Aktuelle Projekte am Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie
Laufende Projekte zum Ukrainischen in der Fachdidaktik
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Blackness Imagery in the Construction of European Identity/ies: The Case of the Czech Lands in a Transnational Perspective
Horizon Europe, 2022-2024
PI: Jana Kantoříková
This interdisciplinary project deals with the forms and functions of racial imagery in the construction of European identity/ies, focusing on Black and “mixed-race” alterity language representations within the bounds of Czech-German and Czech-French cultural relations and transfers. With a special focus on the “long” nineteenth century, the research spans five interconnected objectives:
(1) to account for the “scientific” constructions of Black and “mixed-race” alterity in the Czech lands; (2) to survey the translating literature with “colonial” topics for the Czech lands; (3) to analyse the Black and “mixed-race” representations in Czech literature (4) as well as the ascription of surrogate “black” identity in German and French literature to Czechs/Slavs; and (5) identify the instrumentalization of Blackness imagery in cultural-political struggles.
Drawing on the methodology of literary history, translation studies and comparative literature, the research aims especially translations of French literature for the Czech lands, literary works, academic and media discourses and mutual representations of Czechs and Germans as “black”. Thus the project conceives (self-)Africanization as a rhetorical strategy of symbolic exclusion of the “other” (and/or self-exclusion), despite being European, from Europe by either the voluntary assumption or the imposed ascription of a surrogate identity. Besides, the interdisciplinary approach, which includes postcolonial studies, discourse analysis, comparative historical linguistics and insights of anthropology, seeks to shed light on the mixophobic framework of racial naming, notably in its gendered and intersectional dimensions.
Modelling the Question-Statement Opposition in Slavic Languages (QueSlav)
DFG/GAČR-Projekt, 2022–2024
PI: Roland Meyer (HU Berlin), Radek Šimík (Karls-Universität Prag)
The area of polar questions and their kin – different types of bias and rhetorical questions – has recently been intensively discussed in theoretical and experimental semantics and pragmatics. The QueSlav project hopes to contribute to this debate by looking at the complex empirical landscape offered by Slavic languages. The strategies used for encoding the distinction between statements and polar questions come from a variety of grammatical areas – from syntax and morphology, through discourse and modal particles, to prosody and intonation. There is considerable intra- and cross- linguistic variation in how these different strategies are used, whether they are obligatory or optional, and what kinds of meanings they give rise to. The matter is further complicated by the existence of borderline cases such as declarative questions (questions with a declarative form), rhetorical questions (statements with an interrogative form), and bias questions (expressing speaker’s answer expectations). The project focuses on languages which, despite their genealogical closeness, make use of a whole range of question-encoding strategies, including sentence-initial verb/auxiliary placement (Czech), use of particles (Polish, Russian), placement of prosodic prominence on the verb (Russian), and use of boundary tones (all languages). In addition, the languages under investigation have a rich repertoire of discourse particles, polarity items, and question tags which are often sensitive to the statement–question (or declarative–interrogative) distinction, as well as different bias inferences, and which can be exploited for diagnosing the relevant properties of the investigated utterance/sentence types. Our leading research question is whether the type of form used for the expression of polar or bias meanings influences the conveyed semantics and pragmatics. According to the null hypothesis, question semantics is universal. The competing hypothesis we put forth is that the type of form correlates with different semantics. Syntactic strategies – which are by assumption more deeply entrenched in the grammatical system – lead to more specified semantics than prosodic strategies, which in turn exhibit stronger reliance on pragmatic and contextual cues. Polar questions are thus used as a window into the general issue of the semantics–pragmatics divide. Our approach to addressing the theoretical question is distinctly empirical. We plan on a series of experimental studies of acceptability, offline and online management of polar questions, their answers, and their contextual bias. Besides informing current theories, we wish to attain a better understanding of polar question formation and bias in questions in Slavic, to foster experimental semantic/pragmatic methods in general and to contribute to a more adequate cross-linguistic typology of polar questions.
Dynamics of verbal aspect and (pro)nominal reference in language contact (RUEG P10)
DFG-Projekt, 2021-2024
PI: Artemis Alexiadou (HU Berlin), Natalia Gagarina (Leibniz-ZAS), Luka Szucsich (HU Berlin)
PhD: Maria Martynova, Vicky Rizou, Onur Özsoy
Dieses Projekt untersucht Veränderungen und Entwicklungen im Bereich des Verbalaspekts und der (pro)nominalen Referenz in den drei zentralen Heritage-Sprachen (h-Sprachen) innerhalb der Forschungsgruppe RUEG, h-Griechisch, h-Russisch und h-Türkisch in Deutschland und den USA im Vergleich mit dem majoritätssprachlichen Griechischen, Russischen und Türkischen. Die Daten des RUEG Korpus zeigen, dass sich die zwei genannten empirischen Domänen offen für neue Entwicklungen im sprachlichen Repertoire der Sprecher:innen aller drei h-Sprachen zeigen. Die Besonderheit der zwei genannten Phänomenbereiche in Bezug auf die Ziele der zweiten Phase von RUEG besteht darin, dass ihre Reorganisation sowohl das kerngrammatische System (interne Schnittstelle) als auch die externe Schnittstelle zwischen Morphosyntax und Pragmatik (Informationsstruktur und Diskursorganisation) einschließt.
The history of pronominal subjects in the languages of Northern Europe
DFG/AHRC-Projekt, 2021-2023
PI: Roland Meyer (HU), David Willis (Oxford)
DIONE: Digitalising mobility and national networks with open education
ERASMUS Strategic Partnership KA226, 2021-2023
"Expressive" dislocation and register in Czech vs. Russian (Projekt A03 im SFB 1412 "Register")
DFG-Projekt, 2020-2023
PI: Roland Meyer, Luka Szucsich (HU)
PhD: Olga Buchmüller, Aleksej Tikhonov, Anna Marklová
In A03 wird syntaktische Variation im Tschechischen und Russischen in Zusammenhang mit Register untersucht, indem verschiedene Wortstellungsvarianten in unterschiedlichen Registern (oder Funktionalstilen) betrachtet werden. Das Projekt kombiniert multidimensionale Korpusstudien, in denen bottom up bestimmte außersprachliche und sprachliche Eigenschaften verglichen werden und experimentelle Untersuchungsverfahren wie beispielsweise matched-guise-Studien. Ein Fokus des Projekts liegt auf der Modellierung der Interaktion von Grammatik, Informationsstruktur und Register.
Interdisziplinären Zentrum (IZ) Border Crossings - Crossing Borders. Berliner Zentrum für transnationale Grenzforschung
seit 2017
PI: Christian Voß, Gabriele Metzler (HU)