Japanologie

Actual Projects and Future Publications

Projekt 1: Language Contact and Language Change East Asia and the West

Investigation into language change in Japan from phonological, syntactic, semantic and sociolinguistic perspectives focusing on loanwords, (personal) names, youth language.

Project 2: Speech Transfer and Language Varieties

The project is focused on pragmatically motivated analysis of different types of speech transfer, best exemplified in situations like Japanese-German translation, the verbal vs. nonverbal communication or different discourse types (manually written text, digital text, audiobooks, etc.). The goal of the project is the elucidation of techniques involved in such a transfer as well as investigation into conditions of felicitous communication.

Project 3: Japan and the Japanese People: Views from a Transcultural Perspective: "Aging concepts in different languages"

Although aging can be described as a universal phenomenon, (linguistic) strategies for dealing with age vary across epochs, places and social strata. Linguistic and visual signs derive their meaning from both their prototypical as well as cultural and social contexts in which they appear. Differences and similarities arise by way of contrastive semiotic comparison of “life form expressions”.

Long Version