JOB TITLES IN GERMAN: CORPUS-BASED COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Authors

  • L. S. Ivashkevych The National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” Faculty of Linguistics, Chair of theory, practice and translation of German, Ukraine https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7166-5331

Keywords:

job titles, denomination of a person by profession, anglicisation, anglicisms, euphemization, neology of German language, low qualified professions

Abstract

The article is devoted to the job titles in the modern German. The author has conducted a corpus-based research of German titles of the vacancies on employment in four areas, information technology, trade, blue-collar jobs and cleaning services. The aim of the study was twofold. First, to check whether the usage of English and euphemistic elements is equally represented in all investigated corpus and to reveal the functions of the usage of these components in each area. Secondly, to prove the possible interferences of the job titles' wordings between different spheres. The study was conducted using computer searching and counting. As a result of the comparative analysis, it was found that in the mentioned employment areas Anglicisms are used with different quantitative and qualitative functions. Thus, for the IT sector, the use of Anglicisms is characterized with the terminology function, while in the cleaning services area they play purely euphemistic function. In the areas of workers' and trade professions a significant level of stereotypy has been detected in the use of Anglicisms. The representation euphemisms were also different in the studied areas: unlike in the IT sector, trade and blue-collar jobs, in vacancies of cleaning services they were represented not only in a large number, but also in a wide range of lexical forms. Besides, some cases of an influence of the wording of the job titles of some areas onto others were found.

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Philology