The Variational Potential of the German Proverb ‘Geld allein macht nicht glücklich’ in Economic Media Discourse

This article focuses on the functioning of the popular German proverb “Geld allein macht nicht glücklich” (“Money alone does not bring happiness”) in German-language press publications over the last decade. The study aims to determine the communicative-pragmatic potential of this paremia, in both its traditional and modified forms, specifically in economics-related articles. Further objectives include identifying the proverb’s variational capacity, systematizing its modifications, and developing models of variation based on instances found in the research corpus. The study employs a range of methodological approaches, including theoretical analysis, continuous sampling, dictionary definition analysis, component analysis, and situational-contextual analysis. Statistical processing and generalization techniques were also applied to the collected data. The primary research material consists of newspaper articles extracted from prominent German online news sources, such as “Focus”, “Taz”, “Manager magazin”, “Frankfurter Rundschau”, “WELT”, “Berliner Zeitung”, “Yahoo!finanzen”, and “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. The Digital Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) corpus served as supplementary material. The findings indicate that the proverb predominantly appears in the main body of articles, primarily functioning to attract reader attention and to convey expressive and evaluative meaning. Notably, modified forms of the proverb occur 1.5 times more frequently than its standard dictionary form. Analysis of the corpus identified both variants, which maintain the core meaning, and transforms, which alter the proverb’s meaning partially or completely. Formal modifications include expansion through additional components, reduction of form, grammatical alterations, component substitution, shifts in communicative orientation, and reduction of the negative element. The research culminates in the proposition of models of proverbial variation. The presented variation models offer clarification regarding the specific ways this proverb is realized in economic media discourse and contribute to understanding and predicting its modification potential. The scientific novelty of this study lies in the development of these variation models for a specific paremia and the pioneering examination of the proverb’s usage in both traditional and modified forms in German economic press.