Project Details
Projekt
Pronouns as a constructional network: usage-based analysis of practices of referring to persons in written interactions
Applicant
Dr. Irina Mostovaia
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457855466
The current subproject of the research unit “Practices of referring to persons: personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in use” combines methods of Construction Grammar and Interactional Linguistics and describes from a usage-based point of view how personal, indefinite, and demonstrative pronouns are used in German WhatsApp chats to refer to ‘present’ (= interlocutors) and ‘absent’ persons (= other persons). The subproject focuses the use of the personal pronouns ich, du, er, sie, wir, ihr, the indefinite pronoun man and the demonstrative pronouns der, die in the WhatsApp chats taken from the Mobile Communication Database 2 (https://db.mocoda2.de/). Applying methods of statistical Network Analysis, the study identifies patterns of practices of pronominal forms of reference in analyzed WhatsApp data and describes formal and functional properties of pronouns. The study focus on two formal properties of pronouns mentioned above: on their collocation profile and their phonographic form. A data-driven analysis of functional properties of pronouns addresses following questions: Which interactional functions do pronouns fulfil within different patterns and which of these patterns can be interpreted as constructions? How do pronouns contribute to the construals of situations and the positioning of social actors? How is the use of pronouns connected to the circumstances or affordances of WhatsApp communication?
DFG Programme
Research Units
