Research projects
My main research interest is currently internet linguistics. Thus I wrote my master's thesis on chat communication of the German language and its characteristics, comparing them with spoken language characteristics. I was part of a research program during my bachelor studies, which was presented as a workshop at the FIID (International Language Fair) in Guadalajara along with my mentor at the time.
Written- spoken language: A corpus based study about chat communication and its characteristics (2023)
Abstract
Verb conjugation variations of spoken German and German chat language are contrasted in this corpus-based analysis. Nowadays, the digital language is not being researched enough, which is the reason why the present study focuses on the so-called spoken aspects in a written-mediated domain. The study consists firstly of corpus searches of verb phenomena frequencies in a spoken-language corpus. Secondly, the phenomena found in the first corpus are searched for in a selected chat corpus. The results are analyzed quantitatively through frequency relativization, as well as qualitatively through Keyword in Context (KWIC). The study cannot provide statistical generalizations; however, it does ascertain that the chat communication is an independent genre, which assimilates as well as differentiates from spoken and written language. The ambivalence of modality and conception of the analyzed genre can be confirmed. The area of German as a foreign- and/or second language teaching should include more everyday genres like chat communication in class, since these play a guiding role in speech transformation and speech use.