With “Screen-to-text”, I offer a multi-perspective exploration of meaning-making through textual discourses that are directly informed by and oriented towards telecinematic artefacts, i.e. fictional films and television series. This includes interlingual and intralingual subtitles as a site of meaning for viewers, written comments from the perspective of fans, and transcription by scholars. The different screen-to-text discourses I explore share that they centre around a process of intersemiotic transfer from multimodal telecinematic discourse with spoken dialogue at its linguistic centre to a genre of written text that contributes to the individual and/or collaborative negotiation of meaning: The linguistic researcher employs transcription to highlight aspects of scholarly interest and make tangible the multimodal context in which conversation in film and television takes place; the subtitler translates meaning for a new target audience; the commenter contributes to collaborative negotiation of meaning by and for an international fan community.
Co-investigator: Prof. Dr. Miriam Locher (University of Basel, Switzetland).
The CMV project employs qualitative and corpus pragmatic methods to explore linguistic persuasion on the subreddit r/ChangeMyView. The data is constituted by a large corpus of submissions and comments annotated with emic community measures for persuasiveness. The initial stage of our research consists of several case studies that explore different linguistic variables within a "persuasive" corpus of interest and a "non-persuasive" reference corpus. Among other aspects, we have investigated register difference (aspects of formality), conversational moves, politeness.
Co-investigator: Dr. Daria Dayter (Tampere University, Finland).
Forschungslogiken is a German term that combines epistemologies, research context, approaches and research questions of different disciplines. Based on this notion and the entailed awareness for our own and others’ – emic and etic – perspectives, we analyse evaluation in German-language online lay book reviews. We approach these evaluative practices from three perspectives, (1) Close-reading/heuristics/qualitative; (2) Corpus linguistics; (3) Machine learning/sentiment analysis, in order to reflect on the impact of theoretical assumptions and empirical methodologies on research questions, results and interpretation.
Pragmatics of telecinematic discourses: Informed by my work film and television discourses and more recently on subtitled, commented and transcribed artefacts, I keep working on various pragmatic aspects of telecinematic fiction.
Pragmatics of humour: From an initial focus on the role repetition plays in humour and in TV sitcoms in particular, I have broadened my interest to include other settings for humour, in particular text-based computer-mediated communication and also continue working on telecinematic humour.
corpus linguistics, computational linguistics
pragmatics, English linguistics
discourse analysis, conversation analysis
audiovisual translation, subtitling
textual Digital Humanities, social reading
human-computer interaction, computer-mediated communication, virtual assistants
telecinematic discourse, the pragmatics of fiction, participation structures, stylistics
humour studies, incongruity-resolution, repetition in humour, humour in telecinematic discourse
geolinguistics, linguistic landscapes and spaces
political speech, persuasion online
linguistics of food