"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them."

In einer Welt, geprägt von Kosten-Nutzenrechnungen, in der Angebot und Nachfrage über das Bestehen und Nicht-Bestehen von Konzernen, sozialen Einrichtungen und sogar Schulen bestimmen, zweifeln wir einmal mehr an den Worten eines Thomas Gradgrind ein Typus Mensch, der sich durch stumpfe Rationalität auszeichnet und mit dem Eintritt Englands in die Industrialisierung bis in unsere heutige Zeit zunehmend an Bedeutung gewann.

Hard Times ist Dickens' Kritik dieses nüchternen und nutzenorientierten Menschenbildes, dessen Ursprung er in der damalig revolutionären, utilitaristischen Philosophie begründet. Eine derart blinde Rationalität, wie Dickens sie dem Utilitarismus unterstellt, verderbe die menschliche Natur und sei damit Schuld an den sozialen Missständen seiner Zeit. Die Lösung dieser sozialen Frage könne lediglich durch das harmonische Zusammenspiel der antagonistischen Welten von Ökonomie und Menschlichkeit erreicht werden; und so sind "fact" und "fancy" zwei sich fortlaufend ergänzende Theoreme seines Romans. Damit ist Dickens ein großartiges Beispiel für die ambivalente Stimmung, in der sich die, von der Romantik geprägten, Menschen des industriell aufstrebenden Englands wiederfanden und die bis zum heutigen Zeitpunkt entscheidenden Einfluss auf unser Denken hat. Hard Times For These Times – hoffen wir, dass es uns trotz einer immer stärkeren Gewichtung von wirtschaftlichen Interessen und Effizienz gelingt, die Komplexität des Menschseins nicht zu vergessen.

Alexandra Hähnert | A Story, Told as Truth: Reading Hawthorne's "Wakefield"

A man leaves his wife of ten years without reason or notification, rents an apartment in the next street from which he spies on her life without him, only to return, unexpectedly, one October evening twenty years later: Often described as a distinct oddball in the Nathaniel Hawthorne canon, his tale "Wakefield," for the most part, has been traditionally dismissed by critics for being technically unaccomplished. Jorge Luis Borges, however, rated "Wakefield" even above Hawthorne's magnum opus The Scarlet Letter. At any rate, this sparse and equally shrewd story testifies to the great richness of the author's work. The presentation will look into how, paradoxically, "Wakefield" is both characteristic and atypical of Hawthorne's fiction. Moreover, it will show that the story, with the epistemological questions that it raises and its implicit emphasis on its own fabricatedness, brings Hawthorne into close proximity to modernist and postmodernist metafiction.

Rebecca Fischer | From Sydney to Wollongong: Naming and Renaming Places in Australia

With a long history of immigration, the Australian landscape has been subject to an extensive process of naming and renaming. From the very first inhabitants of the Australian continent to the immigrants who went there in the 20th century, all left their traces on the landscape in the form of the names they ascribed to hills, rivers, lakes or settlements. While in many other countries with a similar history, only very few native names have survived; Australia shows a remarkable number of names which can be traced back to Aboriginal origins.
This presentation will look at various place names present in modern day Australia, introduced as well as native ones, and will trace some of the names back to their origin. It will furthermore examine the process of renaming places and look at possible conflicts arising from this practice.

The place names in Australia have not received very much attention from researchers and the public in general. Nevertheless, due to its history, the naming of places in Australia proves to be an interesting field of research, especially when it comes to the role of names as markers of possession.

Anna Kähne | Soap That Makes You "Think Pink": Semantic Aspects of Commercial Naming of Products by Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics

As a result of tough competition between companies in consumer societies of the industrialized world, the naming of products and brands has become one of the instruments of customer binding. It seems that it is not enough any more to promise good quality, to describe a purpose of a product or just simply give a product the name of the inventor or the producing company. Customers no longer simply buy a product. Instead, while consuming, they find themselves in the never ending pursuit of happiness, higher social status, beauty ideals, comfort, individuality and social recognition. Therefore, the integration of these and other attractive postmaterialistic values into product naming has recently become an imperative for any company on the market, enhancing linguistic diversity in the domain of product and brand names.

This fact has led to increased interest in product names in both onomastics and linguistics in general. The meaningfulness and motivation of product names, the fact that they combine characteristic features of both proper names and appellatives, their synchronic analysability and employment of figurative language make product names become interesting objects for a linguistic study.

Lush Fresh Cosmetics, a British producer and retailer of hand-made cosmetic products, is one of the companies with conscious product name choice. The corpus of product names by Lush presents an ideal object for a linguistic study. Its diversity includes the employment of all possible linguistic means including rhetorical devices, such as alliteration as in Mmm Marshmallow Moment bath melt, paronomasia as in Shave the Planet shaving cream, onomatopoeia as Yummi Yummi Yummi (shower gel), the usage of foreign language elements in names like Ne Worry Pas (bath bomb), new word-formations like Ultrabland (cleanser), word-class transfer via zero-derivation as in Think Pink (bath ballistics).

Although all these elements present an interesting field for a linguistic study, the main goal of my presentation is to concentrate on the semantic issues and to present a semantic typology of product names from the present corpus. The latter is based on types of semantic motivation of product names by Lush and reflects on various cases of iconicity and indexicality found in the corpus. Furthermore, the product names are classified in accordance to their descriptive or allusive character in relation to products.

The semantic typology of product names by Lush is a constituent part of a thesis under the title "Economic Value of Product Names and Linguistic Means of their Creation" supervised by Prof. Dr. Angelika Bergien and Prof. Dr. Renate Belentschikow.

Miriam Hauft | Influence of Biographical Factors on Individual Success in Second Language Acquisition

This paper examines the influence of certain biographical factors on a person’s actual ability to succeed in second language (L2) acquisition. Very often biographical factors are taken as an indication for a person’s ability to speak and understand a language. This is also the case in international debating, which will serve as motivation and example in this paper.

Debating is a sport that requires contestants to have mastered language in a way that they can make complex arguments understood, and convince a critical audience of a given position. International debating tournaments are therefore naturally faced with the problem how to judge native and non-native speakers of English, as native speakers have an obvious advantage when competing against non-native speakers. In this paper, we will focus on the European Universities Debating Championship (EUDC) for which the EUDC council as governing body has decided to introduce two categories of judgment: ESL (English as a second language) and EFL (English as a first language). In order to determine which speaker belongs into which category, certain criteria have been formulated by the council, many of which are generally accepted as defining a “good” speaker of English. Among these criteria are the age at which English was learned, the time since when English is spoken, the role English plays in the person’s everyday life, and time the person has spent in English-speaking environments. According to these biographical factors, speakers at the EUDC are classified as either ESL or EFL.

In this paper, the criteria used by the EUDC council will be examined from a linguistic point of view, in order to find out if these factors really have such a considerable impact on a person’s ability to learn and speak an L2 that would justify a reliable categorization of speakers. Hypotheses about which of the factors may or may not influence L2 acquisition in a significantly positive way will be formulated. It will then be examined which of them may play an especially prominent role in L2 acquisition. Is the age at which we start learning English, for example, more important than the time we have spent in an English-speaking country? Subsequently, a study will be presented that may support these findings. Students will be questioned on their personal experience of learning English as an L2 and they will be asked to specify on the criteria that are applied by the EUDC council. Their data will then be compared with their TOEFL scores which serve as a standardized point of comparison for their ability to speak and understand English. From that, we might be able to draw conclusions if one of the factors defined for classifying international debaters does in fact influence a person’s individual success in L2 acquisition. Based on that, suggestions for future international debating tournaments will be given. As employers and teachers often also intuitively rely on these factors when estimating whether or not a person speaks English as an L2 very well, the findings of this paper might even suggest an adjustment of these general expectations.

Lydia Gerlich | Intercultural Encounters in Bilingual Preschools

Intercultural (communication) competence has been a subject of research for a number of decades. In their research endeavors, scholars have so far mainly focused on defining the concept of intercultural competence, on developing intercultural training programs for adults, and on assessing intercultural skills in the context of international business interactions. In view of intensifying globalization processes and increasing opportunities for multicultural encounters in national contexts it is clear, however, that the need for intercultural competence goes beyond the confines of business relationships.

As many other skills and abilities, intercultural competence can only be acquired over an extended period of time. Therefore, it is never too early to gather knowledge about one's own and other cultures, to learn tolerance and respect for others and their cultural practices, and to develop strategies for dealing with ambiguity and frustration in intercultural contexts. Consequently, intercultural education emphasizes the need to build intercultural competence as early as in the preschool years.

Since intercultural communication competence is a necessity for, as well as an outcome of, foreign language learning, the ELIAS project, which researches early language acquisition in preschools, focuses also on the development of the children's intercultural communication competence under the influence of native speakers and the acquisition of English as a second language.

The data used in this paper were collected over a period of two years using the methods of ethnographic observation at various preschools in Germany, Sweden, and Belgium.