What’s New in Discourse Linguistics?

This is what we were curious about and decided to take the opportunity to invite some colleagues who must know (some of the answers). So, my colleague, Jana PFLAEGING, and I set up a guest lecture series, funded by our Salzburg linguistics doctoral college (‚Language, Society, and Digital Life‘) and were lucky to attract some key figures in discourse linguistics.

So, we’ve had Christoph RÜHLEMANN from Freiburg University talk about his corpus-linguistic research project on multimodal interaction, where he’s looking at how gaze and pupil dilation signal and manage turn-taking. We’ve had three colleagues from Innsbruck’s Media Studies Department (part of German Studies), namely Ina PICK, Katharina CHRIST, and Daniel PFURTSCHELLER, talk to us about their rich discourse linguistic methodologies and objectives, among them YouTube videos, medical patient files, and news on social media, which are being tackled with interesting digital tools. Then, Martin LUGINBÜHL came from the University of Basel and took up the topic of newscasting on social media from a different, culture-contrastive perspective.

We’ll be closing the series for the time being on 30 April 2025 with a lecture by Crispin THURLOW from the University of Bern, who will talk about his long-standing project on tourist discourse. This time, it’ll be about the discourse-pragmatics behind the communication of/in super-elite hotels. And wouldn’t you be attracted if the title of the talk is ‚The Pragmatics of Privilege‘?