Linguistics: Contact – Variation – Change

Abstract

Contact, variation and change are fundamental linguistic concepts, which manifest themselves in multiple forms. Our doctoral programme aims to investigate these and the various relations between them. The overarching goal staff and students pursue is to find out how language contact, variation and change interact.
We apply these three concepts to a variety of different linguistic phenomena and to various levels of description, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and lexicology but also to texts, text types and their relation to imagery, the relation between language user and language, and language attitudes.
Our programme focuses on seven areas of study:

• Language system and language systems Pragmatics
• Text and multimodality
• Diachronic linguistics
• Language variation
• Language contact and multilingualism
• Cognition

Our programme offers an excellent environment for highly-qualified and promising doctoral students, in which they experience outstanding supervision as well as individual help for every aspect of their project. The format of the programme and regular activities create a stimulating academic environment that is research- and skills-focused and in which doctoral students can create new networks with other students and supervisors in a relaxed and informal manner.
The academic environment that our doctoral programme creates makes an important contribution to students completing their research projects in time. This is implemented through regular supervision meetings between supervisors and students, specialized training and advice on such matters as conference selection and preparation as well as publication in subject-specific, peer-reviewed journals, etc.
It is our goal to prepare doctoral students as best as possible for their future careers, whether it be in academia or other related fields.