Converging conventions? Macrosyntactic conjunction with English and and German und

Abstract

A growing number of investigations into the historical development and status of academic prose have found that many national languages lose both prestige and distribution as a medium of expression in the sciences, while English progressively develops into the lingua franca of science. The investigation presented in this paper starts from the assumption that the status of English as a global lingua franca not only replaces the use of other languages but that the prestige associated with English styles of scientific writing can also influence text production in other languages in the sense that indigenous language- and culture-specific communicative conventions are superseded by the conventions operative in comparable English texts. Taking the example of macrosyntactic conjunction with and and und in English and German popular scientific texts, this article addresses the question of whether German communicative conventions are adapted to English communicative styles such that language-specific strategies of information organization in German change in the direction of English.