DFG Research Grant: DFG Sachbeihilfe

Principal Investigator: Ruben van de Vijver (Department of Linguistics)

Duration: 04/2025 – 03/2028

Cooperating partners: Harald Baayen (Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen), Kilu von Prince (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf), Mirjam Ernestus (Radboud Universität Nijmegen, Niederlande), Holger Mitterer und Jessica Nieder (L-Università ta' Malta Malta), Epimaque Niyibizi und Florien Nsangawimana(University of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda)

In many languages there is systematic variation between the morphophonological patterns of nouns and verbs.  Morphophonological theories have constructed grammatical devises to capture the differences in form, but they do not address two central questions: why do languages have such asymmetries, and what are the mechanisms by which native speakers attain knowledge about them? 

The central hypothesis of this project is that such difference are useful for the language user in two respects. First, by narrowing down potential meanings for a word form, the difference helps comprehension. Second by narrowing down potential word forms for a given meaning, the difference helps production. 

The aim of the project is to answer the following research questions:

RQ1: Are the systematic differences in the morpho-phonology of nouns and verbs accompanied by systematic differences in their meaning?

RQ2: Can we model comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in a usage-based theory of the lexicon, i.e. the Discriminative Lexicon, by predicting word forms from meaning and meaning from word forms?

RQ3: Can the Discriminative Lexicon  predict how speakers process nouns versus verbs,  by using measures derived from modeling how they predict word forms from meaning and meaning from word forms?

The research questions will be tackled using a range of different methodologies. The project will make use of classification models of the phonology of nouns and verbs and their embeddings, lexical decision experiments of words and pseudowords, and implement computational models of comprehension and production of nouns and verbs within the framework of the Discriminative Lexicon.

 

Funding Source: LVR Rhineland

Principal Investigator: Jasmin Grande („Moderne im Rheinland“/Zentrum für Rheinlandforschung)

Duration: 04/2022 - 05/2024

The project examines artist colonies and the groups and movements founded in the Rhineland from 1900 to the present: the naming and genesis, the respective programme, structure and organisation, members and guests, activities and networks, the diversity of artistic practices. To this end, research and analysis are embedded in relevant scientific fields: How and to what extent do artists' colonies contribute to "modernity"? What do the moments of change say about the changed society, resp. to what extent do they become precursors, i.e. "avant-garde", or conservative preservers? What is their significance for the discovery of landscape and region? The project ties in with the cultural-theoretical methods of transculturality. The results will be included in a "map" and networked with existing cultural places as well as digital offerings.

Funding Source: DFG Research Grant

Principal Investigators: Oliver Victor, Christoph Kann (Department of Philosophy)

Duration: 04/2023 – 09/2025

The project intends to revise the history of Albert Camus’s development as a philosopher. Against the background of the generally dominant image of Camus as a modern literary classic as well as his self-concept as a creator of art, its main goal is to make Camus’s philosophical works accessible with a focus on still largely unknown juvenilia. Insofar as Camus’s early philosophical work has already been widely received, this has been done by concentrating on his thesis "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism" (1936) as well as on the central work "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942). In the German-speaking world little or no attention, however, has been paid to the aforementioned juvenilia, which are indispensable for a more complete, coherent picture of Camus’s thought, especially his cultural philosophy with its leitmotifs of the European and the Mediterranean, his anthropology and his aesthetics. In the context of the project, Camus’s "Écrits de jeunesse", written between 1931/32 and 1934, will be edited, translated into German, commented, and made accessible to scholars with regard to their philosophical significance. The aim of the project is to provide further research with an important textual basis, to provide a foundation for a philological and philosophical exploitation of the writings, and to contribute to a more adequate image of Camus through historical and systematic studies of them.

Further information (German only)

Funding Source: DFG Research Grant

Principal Investigator: Jacopo Romoli (Department of Linguistics) 

Duration: 09/2023 – 08/2026

Linguistic utterances are processed incrementally as they unfold in time, resulting in a temporal asymmetry between the before and after of a given expression. The present project addresses the fundamental question of whether observed asymmetries are merely a by-product of linguistic utterances unfolding in time, or whether they play a direct role in linguistic knowledge and representations. Addressing this question is critical because it has important potential consequences on the very way we conceptualize the meaning of sentences and how they interact with contextual information. This bears on the general issue of how linguistic knowledge and other cognitive faculties interact; a core issue in the study of language and the human mind. Asymmetries in the interpretation of presuppositions - a particular aspect of linguistic meaning, which characteristically interacts with both the linguistic and extra-linguistic context - provide an ideal case study for investigating this issue. To illustrate, the presupposition trigger 'stop' in the sentence in (1) introduces the presupposition that Mary used to come to class, i.e., (1) is typically uttered in contexts where this is already taken for granted: (1) Mary stopped coming to class. Importantly, presuppositions in complex sentences are traditionally thought to be asymmetrically computed, such that the presupposition of a trigger (e.g. 'stop') requires support in the preceding discourse context. This is illustrated by the contrast in (2). Introducing the material supporting the presupposition before the trigger, as in (2a), makes for a felicitous utterance, while the reverse configuration (2b) does not (indicated by '#'). (2) a. Mary used to come to class and she stopped (coming to class). b. #Mary stopped coming to class and she used to (come to class). However, such contrasts may (at least in part) be due to independent factors, e.g. redundancy constraints, and could reflect violable processing constraints rather than being grammatically hard-wired. The effect also may vary across connectives, e.g., in disjunctions or conditionals. Finally, basic data points such as (2) leave open whether the effect is due to linear order or the underlying hierarchical structure assumed to be crucial for the computation of meaning. Thus, the issue of asymmetry in presupposition projection is far from resolved, and so multi-faceted that careful experimental investigation is called for. The present project will explore these issues experimentally and theoretically, combining fine-grained theoretical predictions about presuppositions, rooted in formal semantics and philosophy of language, with models of language processing. The outputs of this project will contribute to a number of ongoing debates in several disciplines in the cognitive sciences, e.g., linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and neurolinguistics, thereby informing our understanding of the human mind more generally.

Further information

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Laura Kallmeyer and Rainer Osswald (Department of Linguistics) 

Duration: 10/2024 – 09/2027

Theories of semantic composition have to cope with the flexible semantic behavior of words that often shows up when they co-occur in syntagmatic relationships. The project addresses two such phenomena. The first one is concerned with the varying meaning contributions of inherently polysemous words depending on the predications in which they occur. Inherent systematic polysemy means that a word or phrase has two or more clearly distinguishable but related interpretations and that there are other words or phrases which show the same pattern of semantic variation. Well-known examples are nouns like "book" and "letter", which can denote physical or informational objects, and "lunch" and "dinner", which can refer to food or events. It is characteristic of these nouns that they can occur in copredication constructions, as in "memorize and burn the letter", where two or more predicates that aim at different meaning facets are jointly applied to the same argument. The second phenomenon is the systematic coercion of semantic enrichment that occurs if a mismatch between the semantic type of an argument expression and the requirements of the predicate is not resolved by facet selection, but by an extended mode of composition in which appropriate pieces of information are added to eliminate the mismatch. This is the case, for instance, when a phase verb such as "finish" or a psych verb such as "enjoy" takes a non-eventive argument such as "letter" or "coffee". The goal of the project is to develop a frame-semantic account of these phenomena which combines rich semantic representations in the lexicon with a formal model of flexible compositionality at the interface between syntax and semantics. The underlying hypothesis is (i) that a frame-based semantic decomposition is particularly well suited for modeling the various meaning facets of polysemous words and the relations between them, and (ii) that an architecture of the syntax-semantics interface that links semantic frames to the elementary syntactic trees of Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars gives us the right amount of flexibility for modeling copredication and coercion constructions. Moreover, the formal analyses developed in the project will be based on a broad empirical basis which includes copredication and coercion data semi-automatically extracted from corpora.

Further information

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Gottfried Vosgerau (Co-PI) & David Löwenstein (Co-PI) (both Department of Philosophy)

Duration: 12/2024 - 11/2027

Argumentation theory and applied argument analysis aims at making justifications and justification structures comprehensible. To this end, rational reconstructions of individual arguments and networks of several interrelated arguments are presented and philosophically reflected upon. Implicit elements are made visible, such as implicit premises, implicit conclusions or even entire implicit arguments, which result from the possibly not explicitly mentioned role of a contribution in a more complex discussion situation. The problem, however, is that human belief formation is often subject to "irrational" influences that lead to false beliefs. So far, cognitive biases have played virtually no role in the reconstruction of arguments. One reason for this may be that cognitive distortions are processes that generally occur unconsciously and cannot be consciously controlled. Since they are at least superficially subject to little or no cognitive control, it seems that they cannot be cited as premises or reasons in arguments. Another reason that cognitive biases have not been considered in argument reconstruction so far is that cognitive biases are considered "irrational" by definition. However, the principle of benevolence is central to argument reconstruction. According to this principle, arguments should always be reconstructed as strong, rational and plausible as possible, including implicit and benevolently reformulated elements. Adequate inclusion of the fact that people form beliefs in an "irrational" way is therefore methodologically very demanding, perhaps even impossible, in argument reconstruction. The aim of this project is to integrate cognitive biases and other explanatory strategies, such as information deficits or virtue deficits, into the reconstruction of arguments without violating the principle of benevolence. The existing method of rational argument reconstruction will be supplemented and further developed into the new method of cognitive-rational reconstruction of arguments. This method is intended to make justifications visible even where they were previously not visible. In this way, the effects of cognitive distortions and biases known from psychological research should, as far as possible, become visible as part of the substantive debate instead of remaining invisible as supposedly irrational foreign bodies or evolutionary automatisms. This forms the basis for a fair discussion of justifications that does not remain in the ideal-rational space, but instead connects to the empirical realities of human thought.

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Dirk Rohmann (Department of Historical Sciences)

Duration: 04/2024 - 03/2027

The transmission of texts by Greek historians from the Hellenistic period is in shatters. The academic state of the art arising from this source material is therefore naturally limited. An investigation into the conditions determining the preservation of these texts can lay new methodological groundwork suited to expand the current state of the art. Accordingly, it is high time to start exploring the very conditions determining the preservation of these texts during the later Roman Empire (from the first to the sixth century). This holds true especially for Christian authors – as these authors share a lot of common groundwork – and for the question of how they reviewed and passed on Hellenistic histories. On one hand, the Fragments of Greek Historians initiated by Felix Jacoby authoritatively assemble these sources and provide a quantitative breakdown of the material in question. On the other hand, neither the edition itself nor its accompanying comments are meant to provide qualitative results on the textual contexts of, and the specific interests in, the later reception of Hellenistic history (c. 336 – 31 BC). Because this material of historical fragments and of the covering texts has most recently been included in digital databases, it is therefore more accessible to academic research than it was before.

The act of historical remembrance tends to be affected by the emergence of new groups that share common religious or ethnic beliefs. Christians were aloof from the cultural framework of their pagan surrounding since they regarded as holy, canonical, and sacrosanct texts which they passed on to future generations. Moreover, the emergence of Christianity is traditionally linked to the Hellenistic world in which Greek culture and ideas spread out to the entire Mediterranean area and beyond. Building on these two perspectives, the proposed research shall take advantage of innovative approaches to shed new light on the confluence of Christian and Hellenistic cultures. The central objective of the project is to produce a monograph which investigates the different factors, such as content, religion, genre and location, involved in determining how Christian authors selected what kind of knowledge and which traditions to pass on from the early Imperial Period to Late Antiquity. This monograph will include introductions to, and comments on, the fragments which are to be arranged in the order of the cover texts. It will also analyse the context, language and knowledge situations of these fragments and, in so doing, create new approaches to the world of Hellenism

Funding Source: Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste

Principal Investigator: Stefanie Michels, Department of Historical Studies

Duration: 2021 - 2025

Cooperating partners: University Dschang (Kamerun); Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum (Mannheim); Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (Köln)

The Thorbecke Collection, which was previously scattered among various locations (museums, archives, libraries), will be brought together by the project. The project ensures systematic documentation according to scientific quality criteria. A translation of central texts makes them accessible to non-German-speaking researchers (e.g. in Cameroon). The provenance of the cultural goods, human remains, zoological, botanical and geological objects is to be clarified as far as possible on the basis of the written tradition (University of Düsseldorf). In addition, intangible cultural assets (images and sound recordings) will also be integrated into the project and questions of provenance will be addressed in this regard (for example, the question of voluntariness/unvoluntariness of participation in it). The results will be made available in various knowledge institutions in Cameroon (archives, universities, museums, libraries).

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Stefan Hartmann (Department of German Studies)

Duration: 2021 - 2024

This project addresses the question of how speakers of present-day German refer to future events and how the conventions for future reference have changed over the past centuries. To this end, a corpus-based approach is used, i.e. we take authentic data into account, using a number of different resources, some of which have become available only recently. The project can be divided into two broad areas: a) From a historical perspective, we investigate how the future construction werden ‘become’ + infinitive (e.g. “ich werde morgen nach Hamburg fahren” ‘I will go to Hamburg tomorrow’) developed and which other constructions can be considered predecessors or competitors of this pattern. For example, it is often assumed that modal verb constructions, especially sollen ‘shall’ + Infinitive, were used for future reference in earlier stages of German as well and that they could play a role in the grammaticalization of werden + infinitive as they might have served as analogical templates. In addition, werden + present participle is often discussed as a potential predecessor (“es wird regnend” lit. ‘it becomes raining’). This project approaches the highly controversial question of how these different constructions relate to each other with a data-driven approach. We extract all instances of all relevant constructions from the newly available reference corpora of historical stages of German and annotate them for semantic and syntactic criteria. By doing so, we can assess to what degree each construction is actually used for future reference, which of the numerous factors that have been proposed in the literature actually play a role in language users' choice of constructions, and how these factors interact with each other. b) From a synchronic perspective, we investigate which factors drive the choice between the two most important possibilities to express future reference in present-day German, namely the construction werden + infinitive on the one hand and the so-called futurate present (e.g. "ich gehe morgen ins Kino", lit. ‘I go to the cinema tomorrow’) on the other. We assume that register and text type (e.g. conceptually more oral vs. written communication) as well as semantic as well as syntactic factors play a role. Semantic factors include temporal distance, syntactic ones the occurrence of other constructions with werden ‘become’ in the immediate context or the occurrence in negated or interrogative contexts. Taken together, these studies about historical and present-day conventions of future reference in German can help to clarify a number of open questions that have been discussed extensively from a theoretical perspective in the previous literature but that can now be approached on the basis of a substantial amount of empirical data for the first time.

Further information

Funding Source: Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs

Principal Investigator: Frank Marcinkowski, Co-management: Fabian Anicker, KMW I, (Department of Social Sciences)

Duration: 09/2024 - 08/2026

The project investigates, through population-representative surveys, the impact that AI has on people's lives in work and leisure. The population-representative longitudinal study surveys attitudes towards AI and, in particular, the work-related use of AI applications. This allows for tracking cognitive, emotional, social, and political reactions of those affected to changes in the world of work and daily life over time. Two additional in-depth studies will explore the causes of the observed developments. One study on the anchoring of AI attitudes in social milieus will empirically show AI attitudes are situated in social structure, attitudes, and professions and thereby uncover AI Milieus. A second study is aimed at identifying factors that determine the acceptance of AI systems in the workplace through a conjoint experiment.

Further information

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Stefan Hartmann (Department of German Languages and Literatures)

Duration: 02/2024 - 01/2027

Cooperating partners: Kristian Berg (University of Bonn)

Recent research has shown that the structure of words (i.e. their morphology) has an impact on their representation in written language in various respects. Spontaneous handwritten texts thus offer a highly promising way of studying the relationship between morphology and writing in more detail: They are often written without detailed conscious planning, and many of the corrections that writers make are transparent. This means that the factors that influence written language should manifest themselves in handwritten texts more clearly than in machine-written language.  In addition, there are good reasons to assume that the specific form of words and letters can give clues to the mental representation and processing of words. These two aspects are key to our project, which sets out to investigate how morphology influences written language. In doing so, we take two complementary perspectives: On the one hand, we will investigate how the morphological structure of words influences the distribution of spelling errors and what this can tell us about the mental representation of words (graphemic perspective). On the other hand, we would like to investigate if the morphological structure of words has an impact on their concrete realization, e.g. in terms of letter forms and boundaries between letters (graphetic perspective). For both parts of the project, we make use of a transcribed and linguistically annotated corpus of A-level exams.

Funding Source: Federal Ministry of Education and Research

Principal Investigator: Stefan Marschall(Department of Social Sciences, Political Science), Project Coordinator: Daniel Hagemann (Department of Social Sciences, Political Science)

Duration: 04/2024 – 11/2024

During “Science Year 2024 - Freedom”, the project “My Freedom – Your Freedom?!” highlights and discusses different understandings of freedom. The aim of the project is to encourage a discursive exchange of ideas and discuss freedom with people of all ages and different backgrounds: Does freedom have limits? Must, can and may freedoms be balanced against each other? How can freedom be protected? How does the society perceive freedom in 2024?

Further information (German only)

Funding Source: DFG 

Principal Investigator: Laura Kallmeyer (Department of Linguistics)

Duration: 10/2024 - 09/2027

Cooperating partners: Hassan Sajjad (Dalhousie University, Canada)

The starting point of this project is the observation that (i) across syntactic theories, across treebank formats and across languages, a large variety of syntactic structures have been proposed; and (ii) it has been shown that self-supervised contextual language models (LMs) capture syntactic information to a certain extent though it is not clear how these models generalize. In this project, we want to remain neutral with respect to the underlying theory and we want to induce syntactic constituency structure in an unsupervised way from LMs. We will experiment with different types of neural network architectures that make different assumptions concerning the overall hierarchical structures that we extract. Our central research questions are:

• Q1 How can we automatically learn syntactic structure from processing raw text?
• Q2 How do the emerging structures relate to established constituency  from linguistic theory?
• Q3 How useful are the emerging structures for NLP applications?

To address Q1, we will induce syntactic structure in an unsupervised way from raw text. We will focus on groupings of tokens into phrases and on the categories of these phrases, i.e., our principal focus is on constituency structure. However, we will also look into identifying the syntactic heads of constituents, which will allow to induce also a dependency structure. We will perform syntax induction on a range of different languages.

Concerning Q2, we will compare our results to a range of existing syntactic theories and annotation schemes. This way, we hope, on the one hand, to find empirical evidence for certain assumptions made in syntactic theory and on the other hand, to identify a constituency format that emerges from text data and that might therefore be a good candidate to be used in syntactic parsing and annotation.

Q3 aims at assessing the latter. Ideally, a syntactic annotation format should be such that it contains enough syntactic detail to provide valuable information for downstream tasks while being sufficiently general and learnable to allow for high quality annotation and parsing. In order to evaluate the usefulness of the emerging syntactic structures in NLP contexts, we will integrate the results from different induction approaches into supervised parsing architectures and into several downstream tasks.

Funding Source: BMBF

Principal Investigator: Dr. Dennis Frieß, Düsseldorf Institut for Internet and Democracy (DIID), Jun.-Prof. Tobias Escher, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Marc Ziegele (Department of Social Sciences)

Duration: 11/2023 - 10/2026

Online discussions have become a part of our everyday lives. However, the quality of these discourse is often poor. This can have many negative consequences. Among other things, it discourages people from getting involved themselves. IndI aims to develop AI-based interventions in an open research process to help make online discourse more inclusive than before.

To this end, ideas will first be collected together with citizens, civil society and online discourse organizers about what constitutes inclusive online discourse and how online discourse can be improved. Based on this, AI interventions are developed and tested with users. User feedback from the tests will in turn be fed into the research process in order to ultimately obtain a functional AI application. This will be tested in an experiment at the end of the project. The scientific analysis should show whether the AI application actually leads to more integrative online discourses and what users take away from these discourses.

More Information (German only)

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Jens Fleischhauer (Department of Linguistics)

Duration: 04/2025 - 03/2028

Cooperating partners: Stefan Hartmann (Heinrich Heine University), Maarten Boogards (Leiden University), Nadine Proske (Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache, Mannheim)

Typically, the predicate of a sentence is expressed by a finite verb (e.g., beobachte ‘observe’). German, as well as other languages, can also express sentence predicates through more complex expressions. One type of such complex expressions (e.g., unter Beobachtung stehen ‘to be under observation’) is referred to as ‘light verb constructions’ Despite decades of intensive research on light verb constructions, many central questions remain unanswered. In the first phase of the project, we examined systematic patterns in the formation of these expressions using corpus linguistic methods. The second phase of the project will focus more on the verbs occurring in these expressions and investigate whether and how they differ from other verbs (e.g., main verbs, auxiliary verbs).

Further Information

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Gerhard Schurz, Gottfried Vosgerau (Department of Philosophy)

Duration: 2021 - 2024

How are concepts and their meanings cognitively represented? What happens in our mind when we grasp objects by their characteristic features and communicate about them with other people? A significant linguistic and philosophical approach to answering these questions is the Frame Theory of Concepts, which was further developed at HHU Düsseldorf within the Collaborative Research Center SFB 991. The DFG-funded follow-up project of the SFB, "Parametrized Frames and Conceptual Spaces," explores the extension  of the Frame approach, based on the theory of cognitive spaces. In cognitive spaces, conceptual meanings are described in a spatial-geometric manner, resulting in a novel and particularly powerful theoretical approach in combination with Frame Theory. This research is undertaken by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schurz, Prof. Dr. Gottfried Vosgerau, Dr. Paul Thorn, Dr. Matias Osta-Velez, M.A. Sebastian Scholz, and Dr. Maria Sekatskaya from the Department of Philosophy.

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Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Paul Lukas Hähnel (Department of Historical Sciences

Duration: 04/2025 - 03/2028

The project examines the intertwining of the German Bundestag with European parliamentary assemblies through dual mandates during the constituent phase of the Federal Republic of Germany (1950-1979/1980). By the mid-1950s, three organizations had emerged, the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the Western European Union, which aimed to promote cooperation among Western European states. These organizations established a European parliamentary level through their parliamentary assemblies, as they were linked to each other by formal and informal relations and were composed of members of national parliaments. The parliamentarians thus received a dual mandate and could act at both the national and international levels. On the one hand, the project traces the process of interweaving the Bundestag with the emerging European parliamentary level. On the other hand, it elaborates the significance of dual mandate holders for the development of parliamentary practice in the Federal Republic of Germany and for the inner-party discourse on Europe. The focus is on individual parliamentarians who exercised comparable functions at both parliamentary levels.

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Funding Source: DFG Research Grant

Principal Investigators: Thomas Winzen (Department of Social Sciences)

Duration: 04/2025 – 03/2028

The project intends to revise the history of Albert Camus’s development as a philosopher. Against the background of the generally dominant image of Camus as a modern literary classic as well as his self-concept as a creator of art, its main goal is to make Camus’s philosophical works accessible with a focus on still largely unknown juvenilia. Insofar as Camus’s early philosophical work has already been widely received, this has been done by concentrating on his thesis "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism" (1936) as well as on the central work "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942). In the German-speaking world little or no attention, however, has been paid to the aforementioned juvenilia, which are indispensable for a more complete, coherent picture of Camus’s thought, especially his cultural philosophy with its leitmotifs of the European and the Mediterranean, his anthropology and his aesthetics. In the context of the project, Camus’s "Écrits de jeunesse", written between 1931/32 and 1934, will be edited, translated into German, commented, and made accessible to scholars with regard to their philosophical significance. The aim of the project is to provide further research with an important textual basis, to provide a foundation for a philological and philosophical exploitation of the writings, and to contribute to a more adequate image of Camus through historical and systematic studies of them.

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: David Hommen, Christoph Kann (Department of Philosophy)

Duration: 2020 - 01/2025

How do we conceive of the world? How does our mind represent objects, events, properties, relations, species and genera? Are the structures of our cognitive reference to the world analogous to those of our language? And what does the way we think and talk about things in the world tell us about the things themselves? The theory of frames represents a current approach to answering these questions. It assumes that cognitive and linguistic representations of everything from simple objects to complex states of affairs occur in recursive attribute-value structures – called frames – that reflect the ontological structures of reality. But is this model of the relationship between thought, language, and reality actually new – or merely a modern formulation of ideas steeped in tradition? If the latter, does frame theory inherit the well-known methodological and epistemological problems of its predecessor theories, or does it perhaps even point the way to their solution? These questions are pursued by Prof. Dr. Christoph Kann, PD Dr. David Hommen and Frauke Albersmeier M.A. from the Department of Philosophy in the DFG-funded research project "Presuppositions of Frame Theory in the History of Philosophy."

Further information

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Simon David Stein (Departmente of English and American Studies)

Duration: 12/2023 - 11/2026

Listeners do not only evaluate what someone says, but also how someone talks: they have so-called language attitudes towards languages and their varieties. For example, one language or variety (e.g., French, Southern Irish English) may be perceived as sounding more “pleasant” than another (e.g., German, Birmingham English). Such attitudes have serious political and social consequences, including discrimination. One of the big unsolved questions about language attitudes is how they emerge. Which factors lead us to have evaluative reactions towards language? One area of research, indexicality research, assumes that attitudes do not result from linguistic features themselves, but from how we perceive the groups of speakers who use these features. Another area, iconicity research, suggests that judgments are also influenced by the properties of the linguistic features themselves. Both hypotheses may contain truth, but little research investigates them simultaneously and tests directly how they interact.

This project investigates the effects of both social predictors (indexicality research) and phonological-phonetic predictors (iconicity research) in the generation of language attitudes. Bringing the two research areas together, it asks which social and linguistic variables are predictive of (which) evaluative meaning associations, whether some associations are more reliably predicted by one of the two clusters of variables or the other, and whether we can find evidence for interactions between the two.

It does so by eliciting attitudes in an increasingly experimentally controlled way: by having listeners react to (1) real, unmanipulated speech stimuli of languages and varieties, (2) to manipulated stimuli, in which some features are selectively replaced by others, and (3) to pseudovarieties, i.e., stimuli of non-existing varieties constructed from scratch. The studies will test a diverse set of languages from different families, as well as a set of different varieties of English. They will statistically model many evaluative dimensions (e.g., likeability, competence, beauty, intelligence) by different social predictors (e.g., exposure to language and cultural context, distance of stimuli to the listeners’ languages) and linguistic predictors (e.g., syllable structure, F0, sonority, voicing, isochrony). The project will culminate in the development of a new theoretical model of evaluative meaning, bringing together indexicality and iconicity in a unified theory.

Ultimately, then, this project will help disentangle the social and linguistic mechanisms underlying evaluative form-meaning associations on an empirical level, better understand their nature on a theoretical level, and teach us how to better combat linguistic stereotyping on a societal level.

Funding Source: Ministry of Culture and Science North Rhine-Westphalia

Principal Investigator: Jasmin Grande („Moderne im Rheinland“/Zentrum für Rheinlandforschung)

Duration: 11/2021 - 12/2024

From 1949 to 1991, NRW was the host state of the Bonn Republic. The interdisciplinary research project examines the mutual influence of region, history and the memory space of the Bonn Republic from a cultural topographical perspective. The research results of the project are presented on a separate homepage, which, however, explicitly represents a participatory claim.

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Guido Thiemeyer (Department of Historical Studies)

Duration: 2020 - 10/2025

The project analyses the consequences of European Integration for German Federalism. Starting with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, the Federal Government transferred important parts of national sovereignty to the European Communities. This, however, meant that the German Länder lost their competences in these political sectors. To regain their influence in the respective policy areas, the Länder Governments tried to establish informal structures – partly against the interests of the Federal government. The result was a new political system called "Multi-Level-Governance" that was characterised by a mixture of formal and informal structures. Even though the Western German constitution was not modified in this respect, the German political system changed fundamentally between 1950 and 1992. The project examines the emergence of this new political system in the Federal Republic of Germany on the basis of three examples: The European Coal and Steel Community and the Common Agricultural Policy are political sectors that were europeanised very early. Education policy, by contrast, is one of most important competences of the German Länder, but the European Commission also gained considerable influence in this sector. The project analyses the emergence of multi-level governance in Germany on the basis of archival resources now available for the 1980s.

Further information (German only)

Funding Source: Ministry of Culture and Science

Principal Investigator: Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (Department of Art History)

Duration: 01/2024 - 08/2025

Cooperating partners: Rheinisches Archiv für Künstlernachlässe (RAK), Bonn (Rhenish Archive for Artists’ Legacies – RAK)

The project provides revealing insights into the prehistory of the Düsseldorf artists' association Das Junge Rheinland and the German art scene of the first half of the 20th century. Already during his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Clarenbach played a key role in the Düsseldorf exhibition scene and was a member of numerous artists' associations over the years, including the Sonderbund. In cataloging and researching the written legacy, the focus is on two research questions that are important for the structure of the contemporary (Rhenish) art scene as a whole. On the one hand, the (exhibition) networks of Rhenish artists and artist groups in the first quarter of the 20th century are to be made visible using Max Clarenbach as an example. On the other hand, the role of female artists in the Rhineland will be examined by analyzing the diaries, correspondence and notes.

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Christoph Spörlein (Department of Social Sciences)

Duration: 10/2024 - 04/2026

Cooperating partners: Wiebke Schulz, University of Bremen

The family of origin plays an important role in shaping children’s life chances, especially by influencing learning and educational achievement in the early life course. While research has established robust associations between parental behaviors and investments and children’s outcomes, the role of genetic influences, and in particular the interplay of genetic and social pathways remains unclear. We study the intertwined influences of the social and genetic characteristics of the family of origin across various contexts of development in the early life course. The premise of this project is that the family of origin constitutes children’s launching pad which shapes experiences in various contexts in the early life course; the various social and genetic influences interact, creating both opportunities for children and hurdles for development. Genetically sensitive designs allow a better understanding of the heterogeneity of environmental factors, as well as genetic factors and their interaction. We study children’s and adolescents’ development across four contexts: (1) remote learning during the COVID crisis; (2) extra-curricular activities and (3) inequality in educational attainment in rural and urban areas.

We use genetically sensitive research designs such as twin studies to quantify the relative importance of genetic and environmental influences, as well as polygenic risk scores which capture an individual’s “genetic potential” for the studied trait or behavior. Integrating insights and methods from the behavior genetics literature enables social scientists to reach a deeper understanding of how cognitive as well as educational achievement develop in the early life course. The proposed research projects will provide innovative insights into the mechanisms behind the interplay of social and genetic advantages, how they foster early achievement, or how they might hinder children’s development.

Funding Source: DFG Research Grant

Principal Investigator: Harald Conrad (Departemnt of Modern Japanese Studies)

Duration: 04/2024 – 03/2027

This research project investigates the social and economic (re)organisation in traditional craft industries and their markets in 21st century Japan. Despite its rapid development as the third largest industrialised country, Japan has managed to maintain various crafts and craft districts with distinct regional characteristics into the present. While research has cited demand- and supply-side factors for the ‘success’ of Japanese crafts, it remains unclear to what extent these explanations are still relevant today and how the crafts have evolved since the early 1990s. Around the world, the middle classes are showing a growing preference for handmade products, which play an important role in discourses on sustainable production, ethical living, consumer values and authenticity. In the wake of this development, the new Western crafts entrepreneurship has also received academic attention. However, the current reorganisation of existing craft districts is poorly researched. Our analysis of recent changes in Japanese crafts will therefore not only shed light on the specific Japanese dynamics of organising in craft districts, but also contribute to broadening our basic understanding of the structural foundations for a possible revitalisation of communities and regional development through craft production in industrialised countries. In doing so, the project takes an economic sociological approach. In order to identify commonalities and differences in structures, practices, problems and problem-solving mechanisms, three types of contemporary crafts will be compared in three different Japanese craft districts (silk weaving in Kyoto, lacquerware industry in Fukui and resist-dyeing in Kanazawa). Since all three districts are characterized by complex organisational structures involving cooperative division of labour, subcontracting, and distribution networks, they represent ideal locations for studying the dynamics of such organisational fields. To enable a comprehensive comparison, the project focuses in particular on a) the changing social and economic structures of the respective organisational fields, with special attention to the organisation and distribution of risks in collaborative production processes, subcontracting, and distribution, b) the role of expert knowledge and training systems and their respective effects on entry barriers and generational renewal of the organisational field, c) discourses about the relationship between craft and machine production, d) the influence of national craft policies and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investigator: Kilu von Prince (Department of Linguistics)

Duration: 01/2024 - 12/2026

Cooperating partners: Stefan Hartmann (Heinrich Heine University), Kristian Berg (University of Bonn), Eleanor Ridge (Massey University, New Zealand)

The project investigates the phonological and graphemic realisation of word boundaries in the two related Oceanic languages Daakaka and Dalkalaen. It also generates the first grammar sketch of the previously undescribed language Dalkalaen.

Funding Source: DFG

Principal Investiator: Anton Kotenko (Department of Historical Sciences)

Duration: 01/2024 - 12/2026

Cooperating partners: Catherine Gibson (University of Tartu)

This project studies the history of zoological gardens in the Romanov Empire as modern and global educational institutions which appeared in the empire during the second half of the 19th century. By focusing on zoos, animals, and the people who founded these institutions and visited them, it opens a window onto a hitherto unknown cultural and social history of the empire. One of the crucial aims of the project is to study the history of the Romanov zoos in the global context of the time. In this way the project, on the one hand, decentres the world history of zoos in the nineteenth century which, until now, has been approached from a predominantely Western perspective. On the other hand, by highlighting the interconnections between the national, social, and global intentions of the actors involved in this history, the project globalises the history of the Romanov Empire.

Further Information (German only)