Texts in Context - Einzelansicht

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The aim of the seminar is to introduce students to the field of text linguistics. To begin with, we will be concerned with the grammatical structures and lexical patterns of texts. After discussing the central notions of cohesion and coherence, we will proceed to a detailed discussion of text classification and how corpus linguistic approaches can inform our understanding of genres, registers and text types. In addition, we will also deal with the medium-dependent characteristics of texts, i.e. the differences between written and spoken presentation.

In the last part of the seminar, we will examine some of the psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of text constitution, such as lexical priming as well as scenes and frames. We will follow a hands-on approach and discuss numerous examples of both traditional text types, e.g., letters, news texts, advertisements as well as more recent examples from the new and social media (emails, chats, short text messages, blogs, tweets etc.). Students are expected to carry out their own little text linguistic studies in the course of the seminar.