoretical semantics, philologically oriented semantics etc.). The second major part is given over to a discussion of central problems of action-theoretical semantics (fundamental concepts, truth-conditions and use-conditions, compositional meaning, forms of meaning description, literal meaning and variety of uses etc.).

The articles collected in this volume deal with theoretical and empirical issues in the historical semantics of German modals. The topics presented in these articles include types of semantic change, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the structure and development of polysemy, epistemic and non-epistemic uses, variation of use in different types of text, aspects of quantitative corpus analysis. As for empirical data there is a particular emphasis of Old High German and Early Modern German materials.