Dana Andrä, Linguistics (poster)

“Do-Support as a Distinctive Feature for Determining Authorship in the Early Modern English Period (1500-1700)”

According to the concept of authorship every person possesses his or her own idiolect. During the Early Modern English Period (1500-1700) two syntactical concepts seemed to co-exist: V-to-I-raising and do-insertion. Therefore, the attempt of this research is to find out if these concepts and its use determine authorship. The investigation of do-support and V-to-I-raising is a suitable feature to analyse the determination of authorship since they are morphosyntactic. Firstly, two comedies of two different authors from the Early Modern English Period, namely Shakespeare and Greene, were compared with each other. The goal is to find out whether the use of do-support is a distinctive feature to determine authorship in the Early Modern English Period. Secondly, two works of Shakespeare were compared with each other to analyse the frequency of do-support to test whether there is a difference recognisable. By doing that one can make also sure that certain works are written by the same person. To limit the research only negative sentences and wh-questions were included. The use of do-support is expected to be a distinctive feature for determining authorship due to different idiolects of authors. Furthermore, a difference according to the frequency of do-insertion in the works of Shakespeare is not assumed due to the fact that all language and grammar parameters are set as a child and cannot be altered afterwards. To analyse the given issues, a written digital corpus study including an automatic search method with Microsoft Office Excel was conducted.

Svenja Denker, Fachdidaktik

"Die Vermittlung von Interkultureller Kompetenz im Englischunterricht der Grundschule"

tba

Kim Ole Henneke, Literary and Cultural Studies

"Beyond Deduction: Anticipation and Representation in Neo-Victorian Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes"

The huge demand for Sherlock Holmes in a time of global change brought about by cutting-edge research in fields like the media, technology, computing and not least cognition and neuroscience, seems to correspond more generally to social anxieties regarding security in a world whose workings are being perceived as increasingly opaque and incontrollable. With regard to selling us our treasured illusions of safety and control, the countless neo-Victorian Sherlocks are thus in no way inferior to their Victorian predecessor. And yet, there is one decisive difference between them: while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fought offenders whose identity was deemed 'degenerate' and hence biologically predisposed to criminality by contemporary (pseudo) sciences, present-day adaptations have to take into account that identity is now unanimously conceptualized as a (largely unpredictable) process of becoming rather than a state of being. Consequently, the new Sherlocks require a future-oriented approach to crime fighting rather than the somewhat superseded science of deduction. In other words, the Sherlocks our culture produces and consumes have to be endowed with cognitive abilities that permit them to navigate the virtual and the digital and to assess the cognitive abilities of others so as to predict future crimes in time to prevent them. I argue therefore that 21^st-century adaptations of Sherlock Holmes – most notably, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock movies and BBC's Sherlock – incorporate recent findings from the neurosciences so that now Sherlock Holmes's methods do not only involve re-cognition but also pre-cognition, being enhanced in light of anticipation.

Anticipatory processes are defined as processes that permanently generate dynamic predictions of the future, while simultaneously acting on these predictions in the present in order to advance and promote desirable future states. They are informing a vast number of future-oriented research areas, such as virtual security, artificial intelligence, robotics and even sports – to name but a few. The representation of these simulative cognitive processes in cultural – and explicitly cinematic and televisual – texts is closely linked to resourceful and inventive uses of filmic registers that, in return, shape the popular understanding of anticipatory processes. In the said neo-Victorian adaptations then, we are granted access to the workings of Sherlock's mind, to those cognitive workings which lead to pro-active behaviour and which are supposedly captured as a one-to-one representation on celluloid. Consequently, we will take a closer look at the registers that shape popular perceptions of anticipatory processes. Whether the depiction of these processes in postmodern texts truly serves to revise prevalent notions of the brain, or whether these notions do not in fact continue to be informed by quasi-Victorian conceptions will eventually turn out to be the crucial question that revisionist adaptations such as the above will have to face.

Jascha Kattmann, Literary and Cultural Studies

“The Function of Poetry in Fantasy Narrative: The Intra- and Extra-Narrative Effects of Poetry in P. Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle”

What is the function of poetry in fantasy narrative? This question will be discussed highlighting the intra- and extra-narrative effects of poetry in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle with a particular focus on cultural world building and atmosphere within and outside of the narrative. First, on the basis of different concepts of culture, philosophical identity theory, and the concept of metaformal connectivity, the requirements for an appearance of cultural coherence are established. Second, the social capabilities inherent to songs and poetry are examined, and finally an analysis of the novels will be connected to the established framework. The analysis will show that some of the poems in these novels focus more on adding to the construction and coherence of the fictional world, while others predominantly create atmosphere within and without the narrative situation. Among these, some create a different atmosphere within the story in terms of emotional response than they create for the reader.

Sina menke, Literary and Cultural Studies

"'It's Just a Phase After All':The Representation of Teen Angst in My Mad Fat Diary and The Hanging Garden"

Being a teenager is considered to be the most exciting and challenging chapter in life. Adults refer to their teenage years as the time when they finally found their true selves and grew immensely as a person. Retrospectively, they would describe their teenage selves as strange compared to their current personality. Being a teenager is also considered to be “just a phase”, something one looks back at in an act of nostalgia.

This Bachelor thesis concerns itself with the so far unexplored between the normative ideas of growth, psychological health and their relation to the rhetoric of “the phase”. The goal is to reveal that the normative implication of “going through different phases” in life works as a delegitimisation of the developments of non-normative teenagers. As a counter-construct, the concept of life as one single phase is introduced, which is also referred to as growing sideways. By first of all examining Kathryn B. Stockton, Eve K. Sedgwick and Lennard J. Davis’ theories on the cultural concepts of childhood and adolescence, it becomes clear that the discourse of phases is created retrospectively, mostly by parents. With this in mind, two film analyses are conducted, in which the above-mentioned concepts are applied: normative versus anti-normative and growing up versus growing sideways. The materials used for this purpose are Thom Fitzgerald’s movie The Hanging Garden and British TV series My Mad Fat Diary, both of which deal with the topics of teen angst and ideas of heteronomous versus autonomous growth.

Mareike Schumacher, Linguistics

"Dialect Diffusion - The Influence of Geographical and Social Space on Linguistic Features"

The Bachelor thesis named Dialect Diffusion - The Influence of Geographical and Social Space on Linguistic Features examines the process of linguistic feature changes and its causes. Any change in linguistic features varying from standard pattern, in this work, is seen as a dialect feature and part of the process named dialect diffusion. In a theoretical, literature based analysis the research question of why and how these changes take place is answered. It is particularly focused on the influence of geographical and social space, one dealing with feature changes spreading geographically and the other one dealing with feature changes in social patterns and differences occurring there. The claim that both components play a major role in the diffusion process and that it is meaningful to not treat them as two completely different entities, is justified. In doing that, several theories and approaches on geographical space, including a pure distance entity, population density of urban areas and the influence of them and furthermore on social space including factors like social class, social network, age, gender and ethnicity are looked at and critically discussed in regard to linguistic diffusion. With the interaction of all these factors, the diffusion process is deconstructed and an evaluation is made.

Marie Schnieders, Linguistics (poster)

“Late Child L2 Bilingualism in Arabic-German Typically Developing Children: The LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings): Sentence Repetition vs. Nonword Repetition Tasks”  

The identification of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual contexts remains challenging since appropriate tools are still under review. In this study, two of the tools proposed to identify SLI in bilingual children, namely the German LITMUS Sentence Repetition (SRT) and Nonword Repetition (NWRT) tasks, are considered. Studies on simultaneous and early successive bilinguals (ecL2) have shown that both tasks can distinguish typically developing from language impaired children after only 12 months of exposure to the target language (LoE). On the other hand, applying both tests to late successive bilinguals (Age of Onset > 72 mo.)  led to mixed results in case of the SRT.  Thus, the question about the minimum length of exposure necessary for applying the SRT in late successive bilingual typically developing children (lcL2) arises. The study further investigates, whether excluding certain error types leads to a performance comparable to that of their typically developing monolingual and ecL2 peers. To answer this question, the performance of typically developing (TD) as well as language impaired monolingual and bilingual children (ecL2 & lcL2) (Arabic-German) aged 5;6-9;0 on the German sentence repetition (SRT) and non-word repetition (NWR) tasks is compared. Additionally, two of the lcL2 children are retested after being exposed to German for 18 months in order to check whether SRT is applicable after a longer LoE.