Stielvoll und Ideenreich

Abstract This article deals with a linguistic phenomenon of increasing presence in everyday life which has found little attention in linguistic studies: humorous shop signs in German, shop signs involving word play. This article locates such shop signs within the study of linguistic landscapes, to which they belong but in which they have so far played no more than a minor role, the academic discussion of linguistic landscapes generally focussing on the function of linguistic phenomena in everyday life, above all the function of different languages in bilingual contexts. This article, in contrast, besides the function, examines the specific linguistic form of such shop signs, the syntactic, morphological and lexical particularities of German which allow such wordplay. The article closes with some didactic considerations regarding the exploitation of such shop signs in language tuition.