VAGHEIT ALS INDIREKTE EMOTIONSMANIFESTATION Die Verwendung von irgendwie und irgendwo im Korpus Emigrantendeutsch in Israel: Wiener in Jerusalem (ISW)

ABSTRACT • Vagueness as an indirect manifestation of emotion: The use of irgendwie and irgendwo in the corpus: Emigrantendeutsch in Israel: Wiener in Jerusalem (ISW). This study aims to investigate the use of German vague expressions like ‘irgendwie’ and ‘ir- gendwo’ in some interviews from the ISW-corpus. The mentioned interviews are part of the so-called Israel corpus, collected by Anne Betten and her collaborators, consisting of narra- tive autobiographical interviews with German-speaking Jews who mostly emigrated to Pales- tine/Israel in the 1930s. Although the topic of emotional expression in the Israel corpus has been intensively researched in recent years, the focus has been primarily on explicit rather than implicit emotional manifestations. This is remarkable, considering that implicit emo- tional expressions have particular significance in the Israel corpus. The present study aims, therefore, to fill this gap. As illustrated in this investigation, speakers often have difficulty expressing their subjective emotional attitudes directly because of their highly traumatic experiences. This research is founded on the hypothesis that vagueness can often be considered an indirect manifestation of emotions. Vague expressions, in fact, have a high inferential potential, which is usually resolved by recognising emotions-based implicatures. In other words, vagueness can be seen as a sign of the speaker’s positive or negative emotional disposition.