Projects and activities

Common ground is essential for successfully coordinating and carrying out any joint activity. At the level of large-scale social interaction, notions of CG are useful for understanding social dynamics, or public opinion formation. At the level of dyadic interaction, more fine-grained aspects of CG help explain nuanced phenomena relating to linguistically-oriented communication (LC), among other things. Despite its importance and centrality to many issues in many academic fields, the notion of common ground is highly elusive. This CRC is a multi-disciplinary effort, anchored in linguistics, towards a better understanding, wider applicability and empirical validation of notions of CG. CRC 1718 is structured around three core areas – Cognition, Grammar, and Communication – and brings together researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds, including theoretical and computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, rhetoric, literary studies, and biological anthropology.

For further information please have a look at the CRC's homepage. For information specifically on C5, please follow this link.

The CRC 1391 Different Aesthetics examines texts, images and objects from pre-modern Europe and focuses on the ways in which they determine and reflect on their own aesthetic status. It seeks to explore the contribution of 2000 years of cultural history before the eighteenth century to our understanding of the aesthetic as well as to current debates on art and society. This end is being served by the interdisciplinary collaboration of a broad field of sixteen academic subjects, ranging from archaeology, art history, musicology, classical and modern philologies to history and theology.

For further information please have a look at the CRC's homepage. For information specifically on B06 please follow this link (or this one for the German version).

Connotations (E-ISSN 2626-8183) encourages scholarly communication in the field of literature in English (from the Middle English period to the present). It is an international, peer-reviewed journal which focuses on the semantic and stylistic energy of the language of literature in a historical perspective and aims to represent different approaches.

Connotations features articles, responses, and answers to responses, forming strings of peer-reviewed debates that provide an entirely new way of discussing literary texts. Related debates are linked in virtual special issues on topics of general interest such as “Sympathetic Parody,” “Textual Surprises,” and “Poetic Economy.”

For further information on both the journal and the Connotations Society for Critical Debate please have a look at www.connotations.de. You can also find a full table of contents of all published volumes including a selection of debates which are available as full texts free of charge.

Edited by Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker (together with Susanne Friede, Béatrice Jakobs, Klaus Ridder, Gertrud M. Rösch and Christoph Strosetzki).

The trans-disciplinary journal publishes articles on German, English and American literature, as well as literature in the Romance languages. Articles may be written in German or the languages of the respective fields. The »Literaturwissenschaftliche Jahrbuch« is not restricted to any specific method or school. It focuses on texts and developments from the Middle Ages to the present. With a view to exploring the multilingual and transcultural dimension of the literatures involved, emphasis will be given to comparative approaches.

Find more information on the series and a list of all volumes at the publisher's website.

The project has three aims: (1) to define explanatory annotation, establish its theory, and develop best practice models; (2) to investigate the use of explanatory annotations and their influence on reading comprehension; and (3) to develop explanatory annotation as a new field in the digital humanities. It furthers scholarly practice in the humanities through empirical research and advances the digital humanities by including hermeneutic theory and practice.

To this end, the project is split in two: the research project itself and a connected student peer-learning project that practises scholarly and explanatory annotation in reading literature.

Further information on the research project can be found here. Information on the peer learning project can be found here.