Aptum, Zeitschrift für Sprachkritik und Sprachkultur 20. Jahrgang. 2024, Heft 1

In this contribution, we analyse speech acts of contradiction or opposition in the contemporary media democracy in order to discuss which kinds of utterances can for which reasons be considered adequate from a perspective of language critique in the context on hand. As a starting point, we take the argument brought forward by Habermas, Pörksen and others that social media has fundamentally changed democratic societies because they enable anyone to assume the role of sender or author, and that this circumstance has contributed to an erosion of the difference between the public and the private sector. In an in-depth empirical analysis based on contradiction studies and language critique, we discuss utterances made by “Jana from Kassel”, a COVID-19 anti-lockdown protester who in 2020 compared herself to resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, and by two politicians who reacted to her utterance on Twitter, taking them as our examples. Combining the well-established concept of functional adequacy (funktionale Angemessenheit) with ethical adequacy (ethische Angemessenheit), based on the idea of the responsibility of the speaker, we show that Jana from Kassel’s as well as one of the politicians’ utterances can partly be categorized as deviating from what can be considered adequate. Our research thus contributes to an understanding of social media as a public space in which speakers need to take responsibility for their linguistic actions as an important aspect of successfully assuming the sender or author role.

The aim of this article is to theoretically substantiate antonymy as a discourse-linguistic category and to analytically examine it. The central question here is how antonymic relations are grammatically constituted in discourse and what communicative functions they fulfill. Following this interest, the main empirical part of the paper presents a case study on antonymy in grammatical constructions consisting of modal verbs, negations and two-part adversative connectors. A central result of the study is that the discourse-grammatical constitution of antonymy entails different functions for political discursive communication. Against this background, we argue that the study of antonymy provides important insights for discursive conceptions of contradictions and therefore offers a rewarding interface for interdisciplinary collaboration between linguistics and Contradiction Studies.

Historical references to the Holocaust are ubiquitous in Germany’s contemporary political and public discourse while the country’s ever-changing postmigrant society newly arriving migrants should be educated in Holocaust history became audible and eventually culminated in a revised curriculum for the integration courses. Based on the assumption that Holocaust memory and education can convey core values of German society, this new curriculum aims at historical literacy for the purpose of igniting amongst the newcomers a sense of national identification and responsibility for their new society. Simultaneously, so this article shows, the curriculum is designed to prevent (historical) comparison by declaring it contradictory to, on the one hand, respect this historical responsibility while, on the other hand, bringing issues of contemporary injustices into the conversation on the Holocaust. We will argue that such memory politics risk to exclude people from the national-culture by neglecting responses to Holocaust history that might look different to the ones expected by mainstream society. By drawing from ongoing ethnographic research into different memory-educational programs for refugees in Germany. This way, the article will provide new insights into a very specific discursive constellation in which the still emerging nexus between a normative national memory and Germany’s politics of integration is being constructed as well as contested.

In this article, the proposal is made to analyse practices of contradiction with regard to their aesthetic potential. On the one hand, this is intended to demonstrate the diverse possibilities of contradiction studies and, on the other, to emphasise the role of aesthetic texts in protest discourses. Texts from the feminist abortion discourse will be used as examples.