Kataphorische Kurzkommentare in Pressetexten: eine semantische Untersuchung am Beispiel der deutschen Börsenmagazine

The paper investigates a linguistic structure that is typical of German financial magazines: a concise cataphoric comment (such as “Das Anlegergeld fließt in die USA. DIE FOLGE: Der Dollar steigt”). On the orthographic level the comment is closed by a colon, on the syntactic level it is elliptic and typically consists in an incomplete clause (e.g. “Das heißt:”) or a single phrase (“Grund:”), on the semantic level it provides a hint for the interpretation of the following clause(s) and has thus the function of a headline embedded in the text. The analysis, based on a corpus of 600 examples, shows two main results. First, the comment can display a wide array of semantic functions, e.g. anticipate a logical-semantic relation such as causality or adversativity (“Aber:”), a step in the argumentation such as explanation or conclusion (“Fazit:”), an assessment concerning quality, validity or informational status (“Wichtig:”), a speech act such as warning or recommendation (“Tipp:”). Second, the vast majority of structures has very few occurrences – in other words, most comments have low degrees of entrenchment.