Dr. Theresa Schweden

I studied German and English at the JGU Mainz, where names and personal names quickly became the focus of my research. After graduation, I worked at the University of Münster in a DFG project on variation in the sequence of first names and surnames in German dialects (der Müller Peter vs. Peter Müller). Thereby, I got familiar with ethnomethodological methods and fieldwork and developed an interest in the subject of differentiating people through linguistic categories. Thus, my dissertation "Personenreferenz im Dialekt" deals with different ways of referring to people in dialect and in Standard German. Also, it explores, how self and external evaluation of groups within rural communities as well as personal relations to speakers and interlocutors play a role in choosing a reference form.

After my PhD, I worked in Münster at the Chair of Historical Linguistics on topics in which human differentiation plays a central role, such as personal names as markers of ethnicity, respectively discrimination on the basis of names in the housing market, or dog name trends as indicators of the softening of the animal-human boundary. This is how I came to the SFB Human Differentiation, where I am now working on the topic of "Language and Disability". I am interested in whether the linguistic negotiation of physical disability has changed over time (especially in the 20th century) and in which situations a physical impairment is linguized as disability at all (doing vs. not doing), and whether the linguistic discourse in newspapers and on the Internet is moving towards a linguistic undoing of disability. In doing so, I examine different linguistic levels, from word formation and grammar to lexical categories and discourse.