Coordinators: Elina Suomela-Härmä and Hartmut Lenk
Description:
In the text types and discourses subgroup research has been focusing on linguistic aspects of mass media and literary texts. The methods vary from text linguistics and discourse analysis to pragmatic and philological approaches.
A core area of linguistic media research has been the contrastive analysis of different text types (short news; leading articles, commentaries and their headlines; interviews; squibs; chats; reviews of opinions in other media; real estate advertisements; metaphors in discourse on immigration as well as lonely hearts ads).
The most important difference between Finnish and German journalistic text types is to be found in the argumentative structures of leading articles, e.g. in their headlines. The possible punch line of commentaries and squibs may also differ according to their importance and function. The prosodic analysis of French radio interviews and lectures has focused on the use of marked figures as means of the contextualization of speech. Descriptions of the Spanish Civil war have been examined from a typological point of view.
Within the project Social Deixis: Terms of address as a mirror of societal transformations in the Romance languages area, financed by the University of Helsinki (2005-2007), one doctoral dissertation, several Master’s theses, conference papers and articles have been completed on the use of terms of address in three present-day Romance languages.
The focus of philological research is on the 16th century. In addition to text editions (e.g. a play belonging to the national edition of Aretino’s works; a Spanish manual for midwives), the transmission of literary works via translations and plagiarisms has been studied. Together with traditional approaches, the investigation of internal variants within early printed texts has yielded interesting results concerning e.g. censorship in the Medici principality.
Members:
Nadia Gondolph