Keine Texte
No texts

Summary/Abstract: The paper addresses an issue that is usually hardly noticed, but some may have become aware of during the COVID-19 pandemic: There are various situations in which texts justifiably seem to be missing. However, the lack of texts does not necessarily affect all participants of that non-existent communicative situation. What these situations have in common is that there are apparently no texts that fulfill the situational expectations. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw conclusions from the resulting voids. From our point of view, such implicatures should definitely be considered from a textlinguistic perspective, especially if one understands the communicative practice of a society in all its facets as part of an empirically approachable textual reality. Thus, on the basis of selected examples, we will show that under certain circumstances even ‘no texts’ do indeed ‘express’ something which we can infer based on knowledge and experience, on the one hand, depending on the specific reading situation, and on the other hand, in connection with certain socially relevant discourses.

• Details
• Contents