Tübingen – First Leg

I am happy and grateful to have been appointed Mercator Fellow to the DFG graduate school ‚Ambiguity – Production and Reception‘ (GRK 1808) at Tübingen University. I am looking forward to spending altogether 4 weeks in Tübingen: split between February and July 2022. During the first leg, I will be counseling PhD-students who are working in the field of discourse studies, pragmatics and rhetoric, attending their talks and answering their questions. On 4 February, I will teach a workshop on the idea of the ‚pictorial speech act‘, its emergence in pragmatics as well as its applicability to multimodal discourse. Besides clarifying some of the inherent difficulties in the conceptualization of ‚acting with images‘, the workshop seeks to show how much of pictorial use is dependent on language, multimodal genre rules/patterns and world knowledge that is brought to bear on the relevant understanding of the texts, interactions and semiotic artifacts. I am especially looking forward, too, to fostering some of the ties I have with colleagues in media studies and rhetoric.