German landscape discourse: aspects of modeling

Abstract

In contemporary world, landscape conceptualization gains in importance because of the problem connected with people’s habitat safekeeping before global anthropogenic threat on the one hand and in face of national identification building on the other hand. From this view point, modeling of German landscape discourse is an important research trend that can encode the essence of social processing. The Author means this discourse as a whole set of texts or text fragments having landscape topics locked coherently and as landscape communication in German locked diachronically. The paper’s goal is German landscape discourse modeling with a glance of difference of synchronal vs. diachronic methods on the one hand and structural and cognitive studies on the other hand. The Author focuses on text representants of the concept LANDSCAPE in scientific, fictional, advertising and mass media discourses. Each discourse type practice provides a unique topic state and organization. The paper presents modeling possibilities of German landscape discourse regarding its topics. The structural approach allows to highlight differences in volume, organization, functions and marking arts of topics and their subtopics in different genres. Using the cognitive approach, the Author reveals cognitive modeling parameters from the surface structure of each text type and put them in a conceptual hierarchic order. In this order, topic characteristics (stereotypy, cultural specify, privacy, stile) are regarded. The German landscape discourse is usage-inspired in German society, it includes a lot of discourse practices. The notion ‘landscape’ means not only the nature, but also it has a metaphorical sense as a cultural phenomenon. The research material includes more than 200 text fragments with landscape topics that have made the base for a generalized model of German landscape discourse.