»How can we understand language as an always finite, because power-bound, and thus limited realization and processing of infinite possibilities of expression?«
Current research fields
Worlds of Contradiction (WoC)
Collaborative research platform of the University of Bremen
What (linguistic) forms, what functions, what significance do contradictions have? What power does the principle of non-contradiction have? How powerful is the imperative to resolve contradictions in a discourse world of incompatibilities and heterogeneous complexities? With reference to the modeling of contradiction as a propositional relation and beyond, the broad field of the figure of contradiction, contradictoriness, and forms of dealing with contradiction are examined in an interdisciplinary way at U Bremen.
The Research Training Group (RTG) »Contradiction Studies« explores the formation, negotiation, and explanatory limitations of contradiction. We start from the assumption that the ordering figure of contradiction which includes the imperative to resolve contradictions often stands in a tense relation to experiences of the contradictory in everyday life | Spokespersons Michi Knecht & Ingo H. Warnke.
In a broader international scholarly dialog, the U Bremen interdisciplinary and collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WoC) addresses ways of dealing with tense diversity and heterogeneity and thus forms the conceptual and institutional framework for foundational research in Contradiction Studies | Spokespersons Michi Knecht & Ingo H. Warnke.
German Language in the Colonial Archive including Colonial Toponomastics
How does one speak about others and about oneself in German colonialism, which language do which actors use, and which historical statements arise in which contexts? On the basis of the Digitale Sammlung Deutscher Kolonialismus [Digital Collection German Colonialism], among others, the historical semantics of German and recent usage-related linguistic historiography will be addressed, not least with an interest in linguistically materialized certainties in specific discursive formations.
Colonial Toponomastics
By what means does colonial place-making take place? Place names are an important instrument of the linguistic shaping of colonial spaces; they often have a postcolonial duration. What are the distinctive features of colonial toponyms—or do they not exist at all because a hallmark of the coloniality of place names is their indistinguishability from toponyms that are not colonial? The specific interest in the discursivity of colonial toponyms is located within the framework of research at U Bremen on comparative colonial toponomastics; the cooperation between German and General Linguistics, namely the collaboration with Prof. Dr. Thomas Stolz, is to be emphasized.
Linguistics of Listening
Is listening, which is praised everywhere, really to be seen uncritically? What kind of communicative act is listening and to what extent is it more than a reactive practice of communication? What is the relationship between listening as directed hearing and cantability as directed speaking? Not least at the interface of questions concerning music reception, what is at issue is a linguistic phenomenology of listening that does not overlook the current abundance of the audible and matters of alterity in the act of listening.
