Research Projects

Research Projects at the Field of German Studies – Applied Linguistics

On this page, you will find an overview of the research projects of the research field.

The aim of this project is to close a conspicuous gap in the research on scientific policy advice. The latter has been, and continues to be, a frequent object above all of various social sciences. It is therefore all the more surprising that up to now there are hardly any linguistic and epistemological text analyses of policy advice. The main hypothesis underlying the project is that science, through a double, epistemic and legitimizing function of its advisory services, is fundamentally confronted with the dilemma of having to maintain scientific credibility and develop political effectiveness at the same time, and that this dilemma is aggravated or defused in different ways depending on the underlying mutual expectations of roles and responsibilities. The project is therefore interested in how the current practice of scientific policy advice in Germany can be more precisely determined linguistically and epistemologically in terms of form, content and function, and how the struggle for epistemic quality and social legitimacy is reflected. The analyses are conducted in relation to two issues that serve as examples, namely, bioenergy and water pollution. The corpus consists of texts of selected German institutions of scientific policy advisory, published within the last twenty years.

The idea behind this is to offer a robust interdisciplinary contribution to the longstanding and ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding science’s responsibility in the face of societal challenges and the communication of its insights. The critical self-reflection enabled by this with regard to the language and practices of science is intended as an indirect contribution toward the public legitimation of science as a democratic institution.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr. Nina Janich (Technical University of Darmstadt) and Prof. Dr. Armin Grunwald (ITAS/KIT Karlsruhe)

The aim of this project is to close a conspicuous gap in the research on scientific policy advice. The latter has been, and continues to be, a frequent object above all of various social sciences. It is therefore all the more surprising that up to now there are hardly any linguistic and epistemological text analyses of policy advice. The main hypothesis underlying the project is that science, through a double, epistemic and legitimizing function of its advisory services, is fundamentally confronted with the dilemma of having to maintain scientific credibility and develop political effectiveness at the same time, and that this dilemma is aggravated or defused in different ways depending on the underlying mutual expectations of roles and responsibilities. The project is therefore interested in how the current practice of scientific policy advice in Germany can be more precisely determined linguistically and epistemologically in terms of form, content and function, and how the struggle for epistemic quality and social legitimacy is reflected. The analyses are conducted in relation to two issues that serve as examples, namely, bioenergy and water pollution. The corpus consists of texts of selected German institutions of scientific policy advisory, published within the last twenty years.

The idea behind this is to offer a robust interdisciplinary contribution to the longstanding and ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding science’s responsibility in the face of societal challenges and the communication of its insights. The critical self-reflection enabled by this with regard to the language and practices of science is intended as an indirect contribution toward the public legitimation of science as a democratic institution.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr. Nina Janich (Technical University of Darmstadt) and Prof. Dr. Armin Grunwald (ITAS/KIT Karlsruhe)

The aim of this project is to close a conspicuous gap in the research on scientific policy advice. The latter has been, and continues to be, a frequent object above all of various social sciences. It is therefore all the more surprising that up to now there are hardly any linguistic and epistemological text analyses of policy advice. The main hypothesis underlying the project is that science, through a double, epistemic and legitimizing function of its advisory services, is fundamentally confronted with the dilemma of having to maintain scientific credibility and develop political effectiveness at the same time, and that this dilemma is aggravated or defused in different ways depending on the underlying mutual expectations of roles and responsibilities. The project is therefore interested in how the current practice of scientific policy advice in Germany can be more precisely determined linguistically and epistemologically in terms of form, content and function, and how the struggle for epistemic quality and social legitimacy is reflected. The analyses are conducted in relation to two issues that serve as examples, namely, bioenergy and water pollution. The corpus consists of texts of selected German institutions of scientific policy advisory, published within the last twenty years.

The idea behind this is to offer a robust interdisciplinary contribution to the longstanding and ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding science’s responsibility in the face of societal challenges and the communication of its insights. The critical self-reflection enabled by this with regard to the language and practices of science is intended as an indirect contribution toward the public legitimation of science as a democratic institution.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr. Nina Janich (Technical University of Darmstadt) and Prof. Dr. Armin Grunwald (ITAS/KIT Karlsruhe)

The aim of this project is to close a conspicuous gap in the research on scientific policy advice. The latter has been, and continues to be, a frequent object above all of various social sciences. It is therefore all the more surprising that up to now there are hardly any linguistic and epistemological text analyses of policy advice. The main hypothesis underlying the project is that science, through a double, epistemic and legitimizing function of its advisory services, is fundamentally confronted with the dilemma of having to maintain scientific credibility and develop political effectiveness at the same time, and that this dilemma is aggravated or defused in different ways depending on the underlying mutual expectations of roles and responsibilities. The project is therefore interested in how the current practice of scientific policy advice in Germany can be more precisely determined linguistically and epistemologically in terms of form, content and function, and how the struggle for epistemic quality and social legitimacy is reflected. The analyses are conducted in relation to two issues that serve as examples, namely, bioenergy and water pollution. The corpus consists of texts of selected German institutions of scientific policy advisory, published within the last twenty years.

The idea behind this is to offer a robust interdisciplinary contribution to the longstanding and ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding science’s responsibility in the face of societal challenges and the communication of its insights. The critical self-reflection enabled by this with regard to the language and practices of science is intended as an indirect contribution toward the public legitimation of science as a democratic institution.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr. Nina Janich (Technical University of Darmstadt) and Prof. Dr. Armin Grunwald (ITAS/KIT Karlsruhe)

The aim of this project is to close a conspicuous gap in the research on scientific policy advice. The latter has been, and continues to be, a frequent object above all of various social sciences. It is therefore all the more surprising that up to now there are hardly any linguistic and epistemological text analyses of policy advice. The main hypothesis underlying the project is that science, through a double, epistemic and legitimizing function of its advisory services, is fundamentally confronted with the dilemma of having to maintain scientific credibility and develop political effectiveness at the same time, and that this dilemma is aggravated or defused in different ways depending on the underlying mutual expectations of roles and responsibilities. The project is therefore interested in how the current practice of scientific policy advice in Germany can be more precisely determined linguistically and epistemologically in terms of form, content and function, and how the struggle for epistemic quality and social legitimacy is reflected. The analyses are conducted in relation to two issues that serve as examples, namely, bioenergy and water pollution. The corpus consists of texts of selected German institutions of scientific policy advisory, published within the last twenty years.

The idea behind this is to offer a robust interdisciplinary contribution to the longstanding and ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding science’s responsibility in the face of societal challenges and the communication of its insights. The critical self-reflection enabled by this with regard to the language and practices of science is intended as an indirect contribution toward the public legitimation of science as a democratic institution.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr. Nina Janich (Technical University of Darmstadt) and Prof. Dr. Armin Grunwald (ITAS/KIT Karlsruhe)

What has been referred to as the “Corona crisis” in Germany and Europe since March 2020 consists, on closer inspection, of several closely interwoven crises (epidemiological-medical, social, political, economic). In addition to all these problematic dimensions, the pandemic also confronts societies with completely new communicative challenges: Actor groups in politics, (natural) science and mass media are forced to act in a highly collaborative way to cope with the acute challenges. They share the task of communicating core messages to the democratic-pluralistic citizenry with as much unanimity as possible, despite all the scientific uncertainties – and possibly changing or exceeding their usual communicative tasks vis-à-vis society in the process. This requires a degree of cooperation that has so far not corresponded to the everyday life of these groups of actors, and the citizenry is not used to such cooperation either.

Against this background, the aim of the project is to investigate processes of appropriation, instrumentalization and demarcation between politics and science in the Corona crisis against the background of their mediatization and with regard to their consequences for the legitimacy and credibility of science/scientific knowledge and politics/political action.

The project thus promises, on the one hand, practical short-term insights into current corona science communication and the precarious situation of those who leave the ivory tower consciously, but perhaps also too unprepared in view of the rough seas of political and media instrumentalizations. On the other hand, it offers long-term relevant results on science communication in the context of social crises, in which special epistemic, legitimizing and communicative challenges arise for all participants.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr. Kersten Sven Roth (Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg) and Prof. Dr. Nina Janich

Application for funding within the framework of the FONA “Research Initiative for theConservation of Biodiversity” on the topic of valuing and safeguarding biodiversity inpolitics, business and society.

The drastic increase in insect decline urgently requires sustainable measures to promote biological diversity. However, purely technical and administrative measures will not solve the problem; what is needed is a locally effective integration of knowledge stocks, resources for action and communication strategies. This is particularly evident in grassland: public, private and agricultural green spaces and grasslands in the city (gardens, parks, green strips, industrial green spaces) and countryside (meadows, pastures, farmland edges) are highly relevant as habitats for insects and are often underestimated, partly because of a focus on intensive agriculture. Like hardly any other habitat, green spaces and grasslands are used by large parts of the population and are subject to contrasting, but also dynamic, purposes and serve as laboratories for design (e.g. ornamental lawns or “weeds”, recreational value, animal production), which are often in conflict with the promotion of species diversity. The BioDivKultur project therefore aims to understand and improve practices for the promotion and appreciation of insect species diversity on the basis of a rural-to-urban gradient, where necessary to develop them anew, perform and subsequently evaluate them. This is done from an integrative perspective which, in addition to the biological inventory of biodiversity on the various green spaces, also examines the knowledge-based, discursive and political-administrative contexts of these practices – and thus biodiversity cultures in a broader sense – and conducts research into previous practices and the development and application of new practices together with stakeholders.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr. Nico Blüthgen und Dr. Nadja Simons (Working Group Ecological Networks) – Prof. Dr. Nina Janich – Prof. Dr. Markus Lederer (Institute of Political Science) – Prof. Dr. Alfred Nordmann (Institute of Philosophy)

Today, a significant part of knowledge transfer takes place via media, which attempt to prepare factual and specialized information in an understandable and appealing way for a broad audience in a multitude of multimodal formats that can hardly be surveyed. New, interactive forms are constantly developing, particularly as a result of the dynamics of digitization. In recent years, media products that popularize knowledge have increasingly become the focus of multimodality research. This asks how different semiotic resources interact to generate meaning. However, a systematic survey of the multimodal design of knowledge formats beyond exemplary analyses is a desideratum – the international and interdisciplinary network is dedicated to this desideratum. The spokesperson is Dr. Sylvia Jaki, University of Hildesheim.

To the DFG network page

Currently, several societal debates show that science still has to explain, justify, and possibly even defend its credibility and its research practice time and again. In the scope of their research, scientists will inevitably encounter situations of not-yet-knowing, not knowing for sure, or not being able to know – but since research is generally presented as a story of success in public, it is not exactly easy to communicate uncertainties or knowledge gaps in the same way as clear research results. Therefore, the aim of this project is to enter discussions with researchers who are experienced in communicating via the media or in the public sphere – in order to identify possible communication problems, misunderstandings, but also examples of success, as a basis for determining critical communication situations. Science journalists are asked about their experiences in order to derive possible communication standards for critical situations. The evaluation of the interviews is underpinned by a linguistic analysis of written statements by scientists in the media. The aim is to provide young researchers in the natural sciences with experience-based support with regard to science communication.

In cooperation with the National Institute for Science Communication (Nationales Institut für Wissenschaftskommunikation, NaWiK, in Karlsruhe) and the Science Media Center Germany (SMC, Cologne)

Project staff

Maike Sänger, M.A.

At the latest since 2013, after the European Commission suspended the use of certain insecticides, the so-called neonicotinoids, on the basis of a scientific report (which it confirmed once again in 2018), there has been an dispute between the agricultural industry, environmental organizations, beekeepers' associations, political parties, and scientists about how harmful these substances really are. Usually, the individual actors tend to paint a picture that is influenced by their interests, strategies, and values.

In order to find out how different actors deal with scientific knowledge and related uncertainties or even non-knowledge in this context, we examine their way of speaking and the way they write about scientific (non-)knowledge – regarding the question what consequences this has what effects their statements could have. Object of research are the statements of actors that are available online – information or programs such as press releases, infosheets, homepages, and blog articles are investigated with regard to linguistic patterns, intertextual networks, as well as indicators of conflicting knowledge and their function within the discourse.

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Nico Blüthgen, Ökologische Netzwerke, FB Biologie, TU Darmstadt

Project staff

Niklas Simon, M.A.

In 2012, a project was initiated at the Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz in cooperation with the Institute for Linguistics and Literature (Prof. Dr. Janich, Prof. Dr. Rapp) – initiated by Damaris Nübling, University of Mainz – aiming to build up a digital surname dictionary. In this project, a substantial part of the range of surnames in Germany (including names of foreign origin) is listed in a lexicographical manner, interpreted in terms of language history, and mapped. The digital dictionary, which is freely accessible to the public, will be constantly updated and enriched with narrative information.

To the webpage

The topic of knowledge transfer for children has been a current issue for many years, which is reflected not only by ever new nonfiction book series for different age groups, children's magazines and TV formats, but also by the veritable boom of children's universities and the increasing interest of science journalists. Surprisingly, however, researchers in the field of linguistics have so far shown little interest in the linguistic strategies of extracurricular knowledge transfer and science education aimed at children. The project is supposed to close this obvious research gap. Thus, children's university lectures, scientific TV-formats, and non-fiction picture books and non-fiction textbooks for children were examined in terms of linguistic, content-related, and multimodal placement strategies, and with regard to the specific content and type of media – distinguishing, for example, between formats that focus on humanistic topics vs. ones that focus the natural sciences.

Project staff

Maike Sänger (born Kern), M.A.

Ewa Kanai, M.A.

Publications

  • Janich, Nina/Korbach, Bernadette (angenommen): Das Kindersachbuch zwischen Multi-, Trans- und Intermedialität. In: Lenk, Hartmut et al. (Hrsg.): Medien, Kultur, Multimodalität, Intermedialität. [Tagungsband „Kontrastive Medienlinguistik“, Helsinki 2017]. Bern (Sprache – Kommunikation – Medien).
  • Janich, Nina (angenommen): Science revisited. The representation of scientific knowledge and ignorance in the German Kinder-Uni books In: Kramer, Olaf/Gottschling, Markus (eds.): Recontextualization of Knowledge. Boston/Berlin.
  • Janich, Nina (2018): Forscher erklären die Rätsel der Welt. Die Darstellung von Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften in den Büchern „Die Kinder-Uni“. In: Luginbühl, Martin/Schröter, Juliane (Hrsg.): Geisteswissenschaften in der Öffentlichkeit. Linguistisch betrachtet. Bern u.a. (Sprache – Kommunikation – Medien 11). 85-105.
  • Janich, Nina (2016): Zwischen semiotischer Überforderung und lustvollem Verweilen. Multimodalität im Bildersachbuch für Kinder. In: Jaki, Sylvia/Sabban, Annette (Hrsg.): Wissensformate in den Medien. Analysen aus Medienlinguistik und Medienwissenschaft. Berlin (Kulturen – Kommunikation – Kontakte 25), 51–75.
  • Kern, Maike (2016): Kinderwissenssendungen im Fernsehen: Darstellungsformen und Adressierungsstrategien. In: Jaki, Sylvia/Sabban, Annette (Hrsg.): Wissensformate in den Medien. Analysen aus Medienlinguistik und Medienwissenschaft. Berlin (Kulturen – Kommunikation – Kontakte 25), 227–254.
  • Sänger, Maike (geb. Kern) (2017): Zur Funktion des Moderators in wissensvermittelnden Magazinsendungen für Kinder. In: Skog-Södersved, Mariann/Breckle, Margit/Enell-Nilsson, Mona (Hrsg.): Wissenstransfer und Popularisierung. Ausgewählte Beiträge der Tagung „Germanistische Forschungen zum Text (GeFoText)“ in Vaasa. Frankfurt a M. (Finnische Beträge zur Germanistik 35), 137–150.

The project aimed to examine, from the viewpoint of linguistics, how the Priority Program evolved as a research initiative focusing on the aspect of responsibility with regard to Climate Engineering (CE) as a research topic. It sees itself as accompanying research to the Priority Program, aimed at examining the concepts of responsibility of the participating scientists, and reflecting the aspect of responsibility in the scope of CE research, especially with regard to uncertainties in climate research. On the part of political science, the analyzes are embedded in the context of the national and international CE discourse.

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Daniel Barben, University of Klagenfurt –

Project staff

Christiane Stumpf, M.A.

Publications

To the research project

The project is based on the hypothesis that urban spaces, along with other factors, are essentially also shaped by linguistic action – culturally, socially, and in terms of urban personal identities – and that this also applies to the sustainability discourse on the urban level, which has so far been largely neglected by linguistic research. This means that should be possible to make out (discursively contested and/or sought-after – and, therefore, relevant with regard to “image”) certain “places” of sustainability in cities that – identified by local actors and others, and in the context of city marketing – are presented as places to identify with. Based on the example of a city comparison between Mainz and Wiesbaden (in the sense of a “most similar cases design”), the project pursues the following research question: Which textual-communicative arrangements and which discursive practices of urban actors in these two cities determine which spaces in the scope of the sustainability discourse; what role do these spaces play in attempts to shape the identity and the image of the respective city; and to what extent can this spatial constitution be seen as in-line with city-specific discourse patterns? One focus of the analyzes was on the respective spatial metaphors.

Project staff

Viona Niemczyk, M.A.

Publications

  • Engels, Jens Ivo Engels/Janich, Nina/Monstadt, Jochen/Schott, Dieter (Hrsg.) (2017): Nachhaltige Stadtentwicklung. Infrastrukturen, Akteure, Diskurse. Frankfurt am Main/New York (Interdisziplinäre Stadtforschung 22).
  • Niemczyk, Viona (2017): Metaphern – Sprachliche Bauten städtischer Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation? In: Engels et al. (Hrsg.): 223-239.
  • Niemczyk, Viona (2017): “Auf dem Weg zur 2000-Watt-Gesellschaft”. Wegmetaphorik und Energiekommunikation in der Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung der Stadt Zürich. In: Rosenberger, Nicole/Kleinberger, Ulla (Hrsg.): Energiediskurs: Perspektiven auf Sprache und Kommunikation im Kontext der Energiewende. Bern (Sprache in Kommunikation und Medien 10), 225-240.
  • Niemczyk, Viona (2014): Raumkonstitution und -kognition in und über städtische/r Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation. In: Studentische Projektgruppe Hannover (Hrsg.): Zeit – Raum – Identität. Beiträge der interdisziplinären studentischen Tagung in Hannover vom 25.–27. April 2014. Hannover, 149-176.

The linguistic-communicative treatment of uncertainty in (popular) scientific texts has so far received little attention in the interdisciplinary field of “Ignorance Studies”. Therefore, the research question of the text-linguistic project focuses on non-knowledge in lay-addressed texts of different authors and on different levels of specialization, how it is presented and assessed, from a stylistic-rhetorical point of view – asking how reflecting such strategies of textualization could lead to a more considerate treatment of uncertainty/non-knowledge in science communication. As an example, the project focuses on the conflict discourse regarding a project that addresses the possibility of supplying iron to ocean waters (LOHAFEX 2009).

Project staff

Anne Simmerling, M.A.

Publications

  • Simmerling, Anne/Janich, Nina (2015): Rhetorical functions of a ‚language of uncertainty‘ in the mass media. In: Public Understanding of Science (2016) 25.8. Special Issue „Scientific Uncertainty in the Media“, hrsg. von Hans Peter Peters und Sharon Dunwoody. [first published online: Public Understanding of Science 2015, 1-15. DOI: 10.1177/0963662515606681.]
  • Janich, Nina/Simmerling, Anne (2015): Linguistics and Ignorance. In: Groß, Matthias/McGoey, Lindsay (Eds.): Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies. London/New York, 125-137.
  • Janich, Nina/Simmerling, Anne (2013): „Nüchterne Forscher träumen…“ – Nichtwissen im Klimadiskurs unter deskriptiver und kritischer diskursanalytischer Betrachtung. In: Meinhof, Ulrike/Reisigl, Martin/Warnke, Ingo H. (Hrsg.): Diskurslinguistik im Spannungsfeld von Deskription und Kritik. Berlin (Diskursmuster – Discourse Patterns 1), 65-100.

To the webpage

As is known, interdisciplinary projects face special challenges: the disciplines involved are based on distinct modes of thinking, have their own language and different scientific working methods. The diversity helps to shape the identity of the respective discipline, but interdisciplinary communication often turns out to be quite complicated. In a project work with an interdisciplinary orientation, it is therefore necessary to find a way to deal with the resulting communication difficulties, to find a “common language” (at least to a certain extent) and a productive way to access the knowledge resources of the respective partners, despite the different responsibilities of the respective scientific disciplines. The project therefore addressed the question of how interdisciplinarity actually “works” in actual scientific project communication. Leading questions were how the project participants address the aspect of interdisciplinarity as an aspiration, how this is implemented in the context of the project proposal, how this affects the linguistic constitution and negotiation of common knowledge and (possibly) the establishment of a common language, and how it is possible to describe cooperative text production processes in the context of interdisciplinary. The point of reference was an interdisciplinary project, involving physicists and political scientists, on the topic of proliferation resistance of fusion reactors. The investigated material was diverse and consisted, among other material, of various project application versions, mail correspondence, interviews with the project participants, and recordings of project meetings.

Project staff

Ekaterina Zakharova, M.A.

Publications

  • Janich, Nina/Zakharova, Ekaterina (2014): Fiktion „gemeinsame Sprache“? Interdisziplinäre Aushandlungsprozesse auf der Inhalts-, der Verfahrens- und der Beziehungsebene. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 61(1): 3–25.
  • Janich, Nina (2012a): Fachsprache, Fachidentität und Verständigungskompetenz – zu einem spannungsreichen Verhältnis. In: Berufsbildung in Wissenschaft und Praxis (BWP) 41/2: „Sprache und Beruf“, 10-13.
  • Janich, Nina (2012b): „Ich als Physiker“. Zum Zusammenhang von Fachsprache und Fachidentität. In: Voss, Julia/Stolleis, Michael (Hrsg.): Fachsprachen und Normalsprache. Valerio 12, 93-104.
  • Zakharova, Ekaterina (2012): Zwischen Wissensfusion und Interessenspaltung. In: Decker, Michael/Grunwald, Armin/Knapp, Martin (Hrsg.): Der Systemblick auf Innovation. Technikfolgenabschätzung in der Technikgestaltung. Berlin, 459-462.
  • Janich, Nina/Zakharova, Ekaterina (2011): Wissensasymmetrien, Interaktionsrollen und die Frage der „gemeinsamen“ Sprache in der interdisziplinären Projektkommunikation. In: Fachsprache. International Journal of Specialized Communication 3-4, 187-204.