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Diese Veranstaltung findet zum Teil auf dem Campus Dudweiler statt. Anfahrt Campus Dudweiler
Media and web-based discourse have become key areas for linguistic research. Not only are registers, from special-purpose languages to slang, documented online and thus easily accessible for researchers, but it is also evident that language changes massively under the influence of new communication and interaction methods. Texting prompts brevity, the use of abbreviations and symbols. Cross-platform messaging apps such as WhatsApp allow the integration of spoken-language features, multi-participant conversations and multimodal elements as part of written discourse. Social networks like Facebook prompt lexical innovation, the creation and use of memes and the disappearance of spatial and temporal adjacency. Microblogs like Twitter or image and video sharing websites like Pinterest or Flickr organize information in radically different ways, employing new semantic, pragmatic and multimodal structuring methods. Global web communication facilitates the integration of code-switching, the use of lexis from around the world and even the creation of new varieties. At the same time, media, always a strong innovation source, have become even more pervasive in web-based channels, e.g. though dedicated fan sites, Youtube channels, online streaming and even web-based miniseries. In this seminar we will investigate and illustrate just how English is changing in the media and the web. As part of the seminar, students will also perform hands-on research on web-based varieties by working with corpus data. For detailed course requirements please also consult the respective module descriptions. |
