Posthumanist linguistics. Communicative Practices between humans, animals, and machines a

• Applicant: Dr. Miriam Lind
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 521197124

In four subprojects, the junior research group investigates the linguistic and multimodal interaction between humans, animals, and machines. It is interested in the establishment and routinisation of practices of posthumanist communication, the integration of these practices in human-human interaction, and the negotiation of ontological boundary-making between humans and nonhumans. Beyond the direct interaction between humans, animals, and voice assistants, the research group further addresses questions of language and communication ideologies that underlie the communicative encounters of animals and machines initiated by humans. It aims to symmetrically investigate the communicative relations between humans and animals, humans and machines, and animals and machines and to systematically relate the categories 'humans', 'animals', and 'machines' to each other. The overall goal is to establish an empirically based linguistic theory of posthumanist communicative practices. Methodologically, the junior research group is firmly located within qualitative interactional linguistics and makes use of videographic analysis of everyday communicative interactions as well as of participant observation and ethnographic interviews.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups