B04
Emergence and transfer of register patterns: Situational-functional parameters of intraindividual variation in the writings of Martin Luther and Johannes Bretke

Project B04 investigates register variation in the Early Modern context of the Reformation, when religious and other writing and printing expanded dramatically. We will model register emergence and transfer, focusing on the intraindividual register knowledge of two prolific individuals central to the development of German and Lithuanian respectively: Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Johannes Bretke (1536–1602). We will analyze linguistic, particularly grammatical and lexical phenomena in varied historical registers. Methodologically, the project combines a bottom-up approach based on individual linguistic phenomena with a top-down approach clustering parameters to arrive at a register classification.

Members

Project leader


Prof. Dr. Jürg Fleischer

Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik

juerg.fleischer@hu-berlin.de

Members


Student assistant


Former members



Project in Phase I

Project Title for Phase I

Register emergence and register change in Germanic

Project Description for Phase I

The main aim of this project is to study the emergence of registers in two early Germanic languages (German and Swedish) and to explore register change over time. The study will initially concentrate on individual authors with a comparatively wide range of text production, Notker III of St. Gallen for Old High German and Birgitta of Sweden for Old Swedish. This strict demarcation of sources will allow the study of the emergence of vernacular written registers twice under slightly differing conditions. Three research questions will be addressed: (i) How do new registers emerge in the history of German and Swedish? (ii) How do these newly established registers change over time, and, in particular, do they converge or diverge? (iii) How do register genesis and change relate to a shift of medium, from orally transmitted texts to texts written in the Roman alphabet, and in what ways are they dependent or independent of Latin transmission?

Project Leaders in Phase I

Publications & Presentations

    Publications

    2023

  • Beier, Phil; Schnelle, Gohar; Unverzagt, Silke; Norde, Muriel; Zeige, Lars Erik  (2023) BiNoKo V. 1.0 Birgitta-Notker-Korpus[DOI] [ViVo]

    The Birgitta-Notker-Korpus (BiNoKo) is a resource dedicated to comparative research on historical registers. The corpus comprises two sources: The Old High German Book of Psalms by Notker III of Saint Gall and the Old Swedish Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden. The subcorpus of Birgitta's Revelations and the subcorpus of Notker's Psalms are available as separate zip files. The corpus format is ANNIS. For local installation, use ANNIS Desktop. The documentation for ANNIS can be found here:
    https://corpus-tools.org/annis/
    https://corpus-tools.org/annis/download.html

    The guidelines (see 'related identifiers') are published in REALIS 2/3 and include information about the corpus design, annotation layers, meta data, and annotation principles.

  • Pescuma, Valentina Nicole; Serova, Dina; Lukassek, Julia; Sauermann, Antje; Schäfer, Roland; Adli, Aria; Bildhauer, Felix; Egg, Markus; Hülk, Kristina; Ito, Aine; Jannedy, Stefanie; Kordoni, Valia; Kühnast, Milena; Kutscher, Silvia; Lange, Robert; Lehmann, Nico; Liu, Mingya; Lütke, Beate; Maquate, Katja; Mooshammer, Christine; Mortezapour, Vahid; Müller, Stefan; Norde, Muriel; Pankratz, Elizabeth; Patarroyo, Angela Giovanna; Plesca, Ana-Maria; Ronderos, Camilo R.; Rotter, Stephanie; Sauerland, Uli; Schulte, Britta; Schüppenhauer, Gediminas; Sell, Bianca Maria; Solt, Stephanie; Terada, Megumi; Tsiapou, Dimitra; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Weirich, Melanie; Wiese, Heike; Zaruba, Kathy; Zeige, Lars Erik; Lüdeling, Anke; Knoeferle, Pia; Schnelle, Gohar  (2023) Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods In:  Frontiers in Psychology [DOI] [ViVo]
    In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center ‘Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of SituationalFunctional Variation’ (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define ‘register’ as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of ‘register’, by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: 1. To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. 2. To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals’ social, language, and educational background. 3. We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.
  • Beier, Phil; Schnelle, Gohar; Unverzagt, Silke; Norde, Muriel; Zeige, Lars Erik  (2023) Guidelines for the Birgitta-Notker-Korpus (BiNoKo) In:  REALIS: Register Aspects of Language in Situation [DOI] [ViVo]
    The Birgitta-Notker-Korpus (BiNoKo) is a resource dedicated to comparative research on historical registers. These guidelines include information about the corpus design, annotation layers, meta data, and annotation principles. The corpus comprises two sources: The Old High German Book of Psalms by Notker III of Saint Gall and the Old Swedish Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden.
  • Schnelle, Gohar; Lüdeling, Anke; Odebrecht, Carolin  (2023) Historische Korpora in sprachhistorisch orientierter germanistischer Hochschullehre In:  Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur [DOI] [ViVo]
    Abstract This paper argues for incorporating corpus data into the teaching of historical linguistics. While deeply annotated historical corpora are becoming available and corpus data is already widely used to answer various research questions, corpora are as yet rarely used in teaching. We believe they are ideally suited to make the variation in historical data transparent and help students to explore contexts and parameters. In our first study, we show how the KaJuK corpus and its more elaborated version, the GiesKaNe corpus, can be exploited to study adverbial sentences. Using the RIDGES corpus, the second study deals with phrasal and lexical development. Both studies focus on explaining the method and its extension to other corpora and research questions.
  • Ihden, Sarah; Schnelle, Gohar; Schröder, Ingrid; Zeige, Lars Erik  (2023) Der Verbund ‚Deutsch Diachron Digital. Referenzkorpora zur deutschen Sprachgeschichte' In:  Neue Entwicklungen in der Korpuslandschaft der Germanistik. [ViVo]
  • 2020

  • Lüdeling, Anke; Alexiadou, Artemis; Adli, Aria; Donhauser, Karin; Dreyer, Malte; Egg, Markus; Feulner, Anna Helene; Gagarina, Natalia; Hock, Wolfgang; Jannedy, Stefanie; Kammerzell, Frank; Knoeferle, Pia; Krause, Thomas; Krifka, Manfred; Kutscher, Silvia; Lütke, Beate; McFadden, Thomas; Meyer, Roland; Mooshammer, Christine; Müller, Stefan; Maquate, Katja; Norde, Muriel; Sauerland, Uli; Szucsich, Luka; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Waltereit, Richard; Wolfsgruber, Anne; Zeige, Lars Erik  (2020) Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation In:  REALIS: Register Aspects of Language in Situation [DOI] [ViVo]
    The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extract from the frame text of the proposal for the CRC 1412, which was submitted to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2019, followed by a successful onsite evaluation that took place in 2019. The CRC 1412 then started its work on January 1, 2020. The theoretical part of the frame text gives an extensive overview of the theoretical and empirical perspectives on register knowledge from the viewpoint of 2019. Due to the high collaborative effort of all PIs involved, the frame text is unique in its scope on register research, encompassing register-relevant aspects from variationist approaches, psycholinguistics, grammatical theory, acquisition theory, historical linguistics, phonology, phonetics, typology, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics, as well as qualitative and quantitative modeling. Although our positions and hypotheses since its submission have developed further, the frame text is still a vital resource as a compilation of state-of-the-art register research and a documentation of the start of the CRC 1412. The theoretical part without administrative components therefore presents an ideal starter publication to kick off the CRC’s publication series REALIS. For an overview of the projects and more information on the CRC, see https://sfb1412.hu-berlin.de/.
  • Presentations

    2023

  • Schnelle, Gohar; Roth, Theresa  (2023) Evidential Strategies in Ancient vs. Early Modern Medical Discourse In:  Kolloquium SFB1412 (2023) [ViVo]
    In our talk we will discuss the development of evidential strategies used in historical medical discourse as a register relevant function. Our results show, that the use of evidentiality in Early Modern German medical texts is tightly bound to evidential strategies used in Ancient medical texts (i.e. Galen), but also shows variation as the scientific standards and thus registers used in contexts of scientific communication change over the centuries. Our analyses are carried out on the basis of a variationist corpus study based on annotation in the Register in diachronic German Science Corpus (Ridges-herbology) combined with a qualitative analysis of medical tractats by Galen (2nd-3rd century AD).
  • Schnelle, Gohar; Serova, Dina  (2023) Poster session of the participants of the Berlin University Alliance X-Student Research Group ‘Berlin epitaphs as source for historical register research’ In:  Kolloquium SFB1412 (2023) [ViVo]
    The participants of the Berlin University Alliance X-Student Research Group ‘Berlin epitaphs as source for historical register research‘ present their results during a poster session. Their will be an introductory summary of the addressed research questions in English, the posters are prepared in German. organized by Gohar Schnelle and Dina Serova Our students will present their research results featuring the following topics: “Todesreferenzen in Grabinschriften des 17. Jahrhunderts” Franziska Groth, Stephanie Jandt “Darstellung stereotyper Putten im Hauptschiff der Berliner Marienkirche” Tom Liese “Orte und Mobilität auf Epitaphien des 17. Jahrhunderts der Berliner Marienkirche” Marthe Küster “V1 als Registermerkmal?” Elisabeth Eberle “Außertheologische Poesie auf Epitaphien” Luise Bensmann “Vergänglichkeit im 17. Jahrhundert am Beispiel von Epitaphien in der St. Marienkirche zu Berlin” Yasmin Altmann “Gedächtnis und Emotion. Die Rolle von Emotionen im barocken Totengedenken.” Clara Skrippek “Multimodalität und Rezeptionsbedingungen” Ladina Soubeyrand “Epitaphe als biographische Quelle” Svenja Kautz “Personenattribution auf Grabinschriften” Lola Hajnal Berg “Biographische Informationen auf Doppelepitaphien” Bastian Ilgner
  • 2022

  • Beier, Phil  (2022) Expressions of modality in Germanic: Competition and change In:  Expressions of modality in Germanic: Competition and change, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin [ViVo]
  • Beier, Phil  (2022) Register im Altschwedischen? Heliga Birgittas Uppenbarelser In:  Lingvistisk lördag, ISFAS, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel [ViVo]
  • Beier, Phil  (2022) Registers in St. Birgitta's Revelations In:  OXBER-Summer School: Medialität / (Re-)Mediation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin [ViVo]
  • Beier, Phil  (2022) Altschwedisch für Laien. Registeranalyse in Birgittas Offenbarungen In:  17. Überregionale Promovierendentagung der Skandinavistik, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn [ViVo]
  • Beier, Phil  (2022) Register in den Offenbarungen der Heiligen Birgitta von Schweden In:  25. ATdS, LMU München [ViVo]
  • Beier, Phil  (2022) Two perspectives on studying register in St Birgitta's revelations In:  NECRON - Network of Early Career Researchers in Old Norse, Stockholms Universitet [ViVo]
  • Norde, Muriel; Beier, Phil  (2022) Modal constructions in Old Swedish legal and religious texts In:  Expressions of modality in Germanic: Competition and change, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin [ViVo]
  • Norde, Muriel; Beier, Phil  (2022) Modelling modal meaning: Directivity in Old Swedish religious prose In:  25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Oxford [ViVo]
  • 2021

  • Beier, Phil  (2021) Register emergence and Register Change in St. Birgitta's revelations In:  Sällskapet för östnordisk filologi (SÖF) femte internationella konferens [ViVo]
  • Beier, Phil  (2021) Latinsk påverkan på ett religiöst register? Framväxten av register i Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser In:  Svenska Språkets Historia 16 (SSH16) Lunds universitet [ViVo]
  • Schnelle, Gohar; Beier, Phil  (2021) Register dependent variation. Instructions in Notker’s Psalterium and the Revelations of St. Birgitta In:  Intra-Writer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics FAU Erlangen [ViVo]
  • Beier, Phil; Unverzagt, Silke  (2021) Register dependent variation. Instructions in Notker’s Psalterium and the Revelations of St. Birgitta In:  Kolloquium SFB1412 (2021) [ViVo]
  • 2020

  • Norde, Muriel; Beier, Phil  (2020) Registergenes och registerförändring i fornsvenskan – det Birgittinska materialet In:  Kollokviet för nordisk filologi (Institutionen för svenska och flerspråkighet Stockholms universitet) [ViVo]
  • Schnelle, Gohar  (2020) Identification of early Old High German registers by lexical features In:  Kolloquium SFB1412 (2020) [ViVo]

Events

06/14/2021
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm Zoom

preliminary

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