Topics for theses

Here we give you suggestions for possible topics for your final theses (BA, MA, Stex). For some topics we provide data sets.

Memory culture on Instagram using the example of @ichbinsophiescholl: Practices of collective memory and the appropriation of history in digital communication environments. A multimodal corpus with the collected posts and comments of the account will be made available.
Counter-speech on TikTok: Anti-discriminatory communication in TikTok-specific formats such as video memes, stitches, video replies.
Cohesion and (in)coherence in TikTok stitches: Grammatical, semantic and multimodal forms of text and moving image linking.
'Heftig, nh?': a new particle between youth language and digital writing from a corpus linguistic perspective. Corpora will be made available.
Text transformation and popularization strategies in science communication: Analysis of explanatory videos and source documents of the channel"Dinge erklärt - kurzgesagt", where it can be traced very precisely how scientific texts are simplified and made accessible.

Linguistic evaluation practices using the example of restaurant reviews: A huge English-language data set is available via the yelp.com API and can be analyzed corpus linguistically. Basic programming skills required.
Corpus linguistic analysis of obituaries: A corpus of 25,000 obituaries from sz-trauer.de is made available and can be analyzed e.g. for wording patterns. Basic programming skills required.
Science communication in the podcast "Coronavirus Update": The transcripts of almost 100 episodes with speaker identification are made available as a corpus. Various focuses possible: formulation routines, technical language, moderation techniques, etc.

Linguistic Landscapes in soccer stadiums: Collection and linguistic-multimodal analysis of fan banners and fan choreos, for example on faszination-fankurve.de or uisf.de.
Soccer live tickers in language comparison: Based on the multilingual corpora on soccer linguistics. Various focuses possible: spatial linguistic analyses; emotional expression; metaphors and phraseologisms

Linguistic analyses of Christmas and/or New Year speeches: Corpora with all speeches since 1949 are made available. Various focuses are possible: personal references (incl. gender issues); political catchwords; stylometric analyses; corpus linguistic register analyses.
woke as a stigma word: Discourse-semantic analyses of a buzzword of the New Right.
"Spazieren gehen" during and after Corona: political linguistic analyses of a form of protest of the New Right and the lateral thinking movement.
"Tariff jungle" and "foundations of democracy": metaphors in political speech. Large corpora of parliamentary debates are freely accessible.

"Vegan butcher's shop": self-contradiction or marketing ploy? Semantic struggles in veganism discourses in social media

About this page