Senioren* – einige diskurspragmatische, lexikographische und lexikometrische Betrachtungen

In scientific discourseas well as in lay discourse on language, the German expression "Senioren" is sometimes discussed in connection with political correctness or with euphemization strategies. In 2003 Angelika Linke described the expression as relatively new, and the Duden Herkunftswörterbuch (etymological dictionary) published in 2013 mentions „Ersetzung von Altersheim durch Seniorenheim in der jüngeren Vergangenheit“ (a substitution of the expression Altersheim by the expression Seniorenheim in the recent past; p. 114). This article aims to shed light on the expression Senioren and its compounds from the perspective of discourse linguistics and lexicography, and also from a lexicometric point of view. The analysis takes into account linguistic and lay-linguistic statements and observations, lexicographic references, statistically calculated frequency curves with different compounds containing the elements alt* (old) and senior* (Altenheim vs. Altersheim, Seniorenheim vs. Altenheim, Seniorenheim vs. Seniorenresidenz) and frequencies (Online-Duden, DWDS – Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, OWID - Online-Wortschatz-Informationssystem Deutsch). Special attention is also paid to the fact that there are differences depending on text types, text genres and context and that the appearance of simplex or compound element Senior* (in comparison to Alt*) tends to characterize text types in which, functionally speaking, marketing, customer care, institutional self-presentation or corporate wording are in the foreground, and generally in texts belonging to strategic communications in the public sphere.