Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (11)
- Doctoral Thesis (3)
- Postprint (2)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (1)
- Master's Thesis (1)
- Other (1)
Keywords
- discourse (19) (remove)
Institute
- Department Linguistik (7)
- Sozialwissenschaften (3)
- Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften (3)
- Fachgruppe Politik- & Verwaltungswissenschaft (2)
- Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät (2)
- Department für Inklusionspädagogik (1)
- Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (1)
- Institut für Romanistik (1)
- Institut für Umweltwissenschaften und Geographie (1)
Für den Flugverkehr als Teil eines regional und global verdichteten Infrastruktursystems sind Naturgefahren wie Vulkanausbrüche gleichbedeutend mit Risiken. Die Kommunikation von Risiken verläuft im Spannungsfeld von wirtschaftlichen und staatlichen Akteuren einerseits und Medien und Zivilgesellschaft andererseits. Demgegenüber stehen Modelle diskursiver Risikoregulierung als Instrumente öffentlicher Aushandlungsprozesse. Diskutiert werden Einflussfaktoren auf Entscheidungen im Kontext von Risikodiskursen. Dabei wird insbesondere die Funktionslogik der Medien untersucht. Am Beispiel der Aschewolke des Eyjafjallajökull 2010 wird die Phänomenkonstellation von Akteuren und Diskurspositionen illustriert und der Verlauf einer medialen Risikoentwicklung nachgezeichnet.
Swearing in a public place
(2017)
The paper deals with the usage of swear words on the online forum "reddit". Three research questions are dealt with:
How often are swear words used?
How are these swear words received by other users?
Does the topic of the conversation have an influence on the reception and amount of usage of swear words?
The corpus from which the results are taken comprises almost 900 million words. The words are taken from February 2017. Compared to other, similar studies, the corpus is considerably larger and contempory.
In addition, the theoretical part discusses the linguistic basics of swear words. These include concepts such as the theory of politeness, the topic of taboos and its corresponding words and censorship. This is done to explain the factors that influence the use and application of swear words and to explain why swearwords are so special in comparison to other word groups. In addition, further research results from other corpora are presented and compared with the results afterwards. This includes corpora that are also composed of online communication, as well as corpora that reproduce spoken language. The results from all the corpora presented deal with results from the English language.
The results of this study indicate that the swear words on "reddit" are used approximately as often as they are on other platforms. The perception of these swear words is mostly positive, which suggests that the use of swear words on "reddit" is not perceived as impolite. In addition, an influence of the discussion topic on the frequency and reception of swear words could be determined.
This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The aim is to delineate how the linguistic and extra-linguistic context affects referent accessibility to the speaker. The study also examines the degree to which accessibility effects are modulated by cognitive factors such as working memory capacity. In the study, the contrast levels between the referent and a competitor (one contrast/two contrasts) and the syntactic prominence of the referent (subject/object position in the preceding question) were manipulated in an elicited production task. The results provide evidence that the referring expressions of children with ASD correlate with the discourse status of referents to a similar extent as in typically developing controls. All children were more likely to refer with lexical NPs to referents that contrasted on two levels with a highly prominent competitor, compared to referents that contrasted on one level. They were also more likely to produce pronouns for referents previously mentioned in the subject than the object position. The effect of both discourse factors was modulated by the age and working memory capacity of the children with and without ASD. Accordingly, the study suggests that children with ASD do not generally differ from children with typical development in their referential choices when the discourse status of a referent allows them to model the referent's accessibility from their own discourse perspective in a way that is modulated by working memory capacity.
This introductory essay to the HSR Special Issue “Economists, Politics, and Society” argues for a strong field-theoretical programme inspired by Pierre Bourdieu to research economic life as an integral part of different social forms. Its main aim is threefold. First, we spell out the very distinct Durkheimian legacy in Bourdieu’s thinking and the way he applies it in researching economic phenomena. Without this background, much of what is actually part of how Bourdieu analysed economic aspects of social life would be overlooked or reduced to mere economic sociology. Second, we sketch the main theoretical concepts and heuristics used to analyse economic life from a field perspective. Third, we focus on practical methodological issues of field-analytical research into economic phenomena. We conclude with a short summary of the basic characteristics of this approach and discuss the main insights provided by the contributions to this special issue.
Struggling over crisis
(2018)
If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.” Following the premise of this quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, varying perceptions of the European crisis by academic economists and their structural homology to economists’ positions in the field of economics are examined. The dataset analysed using specific multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) comprises information on the careers of 480 German-speaking economists and on statements they made concerning crisis-related issues. It can be shown that the main structural differences in the composition and amount of scientific and academic capital held by economists as well as their age and degree of transnationalisation are linked to how they see the crisis: as a national sovereign debt crisis, as a European banking crisis, or as a crisis of European integration and institutions.
Was ist HipHop?
(2021)
Es handelt sich bei der vorliegenden Dissertation um eine investigative Forschungsarbeit, die sich mit dem dynamisch wandelnden HipHop-Phänomen befasst. Der Autor erläutert hierbei die anhaltende Attraktivität des kulturellen Phänomens HipHop und versucht die Tatsache der stetigen Reproduzierbarkeit des HipHops genauer zu erklären. Daher beginnt er mit einer historischen Diskursanalyse der HipHop-Kultur. Er analysiert hierfür die Formen, die Protagonisten und die Diskurse des HipHops, um diesen besser verstehen zu können. Durch die Herausarbeitung der genuinen Eigenschaft der Mehrfachkodierbarkeit des HipHops werden gängige Erklärungsmuster aus Wissenschaft und Medien relativiert und kritisiert. Der Autor kombiniert in seiner Studie kultur- und erziehungswissenschaftliche Literatur mit diversen aktuellen und historischen Darstellungen und Bildern. Es werden vor allem bildbasierte Selbstinszenierungen von HipHoppern und Selbstzeugnisse aus narrativen Interviews, die er selbst mit verschiedenen HipHoppern in Deutschland geführt hat, ausgewertet. Neben den narrativen Interviews dient vor allem die Bildinterpretation nach Bohnsack als Quelle zur Bildung der These der Mehrfachkodierbarkeit. Hierbei werden zwei Bilder der HipHopper Lady Bitch Ray und Kollegah nach Bohnsack (2014) interpretiert und gezeigt wie HipHop neben der lyrischen und der klanglichen Komponente auch visuell inszeniert und produziert wird. Hieraus wird geschlussfolgert, dass es im HipHop möglich ist konträre Sichtweisen bei gleichzeitiger Anwendung von typischen Kulturpraktiken wie zum Beispiel dem Boasting darzustellen und zu vermitteln. Die stetige Offenheit des HipHops wird durch Praktiken wie dem Sampling oder dem Battle deutlich und der Autor erklärt, dass durch diese Techniken die generative Eigenschaft der Mehrfachkodierbarkeit hergestellt wird. Damit vertritt er eine Art Baukasten-Theorie, die besagt, dass sich prinzipiell jeder aus dem Baukasten HipHop, je nach Vorliebe, Interesse und Affinität, bedienen kann. Durch die Vielfalt an Meinungen zu HipHop, die der Autor durch die Kodierung der geführten narrativen Interviews erhält, wird diese These verdeutlicht und es wird klar, dass es sich bei HipHop um mehr als nur eine Mode handelt. HipHop besitzt die prinzipielle Möglichkeit durch die Offenheit, die er in sich trägt, sich stetig neu zu wandeln und damit an Beliebtheit und Popularität zuzunehmen. Die vorliegende Arbeit erweitert damit die immer größer werdende Forschung in den HipHop-Studies und setzt wichtige Akzente um weiter zu forschen und HipHop besser verständlich zu machen.
The United Nations (UN) policy agenda on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) promotes a “holistic” approach to counterterrorism, which includes elements traditionally found in security and development programs. Advocates of the agenda increasingly emphasize the importance of gender mainstreaming for counterterrorism goals. In this article, I scrutinize the merging of the goals of gender equality, security, and development into a global agenda for counterterrorism. A critical feminist discourse-analytical reading of gender representations in P/CVE shows how problematic imageries of women as victims, economic entrepreneurs, and peacemakers from both the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Women, Peace and Security agenda are reproduced in core UN documents advocating for a “holistic” P/CVE approach. By highlighting the tensions that are produced by efforts to merge the different gender discourses across the UN’s security and development institutions, the article underlines the relevance of considering the particular position of P/CVE at the security–development nexus for further gender-sensitive analysis and policies of counterterrorism.
Discourse Prominence and Antecedent MisRetrieval during Native and Non-Native Pronoun Resolution
(2022)
Previous studies on non-native (L2) anaphor resolution suggest that L2 comprehenders are guided more strongly by discourse-level cues compared to native (L1) comprehenders. Here we examine whether and how a grammatically inappropriate antecedent’s discourse status affects the likelihood of it being considered during L1 and L2 pronoun resolution. We used an interference paradigm to examine how the extrasentential discourse impacts the resolution of German object pronouns. In an eye-tracking-during-reading experiment we examined whether an elaborated local antecedent ruled out by binding Condition B would be mis-retrieved during pronoun resolution, and whether initially introducing this antecedent as the discourse topic would affect the chances of it being mis-retrieved. While both participant groups rejected the inappropriate antecedent in an offline questionnaire irrespective of its discourse prominence, their real-time processing patterns differed. L1 speakers initially mis-retrieved the inappropriate antecedent regardless of its contextual prominence. L1 Russian/L2 German speakers, in contrast, were affected by the antecedent’s discourse status, considering it only when it was discourse-new but not when it had previously been introduced as the discourse topic. Our findings show that L2 comprehenders are highly sensitive to discourse dynamics such as topic shifts, supporting the claim that discourse-level cues are more strongly weighted during L2 compared to L1 processing.
The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.
In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent’s memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of garden-path sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape’s (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure.