Zur Konstruktion der sozialen Indexikalität der Sprache: von „Kollektiv‟ zu „Team‟. Und via Coronavirus-Pandemie zurück?

Abstract

The present paper aims to contribute to the discussion about the social indexicality of the linguistic sign. The analysis relates to the research question of how a language sign or utterance, used in a particular socio-cultural context, takes on socially relevant meanings. The analysis is informed by the concept of social indexicality and social meaning in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Social meaning is reflected as a type of pragmatic meaning of a linguistic form that can become a pointer to (or an index of) the social identities and the typical social contexts. Social meaning acts as an index of the context in which the linguistic unit is expected and appropriate. Social meanings are anchored through social practice. The article analyzes the contextualization of the word collective in German social discourse and thus information is obtained about the social meaning that communicants attach to the concept of collective in communicative interaction. It is revealed that the word collective became an indicator for the social practice of the German Democratic Republic and took the rank of a social index. The “having to fit into the community” praxis, typical for the past, the uniformity of society in GDR made the collective an undesirable word. Since 2020, the return of the lexeme has been recorded in active use to mark the realities that came with the pandemic and the limitation of individual freedom. The ties between a linguistic form and the practice in which it receives its social voice is explained. The study was carried out on the basis of the “Digital Dictionary of the German Language” as a corpus-based discourse analysis. The corpus of electronic texts on the coronavirus pandemic (the corona corpus) was examined.