The Discursive Construction of Austrian National Identity - page 3
Keywords: German; Austrian; Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; discourse; identity; analysis
By sth202 on 25/09/2008
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 3 of 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7hoped would allow her to discuss how she saw Austria and what stereotypes there are. My reason for this was that, as Billig (1995: 81) specifies, “stereotypes are often means of distinguishing ‘them’ from ‘us’, thereby contributing to ‘our’ claims of a unique identity.” Furthermore Wodak et al (1999) believe that the country’s landscape, amongst other aspects, is a popular object of Austrian national pride. The advantage of using pictures as triggers for discourse is that they do not hold the viewer in the “spatial or temporal frame” (Meinhof and Galasiński 2005: 139) of the photograph itself, but instead allow free thoughts to emerge. Consequently the discursive reactions to the images are “not at all constrained by the material representation” (Meinhof and Galasiński 2005: 139).
I designed an ethnographic interview insofar as I stayed silent for most of the narrative meaning that my interviewee could speak freely and in as much detail as she desired. This is important because as Cameron (2001: 128) points out, “in analysing the ideological significance of a text, attention needs to be given not only to its surface linguistic features,” i.e. what is stated, “but also to what is not said, but is indirectly hinted at.” As I stated earlier, my informant has been living in Britain since 2000, she grew up in Vienna and is 39 years old. The relevance of this will become clear later on. Hereafter she will be referred to as ‘Nadine.’
Cameron (2001: 145) states that “talk is always designed by those who produce it for the context in which it occurs.” Therefore the ‘talk’ I will be discussing in this study was not random; it had a purpose and a particular structure relevant to the situation we were taking part in and the speech was chosen, albeit subconsciously, for a certain kind of recipient. Subsequently both Nadine and myself were playing specific roles in the interview, Nadine as the main speaker and myself as the uninformed recipient. Nadine composed her narrative with the fact in mind that I, as the receiver, am not a native German speaker, have never lived or spent any time in any German-speaking country and am from a different generation to her and therefore have no experience of the culture or history. In other words, I am an outsider to her. All these factors would likely have influenced her choice of words and so
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