Schulz, Anke (2015)
Me, myself and I: A corpus-based, contrastive study of English and German computer-mediated communication from a Systemic Functional perspective.
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Ph.D. Thesis, Primary publication
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Item Type: | Ph.D. Thesis | ||||
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Type of entry: | Primary publication | ||||
Title: | Me, myself and I: A corpus-based, contrastive study of English and German computer-mediated communication from a Systemic Functional perspective | ||||
Language: | English | ||||
Referees: | Rapp, Prof. Dr. Andrea ; Teich, Prof. Dr. Elke | ||||
Date: | 2015 | ||||
Place of Publication: | Darmstadt | ||||
Date of oral examination: | 1 July 2015 | ||||
Abstract: | Use of the Internet has opened countless possibilities to access information and to connect with other people. In earlier days, contact was limited to people in the immediate surroundings. New media, like paper, radio or telephones, have opened new channels for communication, and so has the Internet. We no longer need to move our physical bodies in order to see and speak to people who live elsewhere. Physical borders are not relevant for Internet communication. What impact does this have on the language people use? Can we still find differences in the use of two closely related languages, English and German, even though Internet communication may have blurred boundaries? As the language model against which to compare English and German the author chose Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The main assumption in SFG is that any option in a language system serves a certain function for the language user. SFG speaks of three broad functions in human communication, called metafunctions: the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction. With the experiential metafunction, we describe the world around us and inside us; this is realized by the system of transitivity, i.e. process types and participant roles. With the interpersonal metafunction, we establish a relationship between us and our listeners or readers. This is realized by the two systems of modality and negation. Finally, the textual metafunction serves to produce cohesion and is represented by the theme-rheme structure. The aim of this contrastive study is to show the similarities and differences of language use in a bilingual corpus of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The Englische und deutsche Newsgroup Texte – Annotiertes Korpus (EDNA) holds 2 x 10,000 words of newsgroup texts in which people write about either eating disorders or relationship problems. The entire EDNA cor-pus is manually annotated; the annotation was carried out with the help of the UAM corpus tool. The manual annotation covers all four systems representing the three metafunctions. The analysis is twofold: the first part is a qualitative analysis of transitivity, modality, negation and theme-rheme structure, including a test for statistical significance. The second part is an analysis of the lexical items which are most frequently used to express the systems described in the first part. The results suggest that the German writers use significantly more modality and negation than the English writers. Relational processes (processes of being and having) are the most frequent ones in both sub-corpora. Following these, German writers prefer action processes (processes of doing) to mental processes (processes of thinking, feeling and perceiving), whereas English writers use more mental than action processes. The first and main participant roles, usually serving as the subject, are almost exclusively realized by pronouns, most commonly I / ich, and thus say little about the content of the text. In the newsgroup texts by German writers, there are more marked topical themes, i.e. constituents other than subjects stand in the first position of a declarative clause. In the English texts, these marked topical themes are mainly temporal circumstances, while in the German texts, writers refer to themselves with words like mir, mich, für mich. The present study is a comprehensive contrastive analysis of a new register, CMC, in English and in German. It does not limit itself to selected grammatical or lexical features but gives an extensive description and comparison of the language systems and language use in a corpus of CMC by using SFG as linguistic model. There are differences in the language systems, and differences in the frequencies of using the available options. These, however, are outnumbered by the similarities. |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-46148 | ||||
Classification DDC: | ?? ddc_dnb_400 ?? ?? ddc_dnb_420 ?? ?? ddc_dnb_430 ?? |
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Divisions: | ?? fb2 ?? ?? fb2_litwiss ?? |
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Date Deposited: | 16 Jul 2015 10:22 | ||||
Last Modified: | 09 Jul 2020 00:58 | ||||
URI: | https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/4614 | ||||
PPN: | 386811555 | ||||
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