Hannah J. Seemann
I am a PhD student in Tatjana Scheffler’s lab for Digitale Forensische Linguistik at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. My position is part of the CRC Limits of Variability in Language at the Universität Potsdam. Our project studies how to transform texts across media. We are interested in how discourse phenomena such as discourse structure and particle use differ between texts in the spoken and written domain. We have created PARADISE, a corpus of thematically parallel segments of podcasts and blog posts, annotated for various discourse phenomena.
In my dissertation project, I study German modal particles as signals in
discourse. Based on a series of forced-choice experiments, I show that
only a specific group of particles influences which discourse relation
is interpreted by a reader. A self-paced reading study showed no
interaction between the presence of these particles and reading time.
Taking together these results, I conclude that modal particles are
functionally heterogeneous. Those particles that affect discourse are
non-connective signals: They influence which relation is perceived, but
do not facilitate discourse relations.
You can find the link to my
thesis and all supplementary material here soon!
Contact
hannah[dot]seemann[at]ruhr-uni-bochu[dot]de