05.008.200 Seminar: English Linguistics - Written Registers: Print and Electronic

Lehrende/r: PD Dr. habil. Martina Lampert

Veranstaltungsart: Seminar

Anzeige im Stundenplan: S: Eng.Linguistics

Semesterwochenstunden: 2

Unterrichtssprache: Englisch

Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 30

Anmeldegruppe: ELing S

Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie
Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007.

Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
Participants in the seminar are expected to prepare two short (group) presentations in class:

• first, reviewing a specific topic from the current research into written registers;
  
• second, applying its findings to a small-scale case study of samples of writing and presenting their initial insights, which will then be their exploratory work for their term papers.
  

Inhalt:
In this seminar we will take a closer look at the obvious fact that, in writing, language users are limited to the information the visual channel provides for: All acoustic sources of direct face-to-face interactions, prosodic qualities like pitch and intensity, along with the communicative functions of intonation, as well as the kinesics of co-ordinated embodied actions such as gaze, gesture, and body posture are unavailable to readers and writers.
In its exclusive dependence on visual modes of expression, writing has however come to utilize a multi-varied and intricate combination of vision-based representations like alphabetical and non-alphabetical symbols (punctuation marks), patterns of spatial organization on a two-dimensional display (layout, tables, figures etc.), and colors. And, increasingly in the new technologies, ‘writing’ goes beyond spatial arrangements, functionalizing time-/motion-based devices, implementing more sophisticated (non-linear) options that have developed in the course of literacy evolution and resulting in a fundamental restructuring of the text format such as hypertext.

This seminar will first provide a solid introduction to the situational and functional characteristics of written language, such as academic prose, newspaper writing, and extant as well as emerging electronic varieties; then, taking a decisively empirical stance, we will scrutinize a cross-section of the various text types in a close comparative analysis of their distinctive features.