This dissertation aims to contribute new terminology to the field by introducing discourse neologism to the lexicological and lexicographical approaches in the field of a discourse-related lexicon. The term describes a neologism that uses the discourse as an element of word-formation. The idea originates from the emergence of two COVID-19 discourse glossaries by two major German lexical institutes, from which a corpus was selected, including all the terms that could be identified as discourse neologism. In this dissertation, the semantic, semiotic and grammatical features of the discourse neologism are discussed with the examples from the corpus in order to make concluding statements on their nature and application.

This study characterizes the role of English in multilingual/-ethnic speech communities in urban Germany. Drawing on both existing corpus data and new data from a multimodal fieldwork study, this dissertation demonstrates that English plays a far greater role in these speech communities than has previously been recognized. I argue that this is especially true with respect to the Kiezdeutsch speech community, exploring how the social meanings and formal linguistic features of English are reflected in Kiezdeutsch (and vice-versa).

Furthermore, I explore the role of English in contact between the current wave of refugees, many of whom speak better English than German upon arrival in Germany, and pre-existing multilingual speech communities. As the older, largely Turkish-speaking population of Germans with migrant backgrounds absorbs the new refugees, many of whom speak unrelated languages and non-mutually intelligible dialects of Arabic, English has become a lingua franca both for daily communication and as a shared second language in German classrooms. Drawing on my fieldwork data collected in refugee language classrooms, I argue that understanding and navigating this new contact situation will require taking seriously the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in urban Germany. Furthermore, I argue that this contact between new migrant communities and established speakers of Kiezdeutsch necessitates rethinking assumptions about Kiezdeutsch as a “native dialect” of German.

Following an overview of the study in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 summarizes the existing literature on ethnolects in Germany. I give a historical overview of the field and, ultimately, illustrate possible reasons that English has largely been ignored in this work. Chapter 3 demonstrates that English does indeed play a role in the existing data by analyzing the influence of English on data from the Kiezdeutsch corpus (KiDKo). Chapters 4 and 5 present new data from my ethnographic-linguistic fieldwork study. Chapter 4 characterizes the influence of English on the repertoires of post-migrant youth associated with the Kiezdeutsch speech community. Chapter 5, on the other hand, examines the role of English among refugee youth, arguing that English constitutes an important point of connection between post-migrant and migrant speech communities. Chapters 4 and 5, taken together, suggest the emergence of a new German-English hybrid repertoire which I term “Kiezenglish.” Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the study by offering implications of the increasing presence of English for descriptive linguistic study of ethnolects such as Kiezdeutsch, as well as for language acquisition, pedagogy and language policy.

The semantics/semiotics of animal metaphors used to characterize humans may properly be called zoometaphors, in analogy to the well-established field of zoosemiotics. The nature of the metaphor and the zoometaphor is discussed in Chapter 2. A metaphor conveys a meaning beyond the literal meaning, often in a subtle way; it can be a way of 'expressing the inexpressible' or 'saying the unsayable'. In a zoometaphor we can also see a speaker's attitude towards the person she/he is characterizing, which usually tends to be more negative than positive. This dissertation investigates the occurrence of metaphors in which animals represent humans. Taking geographical, cultural, historical and linguistic environments of the speakers into account, animal figures in given metaphors are explained. Examples are taken from English (Chapter 3), German (Chapter 4), and Lithuanian (Chapter 5) data.

The data for this dissertation were collected from dictionaries of metaphors and of idioms in English, German, and Lithuanian. The overall data consists of 626 zoometaphors in English, 663 in German, and 657 in Lithuanian, totaling 1946 zoometaphors, comprise the data.

The contrastive study of the typology of zoometaphors in all three languages reveals that English and Lithuanian prefer a simile 53% and 58% respectively, whereas German prefers the conceptual metaphor over a simile with 92% (Chapter 6). Examples are: the Engl. simile deaf as a cuddy/ass vs. the metaphor sly fox; the Lith. simile laiba kaip bitelė `slender like a bee' vs. the metaphor juoda avis `black sheep'; the Ger. simile dumm wie ein Ochse `stupid as a bull' vs. the metaphor Mensch, dein Name ist Esel! `Man, your name is donkey!'. The most popular animal categories in all three languages, as illustrated in Chapter 6, are Livestock/Fowl (Engl. 40%, Ger. 39%, Lith. 42%), Canidae (Engl. 6%, Ger. 19%, Lith. 13%) and Birds (Engl.10%, Ger. 11%, Lith. 18%)

Future research is projected to seek zoometaphorical data from Russian and Polish.

The inheritance framework originates in the field of artificial intelligence. It was incorporated first into theories of computational linguistics, and in the last two decades, it has been applied to theoretical linguistics. Inheritance refers to the sharing of properties: when a group of items have a common property, each item is said to inherit this property. The properties may be mapped in tree format with nodes arranged vertically. The most general (i.e. the most widely shared, unmarked) properties are found at the highest nodes, and the most specific (marked) information is found at the lowest nodes.

Inheritance is particularly useful when applied to inflectional morphology due to its focus on the generalizations within and across paradigms. As such, it serves as an alternative to traditional paradigms, which may simplify the translation process; and provides a visual representation of the structure of the language's morphology. Such a mapping also enables cross-linguistic morphological comparison.

In this dissertation, I apply the inheritance framework to the nominal inflectional morphology of Old High German, Latin, Early New High German, and Koine Greek. The corpus consists of parallel biblical passages in each language which will serve as the basis for comparison. The trees may be used as a translation aid to those reading these texts as an accompaniment to or substitute for traditional paradigms. Moreover, I aim to shed light on the structural similarities and differences between the four languages by means of the inheritance trees.

This study intends to expand the historical language and gender debate (Chapter 1) by examining the cognitive structures that underlie human beliefs about gender. Although the work does not profess to be a feminist work, it does seek to offer an opinion about how and why linguistic and social change can occur within a population. It examines the current state of gendered language usage and the potential for change in gendered language usage within a Western population. The foundational methods for this study include cognitive linguistic and metaphor theories (Chapter 2) combined with narrative theory (Chapter 3), and the study incorporates Christian theological (Chapter 4) and feminist history (Chapters 1 & 4) as a basis for understanding the cultural conventions about gender in the West.

Narratives are considered to be "Instruments of Mind" (3.6). They consist of systematic structures necessary for all human cognition, principally consisting of metaphorical mappings between source and target domains (2.6). Narrative structures therefore enable us to reason throughout daily life. As a crucial part of our reasoning strategies, narratives point to the details in our moral systems (Chapter 4). A moral system is the coherent foundation of a person's beliefs and choices. Moral systems are culturally shared, but there may be several versions of moral systems in any given culture (4.1). Due to the prolific capacity of metaphorical reasoning, spreading activation in neural structures that enables such reasoning (2.4), and the radial characteristics of real human categorization strategies (2.2, 2.3), no human being reasons with complete consistency. Exceptions abound and point to the blending of moral systems in individuals' reasoning strategies (Chapter 10). Crucially, exceptions indicate both the potential for change and an innate human creativity (2.11, Chapter 10).

We can draw inferences (3.1) about human reasoning structures and individuals' moral systems from the language individuals choose to discuss culturally shared stories. Constellations of words, collocations, phrases, and metaphors point to the values, or moral systems, of each individual. Constellations and collocations (3.4) often demonstrate beliefs in cultural folk models (2.3, 4.1.5). Folk models primarily consist of prototypes and basic-level effects (2.2), and speakers employ these to make speedy and efficient judgments about people, things, and actions in everyday life. Prototype categories, however, are radial categories (2.2, 2.3), which means that membership in a category is based on relationship to the central member, but that categories have indistinct boundaries and allow for unique or novel inclusion radiating from the central members. The capacity for novel usage (2.11) is one of the most salient qualities of human cognition, and it is the quality that allows for both linguistic and social change through cognitive transformation.

The primary folk models in the West point to two moral systems used by speakers to reason about daily, mundane and complex functions and actions. Both prototypical moral systems stem from the Christian heritage: the Strict Father system of morality (SFM) and the Nurturant Parent system of morality (NPM) (Chapter 4). SFM involves hierarchies, strict boundaries, moral strength, and purity, while NPM is based on empathy and dissolves notions of hierarchies. This study demonstrates through interviews with 26 native speakers of modern German regarding stories of Christian saints (Chapters 5-9) that the leading moral system both historically and currently in this Western population segment is SFM (Chapter 10). While many speakers demonstrate occasional features of NPM reasoning, female consultants tend to demonstrate more of these features than male consultants (Chapters 7-10). It appears that women's historical status as a subordinate group under a SFM system may predispose them to the use of empathy (10.1) and therefore to the use of NPM reasoning. Women tend to be the primary instigators of change in gendered language usage.

Finally, the analysis of the study suggests that language and social change occur over time as a result of the creative potential inherent in empathetic cognition, found more often in subordinate groups, due to their perception of a need for alternatives from the norm (Chapter 10). Change rarely occurs "from above", through those who make up the status quo, but originates out of a need by subordinate groups to break down strict boundaries and rigid divisions. Change is always possible, as human cognition is based on fuzzy boundaries and radial categories. Nonetheless, change is a slow process because it requires long-term and often radical alterations in the tenacious narrative and cognitive structures of a shared culture.