ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the positioning of British and German colonizers using a corpus-based approach. Its reference point will be the first large corpus initiative for German colonialism, the Digitale Sammlung Deutscher Kolonialismus (DSDK) (https://brema.suub.uni-bremen.de/dsdk, cf. also Müller and Schmidt-Brücken 2017). Within the framework of the research paradigm of postcolonial language studies (cf. Warnke et al. 2016), we address the question of how utterances in colonial discourses are used on the levels of a) lexical expressions, b) pragmatic attitudes, and c) argumentation patterns as an instrument of positioning agents in the colonial apparatus. This apparatus of coloniality is conceived as a macro-level of research for postcolonial studies. The discourses that enter archives such as DSDK, as a reconstruction, are considered a meso-level. The micro-level of concrete empirical analysis is then realized in the language use as materialized colonialist knowledge within the DSDK corpus. Evaluations of British colonialism from a German colonial perspective will be placed at the centre of our interest. Our chapter uses exemplary corpus data from three German texts in DSDK in order to analyse the structures of stance taking in respect of the three above-mentioned levels of linguistic structure in order to contribute to the debate on competing German and British colonialism.
