<p>Although dialect use has declined massively over the past 100 years in large parts of German-speaking countries, there is still a considerable areal diversity overall. Even written standard language characterised by diatopic heterogeneity on various levels – pronunciation, lexis, grammar, pragmatics. This even more true for spoken everyday language, which, depending country and area, m...

Having survived the «death of rhetoric» (R. BARTHES 1985: 115), metaphor has become the centre of intensive research by philosophers of language and linguists in the twentieth century. Nowadays it is widely accepted that metaphor is not reducible to «a sort of happy extra trick with words» (I. A. RICHARDS [1936] 1964: 90), but is rather said to be a fundamental principle of linguistic creativit...