Shakespeare’s quotations in German linguoculture: an ecolinguistic approach

Abstract

The article deals with the features of eptonymized quotations from William Shakespeare in German within the framework of the translingual aspect of the ecolinguistic approach to the study of linguistic and speech phenomena. Ecolinguistics makes it possible to study the existence of language in combination of language and speech units with geopolitical, historical, social, and psychological factors. According to this approach, English is considered “super-heavy” in terms of the number of native speakers, which means it can influence the languages with a lower number of native speakers, such as “heavy” German. The aim of the work is to study the features of this influence on the example of quotations from the works of the most famous British writer of all times, William Shakespeare, which are adapted by German linguoculture and which have their own formal and functional characteristics at the present stage of German language development. German versions of eptonymized Shakespeare quotations are the result of cognitive, historical and socio-cultural factors of adaptation of new symbolic phenomena to the language environment-the receiver. The translingual aspect of ecolinguistics allows to explain the use of eptonymized units of English language and culture in the context and by means of German as a receiving language, where these units acquire specific characteristics. The establishment of these characteristics is the purpose of the presented work, which studies as an object the quotations from the Shakespeare works that have acquired the qualities of winged expressions (eptonymized quotations) on the German ground or even demonstrate a tendency to phraseology. The objectives of the work are to determine the ways in which Shakespeare's quotations fall into German linguoculture, to establish structural and semantic features of the use of eptonymized Shakespeare quotations in modern German internet discourses, to describe the main functions of such Shakespeare quotations in the mentioned discourses, taking into account the creolization factor of the text. Consideration of the socio-historical basis for the integration of Shakespeare's work into German linguoculture allowed us to identify the main factors of popularization of quotations and their penetration into the linguistic consciousness of native German speakers. These factors include translations of Shakespeare's works into German, stage productions, borrowing and processing of Shakespeare's plots by German-speaking writers, and including the works by the British author into mandatory educational programs. According to the formal features, there have been distinguished exact citations in phraseological meaning without pointing to the primary source, exact citations in phraseological meaning with pointing to the primary source, exact citations in phraseological meaning intently without pointing to the source, citation with transformations and unspoken citation without intended transformation. Such quotes perform informative, ornative, attractive, and human functions.