Gutenberg und das Internet. Der Einfluss von Informationsmedien auf Sprache und Sprachwissenschaft

Abstract

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century had a lasting impact on the development of language. In the case of English it increased the then existing standardization tendencies, it led to more widespread alphabetiza-tion and indirectly to a replacement of Latin as the language of science and learn-ing. But above all the printing press led to a new fixity of texts and thus to our modern understanding of texts as finished products whose authorship can be pro-tected by copyright laws. Against this background this article assesses some im-minent changes brought about by the digitalization of texts. In addition to their modular and multilinear structure electronic texts are characterized by a loss of fixity. These features pose considerable challenges to linguistics. New tools will have to be developed in order to cope with the modularity, multilinearity and flu-idity of digital texts.