Projects
SFB 1412 "Register", Phase 2 (2024 - 2028)
Spokesperson: Luka Szucsich
The CRC Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation investigates aspects of the register knowledge of the speakers of a language. Competent speakers can adapt their linguistic behavior on every level in response to the current situation: They know, for example, that the German word sauer ‘ticked off’ is appropriate in different situations than the word verärgert ‘angry’, that one uses less complex sentences when speaking with children than in an academic function, and that sometimes it matters whether one says around 8 o’clock or 7:49 am, and sometimes it doesn’t. We are thus concerned with intraindividual variation.
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C07 (SFB 1412): The impact of language ideologies on registers distinctions in multilingual contexts (2024 - 2028)
PIs: Oliver Bunk | Antje Sauermann | Heike Wiese
PhD students: Johanna G. Pott, Victoria Oliha
The project investigates how language ideologies impact register distinctions. It contributes to models of register knowledge by incorporating the role of societal contexts. The main focus is on multilingual contexts, where speakers can draw on resources from different languages for register marking. Building on our findings on register distinctions and perceptions from Phase 1, we compare societal macro contexts with a mono- vs. multilingual societal habitus. We investigate the impact of language ideologies at the meso level of speech communities and the micro level of speakers’ linguistic practices, comparing register distinctions in Germany, Namibia, Singapore, and Australia.
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Research Unit: "Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations: A Comparative Approach" (FOR 2437) = RUEG
Spokesperson: Heike Wiese (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Vice speaker: Shanley Allen (Technische Universität Kaiserslautern)
(Find more information here)
P8 (RUEG): Dynamics of information structure in language contact (2021 - 2025)
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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Member of the DFG-Network "Queerlinguistik"
Spokespersons and applicants: Lars Sörries-Vorberger & Miriam Lind.
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finished
HyPE ViSOR - Hybride Präsenz- und E-Lehrkonzepte zur Vielseitigkeit von Sprache, Offline und Remote (2022 - 2023)
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.
P6 (RUEG): Noncanonical constituent linearisation in German across heritage speakers (2019 - 2021)
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”).
(Find more information here)