Early Modern Correspondences of Princesses in Central Germany: Contrasting Corpus

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Rosemarie Lühr
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 145225894

The project continues to pursue two objectives. 1) a corpus-linguistic analysis of the private correspondence of princesses in central Germany in early modern times with a special focus on language change, dialect, grammar, lexis, orality - literacy, women's language, signals of modesty and politeness as well as the identification of the key terms and description of gender specific features of the respective genderlect; 2) the necessity digitizing of these correspondences and their philologically reliable and scientifically usable edition. The correspondences of princesses with male familiy members compiled so far (application phase 1: corpus I) are now to be expanded by a wide range of correspondence of princesses with other noble women that have neither been investigated nor edited yet (application phase 2: corpus II) as the topics mentioned in the latter are of a far more intimate nature than the correspondence with male family members. An extension of the already compiled corpus (corpus I) by this new contrasting corpus (corpus II) will considerably increade its already high cultural-historical value as furthes insights are to expected for the areas of linguistic and cultural history as well as gender reseach. The correspondences selected fit well into the existing corpus in terms of their historical and regional context and have been preserved by the same archives, in particular by the Thuringian Central State Archive Weimar. Forms of publishing are an internet and a book edition with historical-cultural interpretation (Volume I), the integration of the annotated text corpus into the ANNIS database as well as an assessment of the linguistic, stilistical and genderlectal comparision and an analysis of the identified key terms (Volume II). As a spillover of our work the meta data derived from the individually investigated letters will be passed on to the archives participating in this research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants