Description
My post-doctoral ('Habilitation') research project deals with the lexicology and lexicography of 'Mountaineering English', the specialised register of mountaineers. The project aims to bring together insights from (historical) lexicography, lexicology, sociolinguistics, and computer-mediated communication.
In particular, I am interested in the linguistic features that characterise the variety and how the negotiation and transmission of the structural features of this register, in particular on the lexical level, have changed over time. For this purpose, I analyse three sets of data:
historical documents, in particular alpine club journals,
dictionaries of Mountaineering English, and
threads on mountaineering on the social media platform Reddit.
Overall, the project seeks to shed light on a specialised register linked to a sport that is becoming increasingly popular and, accordingly, deserving of scholarly attention.
Research output:
publications
articles in the International Journal of Lexicography (https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecad032), Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America (https://doi.org./10.1353/dic.2024.a944944), Lexicographica (https://doi.org/10.1515/lex-2024-0012), Namenkundliche Informationen (https://doi.org/10.58938/ni744) and Anglistik (https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2025/2/8)
conferences and presentations
2024: conference talk at ICAME45 in Vigo ("Ready for the sufferfest: A corpus-based study of -fest in the specialised register of mountaineers")
2024: conference organisation "Seismic Shifts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mountaineering", co-organised with Franziska Röber at Technische Universität Dresden
2022: conference talk at Digital Humanities 2022 ("'Science has no business in the mountains': Stance-taking and expert knowledge on r/Mountaineering")
2022-2023: invited guest lectures at the University of Bielefeld ("'The mountains are calling and I must go': Mountaineering English as a lesser-known variety"), Chemnitz University of Technology ("Beta, crux, quickdraw, & redpoint: The global and the local in Mountaineering English"), and the University of Regensburg ("The multilingual history of Mountaineering English")