Forschung am Lehrgebiet Englische Sprachwissenschaft

Projektbeschreibung

The notion of politeness is claimed to be a universal phenomenon in human interaction in society. If one fails to convey politeness, communicate sensitivity and show consideration for others, this may lead to a communication breakdown. The acquisition of appropriate politeness plays a crucial role in every speaker’s pragmatic competence and has long been recognized as an essential component of general language proficiency. Despite this important acknowledgement, little is known about the development of pragmatic skills (Böning 2016, Montrul 2016). Additionally, research has shown that the degree of appropriate politeness together with the linguistic realisation of polite formulae varies considerably in different cultures. The differences in the rules of language use often lead to pragmatic failures. This study sets out to investigate the pragmatic abilities of English heritage language speakers and German English foreign language learners in comparison to English native speakers to illuminate cultural differences in politeness strategies and provide insights into the acquisition of those.

Stand: 30. Mai 2019

Kerndaten

Leitung: Pascal Hohaus

Dauer: 10/2015-07/2018

Förderung (im Rahmen der Begabtenförderung für Nachwuchswissenschaftler): Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (Förderzeitraum: 02/2016-09/2017, Fördervolumen: 28.025 EUR)

Kurzbeschreibung

This study is concerned with the use of the English modals (may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would and must) in adverbial, relative and complement clauses. It employs synchronic data from the British National Corpus and quantitative methods to investigate similarities and differences between the core modals, as well as modal-specific preferences in subordinate clauses. The main finding is that modal verbs in subordinate clauses may be conceived of as meso-constructions and that they qualify as micro-constructions once further syntagmatic features are considered. This allows for distinguishing modal verb phrases with different degrees of complexity, schematicity, productivity and subjectivity.

Konferenzen und Forschungsaufenthalte

September 2017. Vortrag mit dem Titel “Situating Epistemicity – Weak Epistemic Meanings and the Case of Might” 50. Jahrestagung der Societas Linguistica Europaea. Workshop: Linguistic categories, language description and linguistic typology, Zürich.

August 2017. Vortrag mit dem Titel “Configurations of  Clause Type and Modal Form – On the Syntactic Integration of the English Modals.” Knowling 2017. The Expression of Knowledge: Epistemicity and Beyond, Helsinki.

Juni 2017. Forschungsaufenthalt am Institute of English Studies (Université de Neuchâtel), Neuchâtel (Schweiz).

Publikation

Hohaus, Pascal. 2020. Subordinating Modalities. A Quantitative Analysis of Syntactically Dependent Modal Verb Constructions. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.

Projektbeschreibung

LONGDALE-GE is the German subcorpus of the LONGDALE (Longitudinal Database of Learner English) project that was initiated in January 2008 by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain. LONGDALE is a joint international project that aims to build and feed a longitudinal database of Learner English. For all subcorpora, the same students are followed over a period of at least three years and data collections are organized at least once a year. The written component of LONGDALE-GE was compiled by Caroline Gerckens, MA, in the Deparment of English Linguistics at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Data collection began with the first cohort in October 2011 which was finished in July 2014. A second cohort was started in October 2012 and finished in July 2015. A third cohort started in October 2013 and finished in July 2016.

For more information about the project and about other partners, please consult https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/longdale.html.

Stand: 5. März 2021