Organizational patterns of American and German texts for business and economics: A contrastive study

This paper reports on a research project dealing with a contrastive analysis of business and economics texts taken from the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche and its American counterpart Business Week. It was the overall objective to study the organizational patterns of a representative sample of texts in order to determine whether they display specific differences which can be ascribed to their linguistic and therefore cultural environments. The total text corpus consisted of thirty texts. Fifteen articles were selected per language, and pairs of German and English texts were matched by their specific content. The texts were then analyzed according to specific criteria which were determined to indicate topic boundaries. After identifying these topic-shifts within all thirty texts, the contents of each subtopic were summarized in the form of short captions which represented the underlying outline of each text. All outlines were then transposed into tree-diagrams, which revealed the texts' hierarchical structure. Appropriate statistical tests were applied in order to determine the validity of the hypothesis that the German texts display a different organizational structure than the English texts.