Project Details
Projekt
Pronominal person-reference in letters to the editor in the GDR: Communicative functions of personal, indefinite, and possessive pronouns in the context of indexing social groups in an authoritarian system
Applicant
Dr. Maximilian Krug
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457855466
The project is part of the research unit "Practices of referring to persons: personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in use". The project aims to describe the communicative functions of personal, indefinite, and possessive pronouns for the construction of social group categorization in GDR letters to the editor. The analysis of GDR letters to the editor as a public text form in an authoritarian system makes it possible to examine a functional pivot between state control of language in newspapers and suppressed individual communication. This is important insofar as letters to the editor in the GDR were considered one of the very few state-accepted methods of exercising criticism towards the system. In this context, pronouns play a special role, as they are used to construct identities behind which one can hide or refer to persons or groups of persons one intends to criticize. Letters to the editor can be seen as interactive elements in newspapers' otherwise monologic-one-sided mass media process. Therefore, in this project, the practices of pronominal person reference are primarily considered from an interactional perspective (conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and membership categorization analysis). Since the format "our + noun" is regarded as a typical construction of the political language in the GDR (e.g., "our comrade," "our state"), possessive pronouns – in contrast to the other projects of the research unit – are also considered in this project (along with personal and indefinite pronouns). First, the project examines the communicative functions of pronominal personal references in GDR letters to the editor with respect to social group categories, the respective actions, and nominal references. Second, this qualitative approach will be complemented by a quantitative approach, showing both statistical correlations and longitudinal changes in the use of pronominal person reference concerning pronouns and the respective indexing of social groups categories in the data. The data basis for the project is provided by the newspaper portal DDR-Presse. Within the framework of this DFG-funded project for the digitization and full-text indexing of three exemplary newspapers of the GDR from 1945 to 1994, the daily newspapers "Neues Deutschland," "Berliner Zeitung," and "Neue Zeit" can be accessed and thus a complete corpus with an estimated 8,000 letters to the editor from 49 years.
DFG Programme
Research Units
