Empirical insights into Cohesion. Contrasting English and German across Modes

Dates
Monday 16 January 2017 (13:00)
eric-steiner

Speaker: Professor Erich Steiner (Saarland University)

Venue: LR3 (G19), Strathcona Building

Abstract

  • Erich Steiner, Kerstin Kunz, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, José Martínez-Martínez, Katrin Menzel 

After a definition of essential concepts around cohesion, our research questions will be formulated: how much variation is there between the languages English and German, and between registers and modes within them in terms of cohesion? The underlying research architecture will be explained, integrating language, register and mode as independent variables and degree, strength, type and variance of major types of cohesion as dependent variables. The focus of this talk will be on strength and type of lexical cohesion and co-reference as represented in a relatively small sub-corpus of the GECCo-corpus, a corpus linguistically annotated for cohesion and other linguistic phenomena. Results point into different directions, depending on the independent variable selected and on whether the focus is on cohesive devices or on cohesive chains. The talk will be delivered by Erich Steiner.

Short biography

Erich Steiner, born 1954 in Heidelberg/ Germany, studied English and German Philology in Freiburg and Saarbrücken with extended research periods in Cardiff, Reading and London, and has held posts in Luxembourg, Darmstadt and Saarbrücken. Since 1990, he has been Chair of English Linguistics and Translation Studies, then English Translation Studies, in the former Department of Applied Linguistics, Translating and Interpreting, and now Department of Language Science and Technology at the University of Saarland, Saarbrücken. He has served as Head of Department, Pro-Dean and Dean. Major research interests include Functional Linguistics, Translation Theory and Comparative Linguistics, as well as Corpus-based and Computational Linguistics. He has attracted research projects from the European Union (ESPRIT/ FRAMEWORK, LEONARDO, MINERVA), from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG/ German Research Council) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He has been Visiting Professor at Rice University, Houston/ Texas (1986), Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California/ Los Angeles (1988), Socrates Lecturer at Dublin City University (1998), and Visiting Professor several times at the University of Sydney, Macquarie University Sydney, the University of Technology, Sydney, the University of Oslo, as well as Hong Kong Polytechnic University and City University of Hong Kong over the past 20 years. His major publications include:

Steiner, E. 1983. Die Entwicklung des Britischen Kontextualismus. Heidelberg : Groos

Steiner,E./Schmidt,P/Zelinsky-Wibbelt,C. eds. 1988. From syntax to semantics - insights from machine translation. London : Frances Pinter

Steiner,E. & Veltman,R. eds. 1988. Pragmatics, discourse and text: explorations in Systemic Semantics. London : Frances Pinter

Steiner. E. 1991. A functional perspective on language, action, and interpretation. Berlin etc.: Mouton De Gruyter 

Steiner. E. and Yallop. C. eds .2001. Exploring Translation and Multilingual Textproduction: Beyond Content. Series Text, Translation, Computational Processing. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Steiner, E. 2004. Translated Texts: Properties, Variants, Evaluations. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang Verlag

Cho, See-Young and Steiner, Erich. eds. 2006. Information Distribution in English Grammar and Discourse and other Topics in Linguistics. Festschrift for Peter Erdmann on the Occasion of his 65th. Birthday. Frankfurt/M. etc.: Peter Lang Verlag 

Kapanadze, Oleg and Steiner, Erich. 2012. Linguistik von der Sprachtypologie zur Sprachtechnologie. Masterstudiengang für Studierende der Germanistik. (in Georgischer Sprache/ in Georgian) Tbilissi. 2012. ISBN 978-9941-424-46-5

Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Neumann, Stella and Steiner, Erich. 2012. Cross-linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations. Insights from the language pair English – German. Series Text, Translation, Computational Processing. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter