ʺDer Leserbriefʺ in deutschen und ägyptischen Zeitungen Eine kontrastive textsortenlinguistische Analyse

          This thesis investigates “Letters to the Editor” as a type of text in both the German and Arabic languages. The thesis aims at answering the following research questions: What is the function that the letters to the editor attempt to achieve, what is their text structure, and what are the topics discussed through these letters in the two languages? Additionally, the following research question is being raised: To what extent does the purpose of the letters influence the linguistic actions adopted in the letter and how is this purpose achieved through the different linguistic means of the two languages? To answer these questions, letters to the editor in German and Egyptian national newspapers are analyzed, using the text type description model, developed by Fandrych and Thurmair (2011). The model takes four descriptive dimensions into account: Text function, text structure, text topic, and the linguistic actions and means of expression. Fandrych and Thurmair’s model relies mainly on the inductive approach to extract the important indicators from the text in order to analyze a text type. The same approach is utilized in the present work in order to obtain meaningful results. The analysis of the letters to the editor in German and Egyptian newspapers showed that letters to the editor in Egyptian newspapers are multifunctional. On the contrary, the letters to the editor in German newspapers focus mainly on providing evidence to support an argument. Thus, it can be concluded that letters to the editor are significantly influenced by culture and that the cultural differences are crucial for analyzing this type of text. On this basis, it is recommended to consider this cultural influence when teaching German as a foreign language and in translation studies.