Doctoral Degrees
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Formulaic Language in Animated Series
Yuan-Ting Hsu
This doctoral project draws on theories of language acquisition and examines formulaic language use in selected animated series, incorporating phraseological, text-linguistic, and multimodal analytical approaches. The data is drawn from a specially compiled comparative corpus consisting of six animated series in German-dubbed versions, totaling 120 episodes (302,374 tokens), which are aimed at audiences ranging from preschoolers to adolescents. The study focuses primarily on (1) the variety of types and frequency of formulaic language in the series examined, (2) its forms of realization, types of modification, and functions, as well as (3) its multimodal modes of realization and the semantic relationship between verbal and nonverbal modalities in the context of use. Methodologically, the study combines a quantitative distribution analysis—which records the types and tokens of formulaic language that occur, as well as their relationships—with a phraseological and text-linguistic, qualitatively interpretive, multimodal contextual analysis. Building on the quantitative findings, this analysis provides an in-depth examination of (2) and (3). The objective of this study is to identify quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of formulaic language at both the verbal and nonverbal levels across different age groups and to describe these differences in an interdisciplinary manner, drawing on approaches from text linguistics, language acquisition research, and multimodality research.
Language, Argumentation, Ideology: On the Reconstruction of Implicit Premises in Political Discourse
Stefan Armanini
This dissertation project examines, from a discourse and political linguistics perspective, the linguistic and argumentative realization of ethnopluralism in parliamentary speeches from the 19th legislative session of the German Bundestag. Ethnopluralism refers to a central ideological concept of the New Right, which conceives of cultures as relatively closed, territorially bound collectives and links the preservation of their distinctiveness to spatial and social demarcation. The ideological structure of ethnopluralism takes concrete form in parliamentary discourse through recurring argumentative patterns. As part of this dissertation, the speeches are examined using a linguistic topos analysis to identify these justificatory contexts, and the topoi through which ethnopluralist basic assumptions are supported and rendered plausible are identified. A comparison of their manifestations reveals the respective variants and the overarching patterns of the discourse under examination. The analysis also systematically incorporates the lexical-grammatical and metaphorical forms of expression of the topoi, thereby linking the argumentative reconstruction to concrete language use. The goal is to reconstruct patterns that extend beyond individual utterances, as well as the underlying systems of knowledge and interpretation.
Patterns in the Automotive Industry’s Corporate Communication Discourse on the Concept of “Mobility”
Etlantida Hasi-Serifi