Project Details
Projekt
Person-referring pronouns in dramatic works: interactional and dramaturgical functions as well as historical change from the Baroque and Enlightenment periods to Sturm and Drang and the Classical period
Applicant
Professor Dr. Wolfgang Imo
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457855466
The project is part of the Research Unit “Practices of referring to persons: personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in use”. The aim of this project is to analyze the systematics of the usage of personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in historical dramas from the literary periods of Baroque, Enlightenment, the Classical period and Sturm and Drang. When analyzing the use of pronouns in historical dramas, three factors are to be reckoned with: (i) Dramas do not exist without relation to historical everyday speech conventions. Therefore, up to a certain degree, they can be analyzed under the perspective of interactional language use as has been described on an empirical basis for current German. (ii) In addition, the social and language-related frame of the period in which the drama has been written, has to be taken into account. Especially address conventions and the expression of politeness has changed significantly over time. (iii) Furthermore, dramas are not just written down dialogues or historical artefacts, they are also literary works and have to be treated as instructions for staging the drama. Therefore, there will be special literary and dramatical functions demanded by the genre, for example verbalization strategies for the expression of thoughts of a protagonist, including self-address practices. In the basis of an exemplary data corpus consisting of the complete dramatic works of Gryphius (Baroque) and a representative selection of works by Lessing (Enlightenment) and by Schiller and Goethe (Classical period and Sturm and Drang) the following questions will be answerded: (1) Which persons in a drama use which personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in which situations, what are the functions of these pronouns in a given context and in what ways do these uses resemble those of modern-day German? (2) Which genre-related distributions of pronouns can be found and how can they be explained? What are the special dramatical demands which are satisfied by pronominal practices? (3) Which persons are referred by which persons and how do pronoun use and activities correlate? (4) With the help of the contrastive corpora from the chosen periods the reorganization of polite person reference will be reconstructed. One question is whether the chance from the polite address term Ihr to modern day Sie as well as the rise of Du especially during Sturm and Drang also resulted in a change of use of other pronouns referring to persons, such as demonstrative and indefinite pronouns, if new practices of referring to persons emerged and how the situations of use demanding polite, distancing address in relation to those demanding the use of Du have changed.
DFG Programme
Research Units
