Text and discourse
Linguistics approaches the description of discourse from two different directions. On the one hand, 'discourse' can be conceptualised as a socio-cultural phenomenon, the aim of which is to capture how the changing observations of socially relevant topics are reflected linguistically or constructed linguistically. A second line of research understands 'discourse' as an almost complete linguistic unit that takes two forms: 'texts' (monologue) and 'conversations' (dialogue). Discourse semantics and pragmatics therefore describe the interaction of individual linguistic utterances with their discourse context. The consideration of conversations as interactive, purposeful behaviour and the investigation of the resulting regularity of a discourse as well as the investigation of all forms of coherence are just two of the important areas of interest in this subject.
Maya Cortez Espinoza (Institute for German Studies):
Question-based approaches to discourse structure
Anouschka Foltz (Institute for English Studies):
Language in the media
Georg Marko (Institute for English Studies): Socioculturally significant (or even problematic) meanings constructed in discourse - with wider implications for worldviews and thinking styles - analysed using linguistic patterns found in texts using corpus linguistic methods, with a main focus on medical and health-related discourse.
Karoline Marko (Institute for English Studies):
- Individual Writing Style
- Discourse of extremist groups
- Corpus-based analyses
Edgar Onea (Institute for German Studies):
Formal discourse pragmatics and discourse semantics
Hermine Penz (Institute for English Studies):
- intercultural communication in multilingual (institutional) contexts
- Metadiscourse
- Ecolinguistics: ecological discourses, e.g. climate change discourse
- Discourses about nature
- plastic discourses
Margit Reitbauer (Institute for English Studies):
- Content and Language Integrated Learning
- Reading Research
- Computer-Mediated Communication
- discourse analysis
- Cognitive approaches (especially in the areas of discourse, reading and language acquisition)