The Collocational Behavior of Anglicisms in German and American Business and News Magazines (English shop)

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In her dissertation, Julia Sosnizka deals with the question whether and to what extent the collocational behavior of (written) Anglicisms in German resembles the collocational behavior of these word-forms in the source language (American) English. The study is empirically based on the 2008 volumes of the news magazines Newsweek and Der Spiegel and the business magazines BusinessWeek and WirtschaftsWoche, comprising in total over nine million words. This selection allows also for statements about differences between thematically specialized corpora and those that are closer to general language use. The study is inspired by the observation that not only word-forms are transferred from English to German, but also their collocates. In her work, the author provides a broad overview on the topic of collocations, which is treated very differently in the literature. In addition to the corpus linguistic approach, she also discusses psycholinguistic and semantic models of collocations. The understanding of collocations for the present study is based on the statistically significant co-occurrence of lexical word-forms. The dissertation may thus be seen as a contribution to contrastive corpus linguistics, collocation and genre research.