LFU:online

Students learn to understand, describe, and discuss names as a special class in the lexicon. The focus is not only on their relationship to appellatives, but also on their embeddedness in spatial and social relations. Basic principles of name theory and methods of their description and analysis are taught, which serve the students as instruments of their corpus to be worked on. 

They are not meaningless, as the multi-word lexeme "Schall und Rauch" ['sound and smoke'] - packaged in the frequently used German collocation with "name" - suggests. Quite the contrary! And yet names are without meaning, at least if one follows some doctrines common today. If you want to understand this, this PS is the right place for you.

We want to explore the nature of names and learn to understand why they occupy a special position in the lexicon. Using selected name classes as examples, we then want to find out how they have been shaped by space and society or how they help to shape these two components. Thus, it is also a matter of illuminating these interactions more closely.

Lecture by the course instructor, group/partner work, preparatory reading and discussion of scientific texts, presentations of the own thesis concept by the course participants.

Presentation, active participation (active participation in the lecture and knowledge of the texts), written proseminar paper (approx. 12 pages)

Nübling, Damaris/Fahlbusch, Fabian/Heuser, Rita (2015): Namen. Eine Einführung in die Onomastik. 2., überarb. u. erw. Aufl. Tübingen: Narr Franke Attempto.

Additional literature will be announced in the course.

Mandatory module 1 completed successfully

The course can be chosen for the minor "Language - Space - Society" as well as for the minor "Methods of Empirical Language Data Analysis".