Cross-cultural discourse analysis: A contrastive study of the organizational patterns of American and German texts for business and economics taken from 'Wirtschaftswoche' and 'Business Week'

This dissertation deals with a contrastive analysis of a subset of written news discourse, i.e., business and economics texts taken from the German business news magazine WirtschaftsWoche and its American counterpart Business Week.; The overall objective of this study is to examine how authors of articles published in these general business magazines typically organize their discourse. The goal of examining the organizational patterns of these texts is to find out whether they display specific differences which can be ascribed to their cultural backgrounds.; Its methodological approach consists of contrastively analyzing the organizational patterns of a total corpus of 30 written journalistic texts. 15 articles were selected per language, and one German text was matched with one English text by their specific content. In order to prevent subjective analyses of the texts, two outside analysts were asked to perform independent analyses of the German and English articles according to specific criteria which are determined to indicate topic boundaries. After identifying these topic-shifts within all 30 texts, the contents of each subtopic was summarized in the form of short captions, and they were the basis for determining the underlying outline of each text. They provided an overview of the texts' dependency relationships. The outlines of each text were then transposed into tree-diagrams, which revealed whether a text showed discourse subordination or discourse coordination.; Thus the organizational structure of written journalistic discourse was studied. In addition, a detailed examination of the linguistic markers which supported the topic-shifts was conducted. Two discourse markers in English (also and but) and in German (doch and auch) were selected for closer analysis of their functions in each language. The overall result of the analyses of the 15 texts samples taken from each language and the statistical tests applied to the data show no conclusive evidence that the German texts display a more subordinated and, therefore, less coordinated organizational structure than the English texts, and vice versa.