Zum Tempusgebrauch in einleitenden und abschließenden Teilen von schriftlichen Arbeiten deutscher und polnischer Germanistikstudierender
The Use of Tense in Introducing and Concluding Parts of the Papers Written by German and Polish Students of German Philology

Summary/Abstract: This work was carried out within the framework of the German-Polish research project ‚Interdiscourse’, which investigated various aspects of text organization and routines of formulation in papers written by German and Polish students. The present paper analyses the use of tense in introducing and concluding parts of academic texts written in German by students of German philology, who are German and Polish native speakers. The study takes into account such types of text as master’s and bachelor’s theses as well as seminar papers in linguistics. The purpose of this study is to identify and to compare tendencies in tense usage in introducing and concluding parts of academic texts written by German and Polish students. The present analysis focuses on three questions: 1. Which tenses occur (most frequently) in the above-mentioned sections of the works of German and Polish students? 2. Which differences regarding tense usage between texts written in German by Polish students and the texts of German native speakers can be observed? 3. Does the tense usage in texts written by students of both groups comply with standards applying to German academic texts and are there any differences between German and Polish students’ works? To answer these questions the tense usage in students’ texts is further compared with the use of tense within articles written by German-speaking linguists. The analysed collection of data (almost 4000 instances) encompasses examples gathered from introducing and concluding sections of 20 German and 20 Polish students’ texts and 10 research articles on linguistics. The analysis reveals that German and Polish students generally observe the rules of tense usage applied to academic texts. The most frequent tense in all groups of texts is present tense. However, Polish students seem to use past tenses more often than German authors (students and linguists). However, because of limited number of examined texts these results should be interpreted with caution. Therefore, it would be advisable to extend the analysis to more texts in the future.

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