Research Day

Research Day

Each term, we organize a Research Day for the PhD students and post-doctoral students at BAEL. The purpose of this meeting is for everyone to present their ongoing work, regardless of the stage they are at in their research projects. The setting is less formal than at a conference and offers an opportunity for in-depth discussions of the individual projects.

2024 Summer Term

Thursday, May 15th, 2024

10:40-11:20   Dr. phil Anke Lensch – Terms of endearment as in-group markers. Zooming in on variation in the English-speaking Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora community.

11:20-12:00   Asim Khan, M.Phil. – A multifactorial prediction and deviation analysis of South Asian Englishes

12:10-12:50   Dr. Oluwayemisi Olusola Adebomi – Lexicalization and gender ideologies in the computer-mediated political discourse of select Nigerian female politicians: A preliminary study

12:50-13:30   Dr. Tolulope A. Akinseye – ‘The men also cry’: Exploring the inter(intra)textual construction of men’s victimhood in newspaper reports on domestic violence in Africa

13:30-14:10   Julia Schilling, M.A. – Developing a linguistic framework for analyzing populist discourse

15:00-15:40   Reihaneh Barani Toroghi, M.A. – Attitudes toward English accents of English in Poland, Germany and Iran

15:40-16:20   Xiaofang Duan, M.A. – Effectiveness of cognitive linguistic approaches in language teaching

16:30-17:10   Bethany Stoddard, M.A. – Grammatical variation in young German learner English

17:10-17:50   Prof. Robert Fuchs – Frequency vs. accuracy in learner Englishes: A study on tense and aspect

Find the Book of Abstracts here.


2022 Summer Term

Tuesday, September 27th, 2022 at 17 pm (s.t.)

Reber, Elisabeth: Building comparable diachronic corpora on legal discourse at the U.S. American Supreme Court


2020 Summer Term

Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 at 10 am (s.t.) via Zoom

Sabra, Reem: From hours to minutes: how automation can facilitate working with corpora
Sango, Lionel: The elaboration of Cameroon Pidgin English through Bible translation: A study of Gud Nyus fo ol Pipul. Nyu Testament fo Pidgin.
Erbach, Kurt: Objects, substances, and schemata: on the acquisition of the mass/count distinction

Thursday, July 9th, 2020 at 10 am (s.t.) via Zoom

Sango, Lionel: The speech acht (events?) of apology in urban Cameroon clearing the path for PhD project via insights from a pre-pilot study
Renkwitz, Katrin: Statistical evaluation of results - Correlations and factor analyses in the study of prosodic dimensions of apologies 
Sell, Friederike: Rhythm tapping revisited: sensitivity issues in measuring cognitive load 
Sickinger, Pawel: We have to talk about speech acts (again) - Some ideas on empirically testing novel conceptions of speech act knowledge 
Rottschäfer, Stefanie: English as a lingua franca in the family
Twiesselmann-Steigerwald, Kathrin: Mapping Museum Communication - Traces of Meaning-Making


2019/2020 Winter Term

Thursday, November 21st, 2019 at 10 am in the Lounge (3. OG, IAAK):

Mohr, Susanne: Phygital tourism discourse: The multimodal construction of the Zanzibari tourist space offline and online 
Renkwitz, Katrin: Vocal fry and strategy position – Dealing with (obvious?) influences on a prosodic analysis
Sickinger, Pawel: The next best thing? The prospects of surface form and lexical matching for estimating pragmatic competence in DCT answers
Sell, Friederike: How similar is similar, how different is different? Functional categories in elicited L2 speech acts


2018/2019 Winter Term

Sickinger, Pawel: Reflections on the psychological status of speech acts and their role in pragmatic competence assessment
Pohle, Stefanie: “Äußerst praktisch allerdings finde ich die Funktion um Wasser in Wein zu verwandeln” - Narrativity and identity-building in German parodies of product reviews on Amazon
Renkwitz, Katrin: Handling complex data: Fixing problems and uncovering patterns through data regrouping
Sell, Friederike: Exploring fluency and disfluency in the production of L2 speech acts


2018 Summer Term

Mohr, Susanne: Putting together the pieces of the puzzle: Conclusions from four years of research on pluralization and countability in African Englishes
Sell, Friederike: No worries, you're welcome, no problem -- analysing thanks responses in two conditions
Sickinger, Pawel: Pragmatics of Trust, again: Methodological considerations
Renkwitz, Katrin: Of forgotten books and broken noses -- Effects of the severity of the offense on apologies and their prosodic characteristics


2017/2018 Winter Term

Pohle, Stefanie: LaMa reloaded: A new generation of MA Applied Linguistics bloggers and a revised project concept
Renkwitz, Katrin: The complex relation between intonation and sincerity - Analysing I‘m sorry and I‘m so sorry in context
Sickinger, Pawel: Associative and perceptual priming across languages in multilinguals
Sell, Friederike: Perks and pitfalls of a dual task design in L2 pragmatic production: results of a pilot study


2016/2017 Winter Term

Löwen, Elina: Approaching pragmatic competence in EFL learning.
Mohr, Susanne: The acceptability of acceptability judgments and the curse of statistics.
Pohle, Stefanie: Academic writing competence beyond the term paper: Harvesting an e-teaching project for research purposes.
Renkwitz, Katrin: Intonation and its contribution to subtleties of speech act meaning - Reviewing past and current considerations for a methodology.
Sell, Friederike: The concept of working memory and how it connects with L2 pragmatic production.
Sickinger, Pawel: Multilingual semantic processing - Exploring the language-concept interface in interlingual priming experiments.
Steigerwald, Kathrin: Text at the museum


2016 Summer Term

Chekhova, Marina: Pragmatism of US presidential speeches with regard to the problems of terrorism.
Mohr, Susanne: Of sports trophies, tomato sauce and missing persons: Field work observations from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Pohle, Stefanie: Teaching and researching intertextuality in academic texts by German writers of English: A project update.
Renkwitz, Katrin: Speech act intonation – challenges with the detection of patterns and their causes.
Sell, Friederike: A psycholinguistic enquiry into L2 speakers’ pragmatic competence – methodological considerations.
Sickinger, Pawel: The value of ‘cheap signals’ – where and why game theory needs linguistics.


2015/2016 Winter Term

Mohr, Susanne: Number marking in Tswana learner English - a typological approach.
Pohle, Stefanie: Something to do with intertextuality, plagiarism and academic writing skills' - On the way to defining a topic for a post-doc research project.
Preiswerk, Ute: Linguistic and cultural aspects of internationalisation strategies of German SME - a short glimpse into my PhD project.
Renkwitz, Katrin: Approaching the measuring of intonation and its role in speech act production.
Sell, Friederike: Representation or processing? Dissecting the challenge underlying L2 request production.
Sickinger, Pawel: Experimental Pragmatics and Game Theory - initial considerations.
Stavroudis, Christianna: Apples and oranges? Comparing L2 acquisition of English idioms by L1 German speakers across the continuum.


2015 Summer Term

Mohr, Susanne: More informations and researches on mass nouns - the L2/learner English divide.
Muschalik, Julia: The pragmatics of threatening.
Salzinger, Julia: What is the size of your voice? Conceptual metaphor and the senses.
Sell, Friederike: Towards a processing-based trajectory of developing pragmatic competence.
Sickinger, Pawel: Measuring pragmatic phenomena – what is there to gain by importing experimental methodology into pragmatics?.
Steigerwald, Kathrin: Mapping museum communication.


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