Flexible Writers in Language History

We constantly vary in our use of language and thereby adjust to diverse social situations and conversational partners, applying language purposefully. This re­search group transfers the observations made on internal linguistic variability in modern socio­lin­guistics into the context of language history and asks the question of whether historical writers showed linguistic flexibility.

Thereafter, we shall analyse this corpus on the basis of the hypothesis that ‘ordinary writers’ were able to make conscious decisions about linguistic registers and the choice between different (groups of) variants.

The project is developing methods to combine functional and structural approaches to linguistic variation, linking to integrated theories in variationist linguistic research. Be­yond that, the nature of the corpus creates the scope for analysing the influence of age and/or illness on language use and thus offers the potential for pioneering work in the area of historical patholinguistics.

The project also has an ethical dimension, namely the examination of evaluations of texts, practices of censorship, and the legitimisation of knowledge and power. The voices of the patients themselves, once stifled, can now be heard again.

The research group cooperates with the Elite Graduate Program „Ethics of Textual Cultures“ at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Augsburg.