Erinnerung und mentale Räume in den Interviews des Israel-Korpus (1. Generation)

Résumé En

This contribution analyses passages in the autobiographical interviews of the ‘Israelkorpus’, in which speakers use spatial or temporal expressions such as ‘in Germany, ‘in Tel Aviv’, ‘here’ ‘then’, ‘today’ in order to evoke “chronotopes” (Leonardi 2016, Bloomaert/De Fina 2015, Baynham 2015, Perrino 2015, Bakhtin 2008) or to set up “mental spaces” (Fauconnier 1994, 1997, Fauconnier/Turner 2002, Ehmer 2011), i.e. cognitive representations of scenes or mental states. Spatial or temporal coordinates are linked with time, space and action in a particular manner. I argue that these passages contain typical “constructions” of a ‘remembering discourse’ with recurrent linguistic means or patterns (modal verbs, generalisations or typifications, perspectival expressions). I investigate which functions or benefits may be reached through contrasting chronotopes/mental spaces in discourse. The main function of such constructions seems to be that they allow speakers to run through different subjective perspectives and to organise them from a present point of view, which brings cognitive and affective benefits: new interpretations and evaluations of social reality, identity, decisions in the past as well as a means of coming to terms with guilt.