Construction and Destruction of Common Ground in Polarized Political Discourse (C01)

• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538184825

Current political discourse, both in the USA and Europe, is characterized by polarization and the strategic destruction and construction of common ground. C1 investigates from a rhetorical and linguistic perspective how CG is established and destroyed in political discourses. The central assumption is that rhetorical and linguistic patterns (such as presuppositions, deletions, ambiguities, and emotionalization) drive the strategic construction and destruction of CG and fuel polarization. To explore this hypothesis, a multi-method approach is used, relying on rhetorical-linguistic text-based analyses of naturally occurring corpus data, focusing on rhetorical maneuvers, linguistic constructions, and results from linguistic experiments.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1718: Common Ground: Cognition - Grammar - Communication
• Applicant Institution: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
• Project Heads: Dr. Andreas Kehl; Professor Dr. Olaf Kramer; Professorin Dr. Susanne Winkler