Noch so 'ne Phrase, Faust auf die Nase! – Eine phraseologische Untersuchung des Nerv-Sprech

Abstract

The so called "Nerv-Sprech" is a newly coined term classifying a specific group of colloquial phrasemes considered annoying by many German speakers. Apart from this affective evaluation of these phrasemes, their main common characteristic is the fact that they are the result of different processes of modification and/or incorporate paradoxical meaning.The online edition of the German magazine Der Spiegel has published a web dictionary of "Nerv-Sprech"-units, which functions as a ready-made corpus. This article categorizes these phraseological units as slogans, pragmatic or predicative phrasemes. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the validity of the term "Nerv-Sprech" from the point of view of the language system, I examine whether there are semantic or structural modifying aspects that are dominant among the phrasemes (and if so, which ones). Finally, a ludic function of "Nerv-Sprech" is postulated as a result of the creativity in modifying these phrasemes.