Linguistics

Linguistic research at the English Department is characterised by a perspective on language as a social practice that exists in close interdependence with its social, cultural and historical context. In line with this view, the main research areas  lie in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, with a range of more specialised subfields and research contexts. These include mediated, fictional and digital language use; varieties of English, English as a Lingua Franca, and as a global resource; language change, especially change of communicative conventions and politeness across historical periods; sociocultural aspects of belonging and inequality, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and dis/ability; and multimodal dimensions of English, including voice, writing, embodiment and affect. 

Methodologically, research draws on a broad range of approaches, including corpus-based research, discourse analysis, sociophonetics, and multimodal analysis, among others. The English Linguistics team is dedicated to collaborative research and is engaged in networks within Heidelberg, such as the Digital Humanities Center  and the Network Gender & Queer Studies , and in international collaborations.

Members of the English Department have successfully secured a number of third-party funded projects, such as “Cringe: Aestehtics and Discursive Practice of Schamlust” (Theresa Heyd, in collaboration with Heide Volkening, Universität Greifswald, funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung), “The Pragmatics of Spontaneous and Fictional Dialogues” (Daniela Landert, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation).