F05Non-Persons and ‘Defective Specimen’

The project F05 builds on research questions and findings from the preceding project “Linguistic Human Differentiation” and investigates how language creates asymmetries between human beings, including those that push people toward the outer boundaries of what is considered human. The project focuses on the categories of dis/ability and childhood/adulthood.

What concepts of childhood are evoked when phrases such as ein Stall voller Kinder ‘a stable full of children’ or terms such as Bälger and Blagen ‘derogative words for kids’ are used? What does it mean when pets are increasingly given the same names as children? What perspectives on disability, in turn, are opened up by expressions such as Dynamokrüppel ‘super-crip’ and schwerbeschädigt ‘severely damaged’? And how are childlikeness and disability intertwined in the name Aktion Sorgenkind?

From a diachronic perspective (19th–21st centuries), the project examines the linguistic levels on which these differentiations operate and how deeply they are rooted in the German language system: in discourses (e.g. on prenatal diagnostics), in everyday patterns of language use (mit Frau, Kind und Hund ‘with wife, child, and dog’), in occasional word formations (Rotznasen ‘snot-noses’, Edelversehrte ‘noble invalids’), as well as in established lexical expressions (Krüppel ‘cripple’, Idiot ‘idiot’, Kindskopf ‘manchild’) and in naming practices. Of particular interest are linguistic categorizations at the outer margins of the human and the use of dehumanizing and, more specifically, animalizing patterns and metaphors (Laufstall ‘playpen’, wilde Kinder ‘wild children’). Depending on the historical and situational context, different attributes associated with the human become relevant, such as cognitive abilities, linguistic capacity, rationality, legal majority, the associated status as a person, (legal) agency, gender categorization, civility, emotional self-control, or normative body images.

Childhood and disability are closely linked closely linked in their social construction: people with disabilities are often infantilized – lexically in Aktion Sorgenkind or communicatively through the use of the informal du in German-speaking care institutions. At the same time, degrees of cognitive abilities are often described in terms of children’s developmental stages (“cognitively like a seven-year-old”).

The project combines quantitative and qualitative methods, including corpus-linguistic and lexicographic approaches.