Dissertation projects
Here you will find an overview of the dissertations being written at the Chair.
Small, inconspicuous posts and messages can achieve an enormous reach on social networks within a very short space of time. Virality as an inherent characteristic of social media communication repeatedly leads to the formation of communities from the interaction that takes place there, which also attract attention outside of social media and thus help to shape social and political discourse.
The dissertation project aims to investigate linguistic practices that users use to show solidarity with one another in social networks. The focus is on the linguistic analysis of discourse patterns, the structure and progression of comment threads, as well as the semantic and pragmatic aspects of linguistic loyalty and solidarity practices. In a cross-network comparison, linguistic strategies of solidarization will be identified and examined both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Alignment describes the psycholinguistic phenomenon that interlocutors align with each other on different linguistic levels, e.g. lexically: If speaker A introduces the expression x to reference an entity, it is likely that her interlocutor B will pick up the same expression to refer to the same entity. This has been shown for both human-human interaction and human-machine interaction (HMI), including for lexis, syntax and prosody, as well as for various settings such as interactions with chatbots, robots and oral language assistants. The majority of research on alignment in human-machine interaction is experimental in nature. While such designs are easy to control, they emulate scenarios that are far removed from real HMI, which reduces the ecological validity of such findings. On the other hand, a corpus-based approach cannot directly demonstrate alignment processes in the brain, but only the persistence of linguistic structures. At the same time, it offers the advantage that (reasonably) authentic interactions between humans and actual machines can be evaluated. Nevertheless, there is hardly any corpus-based research on alignment in HMI. Completely absent is corpus-based research on persistence in the interaction between humans and oral language assistants. This dissertation project aims to fill this research gap by analyzing several German-language corpora with interactions between humans and Alexa for persistence.
The subject of the dissertation is talking about fear. It is based on the observation that fear, in addition to its physical anchoring as an emotion, can be grasped and described via language as a socially constructed concept. Public and semi-public discourses of different collectives form the framework of the study. The delimitation is based on the assumption that fear thematizations, i.e. the use of the lexeme fear and similar lexemes, are associated with specific functions in discourses, which can be divided into fear management, fear reflection and fear coping. For example, plenary protocols of the German Bundestag are examined, as it is assumed that the function of fear management is central in this context. The reflective function, on the other hand, is characteristic of articles in weekly newspapers, which form a further basis for the study. In addition, chats from online self-help forums on anxiety disorders are examined, as these are primarily ascribed the function of anxiety management. It is also assumed that the different functions of anxiety thematization are associated with different, quite contrasting anxiety concepts that need to be determined. Within the framework of the corpus study, linguistic patterns are first determined on the basis of the fear thematizations, which are regarded as traces of fear concepts. The anxiety concepts are then described using a hermeneutic approach that incorporates interdisciplinary findings on the topic of anxiety. From the differences in the results of the corpora, the characteristics of the respective groups of actors can be derived. Finally, similarities in the corpora are interpreted using cultural analysis.
The global success of new-right movements and parties impressively demonstrates the resurgence and social power of powerful (political) narratives. According to the basic thesis of the dissertation, such narratives develop a highly emotionalized causality that forms the legitimizing foundation for radicalization, hostility and ideologized constructions of truth. The strategies, modes of operation and (dis)continuities of new-right discourses are therefore explored in the analytical framework of narratology as a theory of cultural genesis of meaning. Methodologically, an innovative approach is pursued that combines data-driven and generalizing procedures with qualitative hermeneutic methods in order to adequately depict the structural complexity and interpretative openness of cultural narratives.
If someone experiences an event that is so far out of the ordinary that it contradicts everyday reality or their own ideas of what is considered true, plausible and reasonable for them, several problems must be overcome: Firstly, the person concerned must decide to what extent they want to 'allow' a deviation from the normal for themselves. Secondly, the experience must be categorized, in the sense that a decision must be made as to whether it can still be gradually attributed to the previous ideas of what is true. As soon as such an experience is reported, a third problem arises: in addition to the problems mentioned, it must also be reported convincingly, i.e. in a way that does not trigger an immediate rejection from the recipient. The occurrence of these problems as communicative acts will be made visible on the basis of corpora from reports of UFO sightings - which represent a form of knowledge that is widespread but stigmatized - and traced back to its origin in a specific social hierarchy of knowledge.
Multimodal communications and the construction of reality and meaning associated with them are increasingly dominating the everyday web-based discourse of political parties and their potential electorate. Right-wing populist stakeholders also use social media as resonance spaces for a dichotomous construction of identity, which takes place along a discursively formed friend-foe schema and makes the inclusion and exclusion of certain social groups relevant. In doing so, they often realize their discourse actions through multimodal communication in the form of language-image-texts.
Against this background, the dissertation project aims to reveal the linguistic-visual construction of right-wing populist thought patterns and interpretations of the world and the in-group and out-group identities derived from them on the basis of multimodal communications. To this end, a methodological analysis procedure for qualitatively oriented, multimodal online discourse analyses is being developed that combines the approach of semiotically extended discourse linguistics with the methodology of grounded theory.
A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of ideology. Following the various discursive shifts of recent years, this time-honored term is once again being used more frequently: be it as a stigma word for the position of political opponents, as a technical term in political editorials or everywhere as a filler word or phrase. At the same time, the epistemologically oriented concept of ideology has experienced an unexpected renaissance in English-language research and has thus matured into a powerful analytical tool for (political) worldviews and everyday beliefs. This doctoral project aims to attempt a re-foundation of the term for linguistics. The concept of ideology is operationalized through theoretical reflection and linguistic-analytical modelling for research interested in cultural studies in order to provide a novel method for the qualitative and quantitative study of worldviews.
The open access movement that emerged with the commercial spread of the internet and the subsequent development towards opening up the entire scientific production process are symptomatic of current demands for more democracy, openness and transparency in socially relevant domains. The interplay of political and scientific-ethical postulates with the affordances of the new digital media is promoting a radical transformation of the scientific communication system. Using the example of the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) and the Open Science Initiative of the Faculty of Psychology at TU Dresden (OSIP), the dissertation project examines the discursive patterns of interpretation that flank the process of opening up a supposedly closed science or construct and legitimize it as such in a meaningful way in the first place. It is also of interest to what extent the scientists and library staff take up the knowledge constructions of the superordinate discourse and which linguistic acts of self-positioning they perform. To this end, text corpora are generated and qualitative interviews are conducted, which are analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods.