FOR 5182:  Controversial discourses: Language history as contemporary history since 1990

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441142207

The planned research group aims to review and present the most recent history of the German language by examining a wide range of controversial discourses since 1990. In contrast to historiography, “linguistic history as contemporary history” is only practiced in individual studies on, for example, the climate protection discourse, the economic crisis discourse or the discourse on embryonic stem cell research. An overall presentation covering the most important subject areas of public-political debates is a desideratum for the period since the unification of the two German nation states in 1990.The aim of the Research Unit proposed here is to close this gap. Research will be carried out on the basis of the linguistic theory of the reality-constitutive power of language. From this perspective it follows that an explanation of how the respective “realities” in different thematic fields were linguistically constructed and enforced, can be regarded as a valuable contribution to contemporary historiography, especially as historiography is all too often characterized by discourse oblivion: it describes for instance economic crises without reflecting on the linguistic-discursive construction of reality which makes the perception of such “crises” possible in the first place. This socially relevant research objective can only be implemented in a larger collaborative project and in two funding phases since it will cover a large number of interrelated topics extending over a period of 30 years. In the preparatory work for this application, the research group developed hypotheses on basic discourse semantic figures that can be used to bundle these topics into project tandems and through which their respective controversial potential can be focused.Moreover, over the last decades an intense methodological discussion in discourse linguistics has developed. It has established a broad field of research offering a wide range of methods that can significantly enhance the representativity, reliability and va-lidity of the language historical results sought in the Research Unit. However, these methods also require a substantial investment of time and effort with regard to the preparation and evaluation of the corpus. In particular corpus-linguistic methods will be incorporated, which over the last ten years have increasingly shown that they can bring about considerable advances in linguistic discourse analysis. With digital meth-ods of processing, annotating and visualizing text data, discourse linguistics can be applied to the ever-increasing volume of accessible texts and triangulated with text-statistical methods, thus ensuring both the quality criteria of the empirical research and the transparency of the results. The added value of the Research Unit is, therefore, that collaborative research together with a common digital infrastructure will develop a col-laborative methodology for the understanding of discourse history.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Switzerland

Projects

• Coordination Funds (Applicant Wengeler, Martin )
• "Germany's freedom and security are now also being defended in the Hindu Kush”. Discourses on internal and external security in Germany since 1990 (Applicants Kuck, Kristin ;  Wengeler, Martin )
• Individual Freedom and Social Norm - Sustainability and Responsibility Discourses on Environment and Education since 1990 (Individual and Society) (Applicants Janich, Nina ;  Kilian, Jörg )
• Man and Technology. Controversial discourses on the machanization of the living world (Applicants Müller, Marcus ;  Spieß, Constanze )
• Methodology and Reflection: Linguistic Discourse Historiography as Digitally Supported Group Research (Methodological Cross-Sectional Project) (Applicant Müller, Marcus )
• Participation and Egalitarianism – Discourses on Social Participation/Solidarity and Diversity/Equality since 1990 (SP 1: Participation and Egalitarianism) (Applicants Bubenhofer, Noah ;  Schröter, Juliane )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Martin Wengeler