Research

Projects

Spokesperson: Anke Lüdeling

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PIs: Oliver Bunk | Antje Sauermann | Heike Wiese

PhD students: Johanna G. Pott, Victoria Oliha

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Speaker: Heike Wiese (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Vice speaker: Shanley Allen (Technische Universität Kaiserslautern)

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PIs: Shanley Allen, Kaiserslautern | Oliver Bunk, Berlin | Sabine Zerbian, Stuttgart
PhD students: Tatiana Pashkova, Yulia Zuban, Kristina Barabashova 

This project investigates the dynamics in the linguistic expression of information structure in the repertoires of heritage language speakers. Its research questions directly emerge from pertinent findings from the first phase of the Research Unit “Emerging Grammars” (RUEG1). The project will investigate three aspects of information structure: (i) introduction of new referents, (ii) topic constructions, and (iii) focus and prosody. We will investigate these phenomena in the RUEG corpus of bilingual and majority speakers of German, English, Russian, Greek and Turkish. The intricate interplay of (morpho)syntax and intonation for the expression of information structure has been shown to be open to new developments in the language contact contexts in which we collected data in RUEG1. Therefore, we investigate the interplay of information structure with syntax and intonation in a comparative perspective, and relate our research questions to the new Joint Ventures of the Research Unit.

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finished

Oliver Bunk, Antje Sauermann, Fynn Raphael Dobler
Student assistant: Nicole Wong

In this project, we develop teaching material centering around language variation, multilingualism and language contact for academic purposes focussing on hybrid classroom contexts. We draw on materials from "Deutsch ist vielseitig" (Wiese et al. 2015ff) (find more information here) and make them publicly available through OER.


PI: Heike Wiese
PhD student: Oliver Bunk

This project investigates noncanonical linearisations across a range of settings, targeting different age groups, registers, linguistic interfaces and linguistic constellations in majority-language German. Our main focus will be on speakers with Turkish, Russian, or Greek as a heritage language in comparison to German spoken by monolingual speakers in Germany. In addition, we will include comparisons to German as a heritage language in the U.S. and Namibia on the one hand, and as a majority language in multilingual urban settings in Germany on the other hand.

Two empirical domains will be central for our investigation: (a) the realisation of noncanonical word-order options in sentences, and (b) the syntactic and textual integration of new discourse markers and its contribution to new linearisations. In line with RUEG’s overarching approach, we will investigate the status of noncanonical linearisations through three Joint Ventures (short: “JV”) targeting the linguistic systematicity of new developments (JVI, “Language Change Hypothesis”), their linguistic locus at external versus internal interfaces (JVII, “Interface Hypothesis”), and their contact-linguistic source in contact-induced change vs. language-internal dynamics or general developments (JVIII, “Internal Dynamics Hypothesis”). 

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