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Instructors: PD Dr. habil. Martina Lampert
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.008.200
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: ELing 200
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
After a solid state-of-the-art introduction via accessible textbook chapters on register and genre to be discussed in class, this seminar will provide students with the tools for doing in-depth (register or genre) analyses on their own: To this end an inventory of criteria, both situational and linguistic, will be scrutinized that prove apt for approaching all types of linguistic ‘output.’ Adopting a ‘learning by doing’ method to empirical research, (teams of) participants will be expected to carry out their own small-scale case study.
To obtain credit, students are expected to engage in two short in-class (team) activities: an initial (PowerPoint supported) analysis of a short excerpt from a cross-section of registers/genres; and working on a sample of free choice, students will present their initial findings of an individual or a team research project, which will then serve as a sound basis for participants’ term papers.
Details of organization and study material will be available by the first meeting.
Contents:
Looking at a cross-section of diverse language events – such as conversations and chats, textbooks and news reports, advertisements and public speeches – will reveal both systematic variation in their linguistic make-up and recurrent patterns of organization. Ultimately, these characteristic profiles of text and talk follow from their diverse situational conditions and communicative functions, giving rise to what defines register and genre.
This seminar, then, focuses on variation in (the English) language that is intricately dependent on its context of use: While genre has traditionally been confined to art and culture, in contemporary linguistics this term is now found to describe a varied set of conventional criteria for categorizing language events; register, in contrast, is characterized as a functional variety of linguistic patterns from the entire inventory of a language, employed for a particular purpose in a particular social setting.
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