Ulrich Engel, Edyta Błachut, Adam Gołȩbiowski, Alina JuraszÜber Sachen reden

About this book deutschenglish

Speaking about things

This volume shows, with a lot of examples, how to speak about „things“, i.e. about all objects we can imagine, in communicating with other speakers.

Especial importance is given to the communicative entities – i.e. what we in-tend to talk about. By those means we hope to be able to support foreign language acquisition, especially for learners and teachers who do not like conventional grammar; grammatical categories remain in the background and are only introduced when they are indispensable. All grammatical terms are explained in an appendix.

The communicative description proceeds in three steps. First the means of identifying things are presented, for we can talk about them only after they are located in reality; this includes reality of thinking. The second step informs about the possibilities of characterizing things, the most important of which are qualification und quantification. The third step describes how things could be characterized in the speaker’s individual perspective.

The description is understandable without any grammatical knowledge.

This conception of communicative grammar has been developed by Ulrich Engel, based on the examination of Leech and Svartvik’s “Communicative grammar of English (1975, (2)1994). The other authors of the volume are members of the Institute of Germanistics in Wroclaw/Breslau (Poland).

The volume “Speaking about things”is the third of 6 volumes the forthcoming of which are intended to be published as soon as possible. Among the volumes already published, the first, entitled “How we speak” (“Wie wir reden”), treated the speech acts in the two languages, while the second informs on the manners of arguing. The volumes not yet published will inform on speaking of facts, on the tools to compress utterances and on the ways of speaking sincerely and effectively.