Current PhD Projects

Felicitas Otte looks at and contrasts different genres of text within the corpus data, i.e., narratives and free conversations, and disentangles individual referential expressions used in DGS with the aim of establishing an accessibility hierarchy of those expressions for DGS within the framework of Ariel’s (1991, 2001) accessibility theory. The dissertation analyzes reference chains and the use of modality-specific and modality-independent expressions in terms of the accessibility of their referents.

Maria Kopf researches the structure and etymology of name signs in German Sign Language (DGS). Using data from the DGS corpus and newly collected data, she is creating taxonomies for names of people (anthroponyms) and places (toponyms). In addition, she is compiling a broad literature review on the research and documentation of name signs worldwide.

Sabrina Wähl focuses on expressions that are typically named constructed action (CA) from a lexicographic perspective. She analyzes certain recurrent instances of CA in order to find out to what extent form - manual as well as non-manual - and meaning resemble each other across different signers. In doing so, she touches on the issue whether certain uses of CA can be lexicalized or not, and thus contributes to the debate on the grammatical status of CA on the telling-showing continuum.