Interactional speech in the plays of Andreas Gryphius: Data based research from the perspective of Linguistics and Literary Studies

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Wolfgang Imo; Professor Dr. Jörg Wesche
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 324438466

The project will make accessible the entire dramatic work of Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664), one of the literary most influential German writing authors in the 17th century. The works of Gryphius will be made available for research purposes in an annotated database. This data base will provide the infrastructure for analyzing structures, functions and considerations of literary stylized ways of speech in his plays. The data base will substantially contribute to the answering of yet unanswered questions from the fields of literary history, language history and grammar. From a literary perspective, dialogic techniques in the dramatic work of Gryphuis are most important. Since the 18th century his plays have been categorized as typical for a frozen artificiality of German baroque drama. Mainly the constant metric form of his tragedys (Alexandrine in dialogue) was rashly considered the reason for this. In contrast to this still prevailing biased stance, the data base project allows the empirically founded reconstruction and description of language use of Gryphius. This is only possible on the basis of a corpus based analysis. The annotated data allow for the analysis of (i) specific features of interactional language and (ii) stylistic-metric methods of shaping language (e.g. discourse markers, modal particles, sequences of question and answer, collaborative ways of uttering, change of speakers, parts of dialogue, anacoluthons, ellipses, positioning of rhyme, changing of verse). The data based project is part of a larger current trend towards digital humanities and bridges the gap between literary and linguistic analyses. Most important for the linguistic aspects of the analysis is (i) the determination and interpretation of historic candidates of conceptual speech of early modern German, which has not been investigated in so far, as well as (ii) the methodical exploration of a grammar describing different levels of intimacy in speech, which is an important desideratum of spoken-language-research. In a methodical respect the project is the first thorough and cooperative attempt in data based working transcending the boundaries of two branches in German philology: linguistic and literary research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants